Engine Room Podcast #3 – James Millard – Transcript

Andrew Rocks
Hi, my name is Andrew Rocks, and welcome to the Engine Room podcast. It’s a podcast where we dig into the practice of business of the business of financial planning. We all know that financial planners love to see their clients, but it’s the engine that they work inside that allows them to do their best work. And I’m really pumped today to be talking with someone who was described on his own website as an entrepreneur at heart. So I’ll let us make that decision. His name’s James Millard, and he’s from Sufficient Funds. And James, lovely to be catching up with you and the engine room podcast might get

James Millard
Hey Rocksy, thank you very much. Right, great intro.

Andrew Rocks
That’s fine. And we spoke, we spoke earlier, I’m really interested about your business. And one of the standout points is that, in reality, you’ve been going for a little bit of time, but you’re going to give us an overview, I look at five, six years maybe. And you’ve got 26 team members in your team. And, and if you’re out there listing, that’s a really fast trajectory. So if you have any further ado, maybe give us an idea of how you’ve got to this point. And if you could make it funny and a little bit engaging would help me please,

James Millard
Mate, I can’t promise to have the comedic value that you will add to this, but I’ll do my best. So mate yet look it up. We started, I started a business with two others in 2015, when I rolled out of the corporate world, that that was a bit of slow going. And the three of us made a very amicable split in 2018, where I then started with my wife, TASH, and one other team member at the time, sufficient funds. And so SF for sure is sufficient funds is I guess now for us. It’s it’s a mortgage broking. And it’s a financial planning business. I was always a financial planner at the core. But I guess the idea of that, that, you know, really our goal with starting that business was to be able to create something where we could add the value and help people go through the things that we were going through personally. And so being 40. There’s a big backstory, if you want to hear a bit about it. But but the backstory is really, the end result is that was the focus on driven millennials, and people who are in similar situations to us. So we had our first we just had our second child, while navigating life as dual income, no kids, We’d lived in a couple of capital cities, things like fertility challenges, we went through IVF raising a young family then it was about juggling, parental leave, starting a business, starting a family, and everything that comes along with that. And so long, long story short, and there is a book coming in the next few months. So I’ll have I can’t wait, I got a nine year giant is insufficient funds, and the roads are sufficient. Okay, so there’s a play on many

Andrew Rocks
words there. So what stood out there means is that that’s a relatively kind of a noble, noble a noble pursuit is to, to have the self awareness to identify your own life’s ups and downs and problems and struggles. And then to focus or dedicate your professional career to help others exactly like you is that is that sort of where you’ve, you’ve got Well,

James Millard
I mean, But really, for us, it was I was working with clients who had similar challenges, and I could see there was such a big opportunity there. And, and for us, the end result is how do we make a connection between life and money? Because for the young millennials that we’re working with life’s far and more important, money brings a whole lot of challenges. And and it’s really how do we help that that second part, facilitate the bit that’s more important? What are all these things? And there’s a huge story there for everyone. Right? And, you know, I guess for our story, if you go to insufficient funds, this is way way back, but I was at uni, we were, you know, I was fortunate enough to do doing an exchange in Canada, and one of the boys pulled out an ATM slip, insufficient funds, the name we couldn’t start a band, we had no talent there. So we ended up we printed a bunch of trucker hats and T shirts and at the same time had bought an old Chrysler LeBaron so we had one of those old wooden station wagons, wooden panels, station wagons, and we kind of lap the state selling these out of the back of the car so to speak. Look our dream was to never work a full time day in our lives cash in sell it to sort of you know, do what Billabong didn’t and sell it off or Hurley did to Nike and sell it off for 60 mil and and move on but you know life got in the way we you know we’re back at uni we finished our degrees. We put our sensible shirts on and you know, got our full time jobs with our tires and went from there but I guess insufficient funds at the time and I’d been blogging a lot about this. In more recent years before starting the business was I guess it never lost traction, the core idea of there you Got this tiny little movement. But for us, it was a bit about having no money, but being able to do something with it. And then sufficient funds now is really looking back on that and going well, we learned a hell of a lot during that time. And how can I maybe build something around that with the money nerd that I naturally have inside me somewhere,

Andrew Rocks
there’s nothing like quite like it back in the day. When you, you bet the ATM and the insufficient funds that come out, and then you’d act like the money was coming out, because you didn’t want the people to realize that he just got the pink slip. And I think today with the tap and go, it’s the anxiety that people have, that the Little Red Cross is gonna come up. So I’m not sure. But that’s, that’s one of the most sort of interesting ways of designing your company name. And I’m sure that resonates with a lot of your clients and your team members, James each

James Millard
time and I guess the team also has it in their own ways. We’re all living our own version of sufficient bands. And, and, you know, we can talk about how we our advice process and how that links in and the steps that we take there. But yeah, I think, you know, in terms of the backstory, we’re not here without some, you know, some incredible people, but I guess more than anything, it’s the it’s the advice community. And we all know this. And this has been said 100 times, but you guys what you’re doing with X, Y and Ensembl and facilitating these conversations. The best thing about the advice community is everyone’s willing to share, we’re all competitors, apparently. But you know, you don’t really see that showing up in day to day. And if you had to ask someone a question, they’ll give you the answer. And, you know, this is about ideally, ideally giving back so there’s some motivation for you know, we’ve got some huge potential here as an industry as a profession. And, you know, let’s make it happen.

Andrew Rocks
Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, the notion of competitors really only exists when you’ve got a finite number of clients. But I’ve never met a financial planner in the last five years. who’s worried about obtaining clients? They’re actually more worried about, can they deliver the things that they they want and they desire? And can they do at that at a price that’s both affordable for the client and also palatable for your team, and your staff, which is, you know, the whole reason around talking about the practice management, and how you actually build that deliverables? Now, I’m reading your website at the moment. And you’ve got a little comment here. Who the bloody hell are we which is a, you know, a classic Australian tourism ad, Lapse Shot a lot laptops and T shirts. And you said you shook the shackles of the corporate world. So you very much have that feeling that you’re working, that you’re very aligned with the target market, and just repeating the target market when he wasn’t? When you say Millennials under the age of 40. It really does date everyone on this on this call. It’s I’m not sure where we are now. I’m not father of adult children. But yeah, it’s the CEO of Ensembl Clayton is isn’t millennial and he sees like, Well, what happens when you become a middle aged millennial? What’s the

James Millard
tagline there? No. And where I’ve probably got a couple of years on Clayton, I think, and especially with that beautiful baby face, he still seems to be able to hang on to, but we can edit this later, we’ll cut that out. 100%.

Andrew Rocks
So just just changing gears, when you were doing your journey from corporate into into advice, and then you started and then you had you and then you’ve you’ve read pivoted, um, was there any sort of events, or motivations that shaped you shaped you your thoughts other than the cool backstory of the name,

James Millard
I think one thing is the the ongoing challenge, we seem to have as advisors as a as a as a group and the fact that everyone put brings together there, there’s no doubt I mean, everyone knows this. We don’t have to dwell on it. But the challenges that have been around but but what happens here is it actually forces you to be really good at what you do. And on top of that, I think for us the fact that we’re working with young people, the difference in my experience, they’re really getting stuck into this where we, you know, we’ve made some really strong partnerships with people who were able to give us quite a good a solid flow of in incoming inquiries is, all of a sudden you realize that millennials, they challenge you on value, and you have to articulate it. And if you can’t articulate value, and get that across in that very first time you touch on on, you know what you’re going to do with them, you’ve gone, you’ve gone straight away and so, and I’ve

Andrew Rocks
got to I’ve got two questions to ask there. The first one is, you mentioned you’ve got a good flow of clients. I’d like to explore a little bit more about how you attract attract clients. But we’ll come to that that secondary this the second one is, yeah, how do you how do you and you and your team of 26 articulate that value early on to quite sort of I’m not skeptical, but just quite inquisitive and very, you know, millennials have the benefit of being able to cross reference everything. They’re a generation that, you know, you’re the third person they’ve looked at on the website, not the first. So how do you articulate that value early on with the client relationship?

James Millard
So really just with anyone here is absolutely about understanding what are their problems? And what are their challenges. And the thing that comes up for almost everyone that we work with is there’s a lot going on. And there always will be, and whether it’s trying to buy the first time through to starting the family through to the challenges that might come with that. Starting a Business fluctuating incomes, private school, and and everything through that that core kind of 1015 years that we’re sort of going through and have been through career challenges and everything else. There’s so much there that everyone we talked to has something or everything that you know, going on there. And I guess the idea there is for us, if you can really get clear on what is important to you what matters, then we can help you build a financial plan that actually links your money decisions to that. And once you understand that you’re investing for the right reasons and makes sense. And if the market tanks tomorrow, it has no bearing on the outcome of this, this and this, and that they’re the ones that actually matter, then the rest of it falls into place, and you stay on track. So how do you get these clients? So we’ve got so a couple things. So we do have a really good, strong, we’re probably on a 40% referral basis. So clients have a great experience. And that’s, that’s, that’s out there. For us. Our two main sources of leads come from two big podcasts. So Glen James, shout out to Glen and my Millennial Money, she’s on the money, Victoria Devine, these guys are doing an incredible job, I guess waking people up to the salutely ability and ability to really take control of their finances. So the types of introductions that we get from people like this, they’re, they’re engaged already. And they know what they don’t know. And they’re asking, there’s

Andrew Rocks
probably a good chance that they’ve listened to quite a few of the guys podcasts. And they’re starting to firm and, and maybe do a little bit of that, that their formation of ideas even before they get to you. And as you’ve just intimated, the best thing is they know what they don’t know. And both of those people, Victoria with the shoes on the money, and Glenn and his team, have made a real fest of actually going out to the general public and promoting, you know, basically get to get your act together, which and so, So you then have worked with them as an execution partner for people who make further inquiries. Is that right?

James Millard
Yeah, exactly. And I guess that’s the I mean, the benefit of us to somewhere like that is that we can, overall a number of years, we can show that we’re looking after their community, they can trust that process, they can trust that we’ve got capacity. So a decent team. It’s not just one advisor trying to pull it all together. There’s a really solid team, and I’m sure we’ll get into the pod structure and, and how we operate all of that, as well.

Andrew Rocks
And we’re just to change gears to get into the actual business of the business. You mentioned your clients a time poor? Well, I’ve been through that times, and they’re time destitute, is that, you know, you mentioned things like they’ve gotten, they might start their own business, they’re buying their own home, they’re putting their kids through private school, was that the inspiration to get a real handle on the mortgages side of it and, and sort of control the outcome on that cost center?

James Millard
Yeah, I mean, look, going back, going back some time, I worked in a business where we did everything, and mortgages was part of it. So we started that naturally. And I was trying to be a mortgage broker, and a financial planner at the same time. And that worked until we got to a certain level. I’m glad I’m not doing that anymore. But we, you know, I brought in Randy, who I was lucky to have worked with prior he runs the mortgage broking side of the business. They’ve got three brokers there now and good pod structure around it. And that works incredibly well. But yet back to that the outcome for the clients is, I mean, we’re seeing it right now. Right, the refinance market is insane. But it’s also being we’re talking to so many people who haven’t quite bought their first home and just having a sounding board and saying, Well, what does that what does that look like? Or what do I need? And how do I approach that? The two sides of the business planning and broken just works so well together?

Andrew Rocks
Oh, look, you’re preaching to the converted with me, it’s been the genesis of, of law. And I always thought that if you can, if you can save for them, if you can get the best quality life insurance at the best quality price if you can get the efficient frontier of what they pay mortgages. And you can assist them with a you know, either an in house or a quality accounting referral, and the client ends up with, you know, five to $10,000 extra per year. It becomes an easy sell to say, Well, I would like to charge a fee for my services to then make you money as well.

James Millard
Yeah. And on top of that, I think that You know, the common misconception with millennials is they’re not willing to spend money. And that’s rubbish, they’ll they will absolutely throw money at something if they can see the value in it. And that’s the key, you got to create that. But some Yeah, we get paid for what we do. That’s very important.

Andrew Rocks
So you mentioned, you’ve got a couple of mortgage brokers, but maybe, maybe give me an idea of how you arrange your business, to complement the the articulation of how you want to service your clients.

James Millard
Yeah, so. So we’ve got that we keep the two, the two separate entities broking and planning from a planning perspective, we have, we have the advisor, that’s obviously the key relationship holder, and the provider of advice. But that’s really all they do. And, and this stemmed from me, trying to not do anything that I absolutely shouldn’t be doing. Because I get my dirty mitts on things and I break it, it’s, I need to step back and focus on that, whatever that might be. And it’s no longer, you know, one on one with clients as much as it was. And and now we have the good advisor and pod structure around that advisor. So the key our key for advisors is they are relationship people, they have the ability to have conversations, and they can engage and they can coach. And if they’re active listeners, we then have what we call an advice to IC, which is more like an assistant advisor, associate advisor, they may be doing the p y or working towards it, they may not be may already be qualified as an advisor who just wants to work more in a support role, but also maybe service some of the ongoing clients, we then have to admin in that one pot now once for onboarding, everything up to getting through the presentation of a plan. And then the other one is for implementation. And so that’s applications and seeing it through to completion there. And then we have a power plant where the power plant team that we share between the pods, and we’re working on how that kind of fits into that exact structure, but they’re all internal, we used it, we used to outsource a lot of that stuff. But now internally, when I say internal, half the teams in the Philippines, yep, we see them as an extension of us. So it’s, it’s all internal, in my mind,

Andrew Rocks
what a quick glance at your website, there’s no difference between and we’ll get to where all of your team are, but even your advisors and your your to ICs. And I do believe that advice to IC might be a completely unique name to your own business. I personally love it. So if I’m an advisor, and I’ve got an advice to IC, does that mean that that the advisors does a lot of the onboarding of the new clients and potentially the to ICS assisting in in reviewing the portfolios?

James Millard
That’s right, and, and also helping build the strategy and everything up to delivery of advice. And so being that connection with a bit of experience, who understands strategy, and, and everything else that’s really important there to then be the connection between the admin side of the client services part and the advisors themselves so that they can come out of a meeting not We’re not sitting in each other’s meetings. But we but we will record or do a quick loom wrap up to then summarize and move on. And that’s imperative. Just that cost efficiency and keeping the advisor in front of clients ideally is is is the only way to do it for us.

Andrew Rocks
Cool. And for the uninitiated learn is a piece of software that helps you record your meetings there. So with the types of clients you articulated upfront, and having a lending business, is it safe to say that you do have quite a large demand for life insurance is a key part estate planning life insurance of your business?

James Millard
Yeah, definitely is definitely is. And you know, it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting thing for us, because we were about a year and a half ago, and this was leading up to the changes with income protection, we were doing risk only plans. And we we switched that, to now focusing on this was a tough decision to make. But it’s something we really challenged in terms of profitability, spitting out a risk only plan for us where we had the team working on so much other, you know, really important stuff around the goal planning and the bigger plans that we arrive, we made the call to drop that as a service offering and just offer a holistic service that includes risk. So we knew what we’re doing, we’ve done a heap of it. I think we submitted something like 300 Insurance applications in the last couple of weeks of would have been October 21 with the income protection changes and you know, we had we had that but we just had to look I was just looking at the cost of delivering it. And in the end the team was very thankful for the pressure that that came off after the end of October. But I say we’d focus a little bit more on our holistic service which in the end that’s that’s our core value. That’s what we’re absolutely best at and that’s the reason we made that decision on

Andrew Rocks
look if you passionately aligned with that as a service and you deliver it then that’s that’s all you need to we need to do and Are we how much FaceTime? Do your advisors get? It seems like they’ve got quite a bit of support and what with the two IC with an implementation with someone who’s organizing research and whatnot, and also a sort of a consolidated power planning team, if I were working for you, and I’m an advisor, what sort of FaceTime do I get with clients as a percentage,

James Millard
so you’d be doing anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a week. And so that’s, you know, that’s a spread between I mean, there’s, there’s the phone calls, there’s the initial call, there’s our defying sufficient session, which is an hour and a half. There’s another meeting before presenting the plan, which is an hour and then the plan presentation can be up to two hours. And it’s, you know, multiple of those each week.

Andrew Rocks
Now, you mentioned that you you’ve got some team members in the Philippines. What was your philosophy around your your grind your global team? And also maybe give us a feel for? Where is your team located at the moment? You’re a Newcastle native, lots of pictures of you at the beach. I’m on your website, having a bit of fun, but but that’s not necessarily your business, per se.

James Millard
No. I grew up in Grafton. I came to Union Newcastle that’s where I met my wife, Tash. We ended up in Brisbane for a couple years. We’re in Sydney for 12, nearly over a decade in the end and backs in Nui more recently, last couple of years. So I as part of our transition from your from our original thesis, as part of our transition from the original business into building sufficient funds. There was a heavy element of our clients are not coming into the city. They’re not coming there. They don’t want to come see us. So we’re doing video meetings anyway, we were just wasting so much time commuting, that we ended up completely remote. And that was a that was a short term solution here

Andrew Rocks
was that James relative to COVID? Well, well, before

James Millard
we were that was that was 2016. Right? So a little bit before COVID brought the broader necessity. And thankfully for us, we’re already very well equipped, luckily, for all of that, but it was a move that we’d made when we were small and very easily managed at that point. But we made we turn that into an intention. And and it moved Then from now where we are now we have no location. We don’t have a head office, we don’t have an office anywhere. And we’ve got team in Australia from Cannes down to Tassie. And as I said, we’ve before, we’re talking about the Philippines, we’ve got a half our teams in the Philippines as well. So in terms of structure, we anyone can work from anywhere, we don’t mind that we’ve got to do a lot around engagement and make sure that we’re still catching up and doing all that type of thing. That really, really works well.

Andrew Rocks
Well, I’m probably going to touch on that a bit later on around how you, you manage your people and your culture, given what you’ve just articulated there. But in relation to the technology stack that you utilize. What do you use? What do you like what can be improved.

James Millard
So we’ve got active campaign that we use more to engage. And we and we use that to flow to follow the flow of clients through that, especially those to kind of the first 100 days there first creating the plan. And from there, we use Basecamp, which is project management software Basecamp for now, which we used to use asana and which is similar and slack Basecamp. We found combined the two of them and would allow communicational clients and the client becomes an individual project. And then it builds from there. And so you can create task lists off the back of that, that flow for every individual client, you can cut in and add what’s what’s required and take out what’s not and, and really allocate everything. So that’s our workflow system, essentially. Then we’ve got the base of everything is Gmail, Google. So we use Google Drive, Gmail for the search function and integrate integrations whilst I think Microsoft is definitely catching up with that we just found that was and has been incredibly strong their ex plan is our core for splitting our plans. We use it for what we absolutely have to we have found and this is probably licensee driven probably For the most part in what we’re using there, but x planned from the ones we’ve looked at in terms of the modeling that we do, and this is where the power planner role is. So key to us is that initial that modeling, and the short term modeling, especially the first five years, I don’t I don’t believe in long term plans in a 30 year modeling for someone who’s 30 years old, because everything changes tomorrow, but that first few years is imperative. And having good software there to get that right is where we actually bring a lot of our value for these people. So on top of that, we’re using our payment gateways stripe, and that links in through Calendly. So booking through Calendly, everything flows straight into it into the calendar from there into through Gmail, everything’s everything’s stored in Google Drive, and Stripe automates payments are perfect.

Andrew Rocks
Thanks. And look, it sounds like having building those workflows in Basecamp. Four, I’m familiar with Asana, I haven’t worked with Basecamp. But you’ve, you’ve piqued my interest there. It enables your remote team to actually make sure the ball isn’t dropped with the client. Because it’s once they log in there, they can see that we’re on you know, this project hasn’t been finished. It there’s no there’s nowhere to hide. Is that?

James Millard
That’s right. Yeah, it’s very, it’s very good. It shows everyone’s activity, it shows what they’re working on. It’s one of those helpful, helpful items where you’re talking about a remote team that could be literally anywhere. So we can see what they’ve done today, we can see what they did yesterday, we can see what’s still outstanding. I think that’s really important.

Andrew Rocks
And do you in relation to your mortgage broking? Do you run the full financial planning process? And then refer them into the mortgage broking business? Or is there a level of integration there,

James Millard
there’s a level of integration really depend on the client. I mean, there’s sometimes we’re having that initial conversation, there’s like, straightaway, we need to save some money, we’ve got a mortgage and you know, you just ask the right questions there and send it straight over. If if it generally I would say it’s better to run through the process and make the referral after in the interim introduction afterwards. But it can go both ways, of course, and, you know, one of our our challenges that we’re still working on, but I think we’ve got a lot better at it since that change from risk only offering to dropping that was was now it’s it’s more difficult conversation from a mortgage broker to introduce an entire financial plan than it is to just say, Hey, you got a debt, you need to you need to cover that, right. So that’s a work in progress for us. But we are seeing, we’re educating the brokers really around the value of what we do. And that’s the starting point, if you can have a conversation around that, for the most part, that’s, that’s the key.

Andrew Rocks
And look, the when when you’re actually now doing people’s overall goals? Do you do much investments? And if you do, do you have a? Do? Do you run your investments in portfolio? So just give us a bit of a feel? And is there any platforms that work for you that you like dealing with? Go for it?

James Millard
Yes. So our licensing has always been fairly open fairly platform agnostic in terms of that. So we’ve, we chose net wealth a long, long time ago, and just haven’t haven’t felt any need to leave. The support we get through the BDMS, like Rachel collagen, are insane, is really, really helpful. And that that goes for any BDM that you know, jumps in, there’s so much value that they can add when they do a good job and when they’re receptive. So yeah, massive shout out to people like Rachel, people, like bears from neoss do an incredible job, we’re very open to using all sorts of different insurance and investment products that we absolutely do. But sometimes the cream of the crop rises to the top with the with the service delivery, especially. And they’re very helpful. And that’s the, I guess, a key for us to be able to continue doing what we’re doing. In terms of investment approach, we we like to keep it simple, but we can dial it up when needed. And so in my personal view on this is your behavior, he’s going to it especially for the people we’re working with, right where they don’t have $5 million. And it’s not managing that to beat the market. It’s about someone putting more away on a more regular basis and understanding the impact of that. And so the outcome is often it’s an index type scenario, or might be a core and satellite. The fact that we’re not, we’re not, you know, we’re not placing huge value from a client perspective on that, because we’re not telling them Look, we’re stockbrokers, we’re not trying to beat the market. It’s just literally about placing and saying it’s appropriate and reviewing it annually. We still have that as a fairly manual approach in terms of we have a good set of third kind of satellite funds that we like to use and and then focus more on the core side of things for the most part,

Andrew Rocks
I look your your your people are gonna contribute to wealth, their contributions are what it is, and you really need to have that, that discipline or or get them to have that discipline and they do that by trusting, trusting your process and also by really buying in To the process and the vision and the goals, etc, because people need a reason why they also need it to be easy. You mentioned that, that you’ve got time poor people, the tech stack that you’ve, you’ve intimated from stripe to Calendar, you’re reducing friction at every possible point. And, and you’ve removed commuting, you’ve removed friction for as many paths, places as you can. And I’m sure in five years, when we do this, again, James, you’ll have, you’ll even have further articulations, and almost all of them will be to make the life of the client easier for them to to achieve their goals, rather than, as you said, you know, beating indexes or whatnot. So when, when I’m talking about your actual team, and I did start this podcast by saying that building to a team of 26 people in a handful of years is quite an achievement, you outlined how you structured it, but what I’m interested in is why people join you. Why’d I stay? And then, you know, once you’ve done that, because you are so, so So new relative to a 30 year business? Why do you think they’re going to grow with you? So let’s start with maybe why they join you? What sort of person comes to you and says, I want to be part of your previously known as insufficient now noted sufficient funds, philosophy, James?

James Millard
So I mean, I think I think having that philosophy helps, and, and certainly, there’s, there’s a strong drive, I mean, I, the way I frame this, and there’s a there’s actually a job ad on the on the ensemble, or the XY talent, talent board right now is talent hub, I should say, is, is that we kind of feel like we’ve it’s difficult to provide value for millennials, but everyone wants to do it. And I feel like we’ve nailed that. And so when it comes to that, that’s a, that’s a big thing for our existing team. And, and they see that they’re working on files of people that are similar to them or, you know, have similar challenges. And that’s really helpful because they can really engage in that. And so I feel that’s probably I think, the, the motivation, the enthusiasm that we all have for what we’re actually delivering here, it goes far beyond spitting out a plan that helps add financial value. And I guess for us, that’s the kind of person we’re also looking to hire. And we, you know, we do a few things that we’re fairly careful about how we do that. And that evolves each time we do it. But at the moment, I think we’ve got a pretty good, pretty good process around that as well.

Andrew Rocks
And maybe before we get into the process, I’ll just give you an anecdote. So I ran a, a financial planning practice, and we didn’t call it millennials, because they didn’t exist at the time, but our clients were typically 30 to 50, because we were all in our 30s. And, and we were attempting to tread the same path that you’re doing with your clients. And for the first 10 years, you’re doing that and your clients. Yeah. You know, relative to other clients may not have the investable funds and whatnot. But I can tell you that as those people reach 4045, and head to 50, you end up with all the wealthy clients. So if I’m an advisor with you, and I’m playing the long game, then you’re probably got more of a future ahead of you, then then a practice that potentially is not looking to re reinvigorate itself from displaying either retirement only, or whatnot, of which there are plenty of those, and I do speak with them. But you’re starting here and riding that wave. Now, when you say you’ve got a couple of processes for recruiting or obtaining people, what’s unique to you guys, I don’t deny all process. But what do you think you did, it’s a little bit different,

James Millard
or so. So something that we’ve tried a few times, and it’s worked really well to, to really cut the number of applications that we have to deal with, which has been a challenge, especially if you go somewhere like Seagull some but you end up with a heap of some of these you have to work through, but you never know who you’re dealing with. Right? So we’re we’re working really hard on. We need high performers, but we also need that the right fit for us. And that cultural fit. And the personality that comes with that, especially for things like the advisor role are really important. So we have one hurdle that we found, and I’m not sure I really wish people would would engage more with it, but I have asking them to do a two minute video and send it to us has has been something that works incredibly well. Just really two simple questions. What do you you know, tell us a bit about yourself or why should we choose

Andrew Rocks
and beat you know, a bit when you get the one that just stands out? Well first of all, anyone who doesn’t send that to you clearly is not going to perform very well in an environment where all your clients were on the video. That’s quite a binary sort of filter but but when you get that, that video and they just nail it does Yeah ha

James Millard
It seems it does. And that’s, that’s actually a problem that I have because the second part testing whether they’re actually going to be a high performer, I get so bloody excited about the fact that we might have found the right person you can see it in their eyes when they talk to you. It you still need to know that they have numerical ability and reasoning and, and everything else that comes with it. So

Andrew Rocks
do you do that with like a site test or a series of questions? What’s the what’s the sort of the granularity there?

James Millard
So we use Yeah, we do use the site as well. It’s got a couple that we we employ a different different stages, I guess. And that is, one of them is people logica. And big shout out to Korea verse For for getting me on to that one peep logica is incredible for it’s a big test. And what you do is you use it internally to map your ideal staff member essentially. And so from an advisor perspective, I did it at one of our other advisors have done it. And we’ve then collaborated on that say, Okay, well with what we have what’s perfect there, and and then map the new person against that. And that gives us it’s a bit of personality, but it’s also numerical and, and verbal reasoning and ability. So it gives you the kind of full picture there. So that’s really helpful upfront. Another one that we’re introduced to more recently through our business coaches, his wealth dynamics. And the wealth dynamics is an incredible test where you get it’s a really short one set up by guy called Roger Hamilton, you can look it up, there’s heaps, you probably you you will absolutely know about. It’s like no doubt, Roxy, but I guess you get a profiles. And for us, really, there’s only one profile in there that we feel works for an advisor that we need. And so there’s a, you know, the star profile that comes out of that and what a star looks like, it sounds it sounds egotistical, but it’s very the opposite. It’s very much the opposite. It’s someone who doesn’t mind the light shining on them. But they’re also very happy to push that light onto someone else. And that’s where as an advisor, if you’ve got a quality, you’re you’re already going to backfill clients in every way. And that’s what we need. We don’t mind. We use the Clifton Strengths Finder as well. But that’s not an internal that’s sort of a hiring process. That’s more of a, you know, longer term team engagement. Where does everyone fit in? Making decisions around that?

Andrew Rocks
That will that look, and probably bored people with this comment of you’ve got to hire slow and fire fast. Today’s No, we’re not talking about how to fire. But we’re talking about Hi, what I might do is, yeah, well, I’ve also spoken to, to Cory, and he’s mentioned its peak logic or isn’t it? I might just make sure we’ve got that link for that one, also wealth dynamics, and might be just looped back on your business coach, I’m a big fan of being coached. And in fact, my business partner as we speak today was my business coach. You know, how did you get involved with your coach and what, what, what’s the main thing that takeouts that you have?

James Millard
So in terms of business coach, we are a part of the abundance global community. And so we joined that about 12 months ago, actually offered for a reference from my good friend, Ben Nash. And we, you know, we saw them as a great team, run by a really good guy, David, David Dugan, who’s done a lot of work on himself, but then turn this into an incredible business that they then use to grow businesses and, and they deal with everyone, they work with everyone. So you get a bit of everything, in terms of that. So we went through what they call their accelerator program, sort of mid last year, it was 14 weeks of intensive work on this work on that, and we just go through and you tick it all off, and you graduate, and then you go into what they call mastery. And so yeah, these guys have been great for we I mean, we got to the point where with I think it was 20 people in the team at the time, we looked at ourselves, and like we don’t know, what we don’t know here. And the blind spots, if they are there could be could be fatal if we miss something really important. So we need to really engage a coach and we had never done it before. And that was a that was a big leap of faith. But it’s so far so good.

Andrew Rocks
There’s probably a few organizational structures here, changes at play. You know, this is an engineering podcast and, and you might not realize that but you did disclose that you’re, you’re seeing less and less of the client. So in many respects, you’re also stepping into building the business of the business. And where you have potentially had your blind spots, you probably know that you’ve now engaged to coach who is more than likely making sure that you are articulating your strengths and making sure that everyone’s working at their best and highest use, which which probably help you lead to to know ditching the risk early and doing the holistic plans and the whole thing. I can see you nodding But remember, this is a broadcast, you can say yes, if you want.

James Millard
I don’t I don’t want to interrupt, because I actually really enjoy listening to you. Right? Yeah,

I think you’re absolutely right. And, and there’s a, there’s the element of, you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you’ve got someone to plug those gaps, but it was also holding us accountable. For me, when you get busy, everything else falls away if you if you’re not, if you’re not focused on the right things, and it just means if you know you’re doing the right thing at the right time, you so much more call for about just smashing it out, getting it done and moving on. And that was the biggest thing for me.

Andrew Rocks
And you’ve talked about your your team members are arranged the tools, they’ve got the type of clients, the fact that there’s just a river of opportunities for new clients coming in. But how do you how do you arrange? You know, what are your meeting rhythms with your team? How do you know if they’re doing a good job? You know, how do you how to maybe answer those? And then I might ask you, how do you celebrate? You know, like, how do you manage to celebrate those things, when we probably grew up in an environment where everyone was in the one office? So let’s start with the first question, which is, you know, what are your meeting rhythms? How do you build that consistency? And how do you measure success with your team members?

James Millard
So thank you, this is my this is really timely, because we’re actually kind of reviewing this at the moment, we’re revisiting and looking to put in things like a weekly advisor meeting. So currently, the pods meet, but not the advisors. And it’s just a it’s more of a bounce ideas and reflect on

Andrew Rocks
the port. So the two ICS meeting, at the moment running, they were much running the private office of their advisors that right,

James Millard
with the advisor involvement that Yeah, that? Yeah, absolutely. And, but then you’ve got the the pods meet, but there’s that advisor, there’s the value and just bringing the advisors together in in, you know, what did you do? What did you deal with what went wrong? And that’s the stuff that you hear in an office, right? You hear that stuff, and it’s the coaching and the training that can come off the back of that, that’s incredibly helpful. We’re looking at the all in team meetings of bringing in a monthly all in team meeting. And at the moment, what do we do, we’ve got one on ones with the key, sell most of the guys and girls that report to me. And so we’ve got our monthly one on ones, so to speak, where we catch up about life and business and work and everything else. But in terms of the fact that we’ve grown so quickly, we just had to take stock and say, let’s get some structure here. So we’ve got a bit of a plan in place there. But it will revolve around some advisor meetings, weekly, and then a monthly all in. And then we we use actually and this probably helps that second part of that question was, how do we how do we keep the camaraderie going, and all the chat around the office, we use Voxer. And so Voxer being a phone app, it’s also desktop, that that works for just the chit chat all the random stuff, it’s not client talk, it’s not anything specific. We’ve got different channels and so forth, similar to slack. But we use that in a way that like is a lot of fun stuff was sharing feedback, if someone gets a Google review goes in there, just this stuff that really keep everyone pumped up.

Andrew Rocks
And in relation to using Vox Voxer. How did you get your, your global team members to sort of participate in that banter? You know? And was there any tips or tricks you’ve got for other people to get to get your global team involved in that, that chitchat, so to speak?

James Millard
So we, I mean, part of that comes from really pushing that because we saw that as a knee, especially and you know, it is right, it is a challenge sometimes to have, you know, someone in the Philippines feeling like they can give that feedback or say that joke or whatever it might be. And so we just really actively encourage it. And, and asking questions, I think is is is a really important part, taking an interest just as I, as I’ve promoted strongly with the advisor for your clients, take an interest in the team take an interest in what’s going on for them. And, you know, we’ve got all sorts of hilarious stories that get shared in in there and different gifs GIFs that float around. Some of the team in the Philippines are hands down the best at sharing the funniest things at the right time. So yeah, they’ve, they’ve built confidence over the years.

Andrew Rocks
Now that that’s a natural look that that makes all the difference here. There are gonna be people listening to this engineering podcast where, where they’re looking at doing this exercise for the first time, and you’ve just given some pretty sage advice based on my experience there as well. So, as far as how do you celebrate, um, do you guys ever get together physically or maybe give us a feel for that?

James Millard
Yeah. So yeah, I sort of said we have a we have an annual retreat, or that has been the case for the last two years. So it’s, it’s certainly something we want to we want to try and make sure subject to performers that were able to do that. And we were lucky enough to be able to bring one of our two Amen was out last year from the Philippines. And we have you know that that focus of getting everyone together, it gets a lot of work done sometimes. But it’s also a good time to celebrate and do it properly. Because that’s very important as well. We also have monthly drinks. So we have the obligatory monthly drinks on Zoo. And, of course, that’s, that’s, that’s a good one. But yeah, getting everyone together. And, and also, but now that, you know, we do have people around the country and the team, the Philippines often get together face to face as well. More of an ad hoc thing, but just having a baby, if you live anywhere near each other, we’re now more intentional about okay, let’s make this, this and this person get together. And we’ll we’ll go and catch up

Andrew Rocks
now with your with your future of your business. Where do you see? So I’ll frame this question in two parts. Because you’re clearly going through a journey from someone who was a business writer, you’re now coached, you’re building out operational things, you’re potentially putting the jigsaw puzzle in place, with people, with deliverables, you’ve done quite a lot of good things. But where does your business go from here in the next five years? And then the other part of it is, where do you see hence, the future of the practices in financial advice?

James Millard
Okay, so, I mean, look, we’ve got a, we’ve started to kind of through the business coaches, we started to try and create this idea of a 10 year vision for us. And that is a long way away, it’s very difficult to do that was quite a challenging exercise. But you know, what came out of that is set, the goal is so damn high, that then you can put the fence posts in place and join the dots and and do it in a do it in a methodical way. And so I’d encourage anyone to really get stuck into that idea of just getting crazy with your vision and think about how big could it possibly be?

Andrew Rocks
Big hairy, audacious goal is one of the lingos isn’t it?

James Millard
As right, and so that that idea, your grand vision or whatever you want is, it’s it’s really for us, it’s completely dominating financial planning and mortgage writing for millennials for driven millennials. And those are the ones for us, it’s people who want to seeking they’re actually out there to define, achieve and reach beyond sufficient funds is how we frame that. And, you know, we see, the more value we can add, and the more bells and whistles around that service is the ticket to that, and at the same time scaling to the point that, you know, I guess it was take a step back from that we set annual two and three year goals that we’re sharing with the team now as well in terms of revenue, and client numbers, and so forth. And so those are the those are the kind of short term build momentum. And then if you know we’re going to, we’re going to hit the biggest stuff in 10 years time, we’ve got to, we’ve got to hit one and two and three in the first place and and move from there. So when when it comes to the industry itself, and where I think practices need to go, it’s it’s very much about embracing tech, it’s very much about realizing that you know that traditional SOA, which may no longer be necessary, is is going to be something with that merger for the SOA. And then the use of tech to really bring that alive clients AI we’re seeing now is already already completely changing the way people can create content and, and have conversations and all of that. And obviously, we know that’s going to completely blow the world up in a positive way, ideally, in the next few years. And I think it’s very important that we all as as practice owners, but anyone in the business is involved in just understanding that type of thing. At its core, really making sure you provide a relevant offering to the people you work with best.

Andrew Rocks
So it’s fair to say you’ve targeted your clients, but you’re also targeting your team members. So what’s the type of team member that you would like to have you service your millennial client base? Because in case you do rewind this podcast, you did use the word dominate, which is a pretty, pretty definitive, an aggressive word, which I love. But so what does what’s your ideal team member look like? Not just because your your current one is going to be listening but but you know, we spoke earlier, you’re in the market to grow people at any part of your team or any any facet of your team. So what do they look like?

James Millard
So I mean, the job ad right now on your platform is is out there for advisors, and we’re keen to hire one or two as soon as possible. But like you said, hire slow. Put everyone through the right hoops, but in terms of what we’re looking there at four there. It really is emotionally intelligent humans, it people who can connect and that goes for anyone in the business. We want. We want because you have to be able to work remotely. You’ve got to be able to have those conversations and be able to understand how people might take what you say the wrong way if you say it in a certain way, and it’s that idea of emotional intelligence, as well as the intelligence that comes with dealing with summer work in the financial planning world, we need smart people. And that’s where those profiling tools really helpful. In terms of what we’re looking for there, it’s it’s enthusiastic, motivating people that we’re all pretty young. And I mean, my clients and a lot of the team would call me old. But we’re not we’re not against hiring someone who’s, who’s more senior than I might be, for the fact that they’ll bring, bring something slightly different to what we’re offering at the moment, the core and the key there is they have to understand and want to relate and work with the people that we’re working with. And so yeah,

Andrew Rocks
so I think when I asked you to, to practice the future, I think you’ve reiterated what quite a few of my guests have said, which is being very clear at the target market you’re after. And making sure that the the operational business that you’ve built complements that target market, I think the concept of a of a jack of all trades or a general store, in financial planning is very hard to price, it’s very hard to attract and retain the talent. And it’s just confusing in the marketplace. And that’s one of the takeouts there as well. And I would, I would safe to say that people don’t start with that emotional intelligence. And one of the, the upsides of being involved in ensemble is that, that we see people grow in, in their peer to peer, so not just do you have the ability to craft your advisors talking to other advisers and paraplanners. But they’ve got that ability to talk to other people. And as you intimated, up front, there’s no competition there, it’s been one of our more satisfying things is saying, you know, people people’s ability to relate and have that emotional intelligence increase, not as a function of education in the traditional way, but as a function of relating and communicating with their peers.

James Millard
Absolutely. Right. And, and I think that it comes out that, that that’s the core of what we would look for, and I think most people will be looking for, in a sense of any partner, or any staff member, it is about understanding that there’s a connection there, and you can make that connection, and you can understand when they’re not feeling up for that conversation you think you need to have. And so yeah, we’re very open and always keen to, you know, work with and partner with like minded businesses, we’re keen for advisors. And, but but to be honest, you know, as a growing business, there’s, there’s opportunities coming up quite regularly, as well.

Andrew Rocks
Oh, thank you very much for your time. Today, James, and thank you very much for opening the lid on on the that that niche was, when I say niche, there’s a lot of people are in that age group, right? And, and how you’re intending on servicing them, your philosophy around that one team, right down to a bit of honesty around how you’ve now increased the accountability by bringing on a business coach, by going through that program, you know, people don’t start being awesome, as a practice or a CEO, and it’s a journey. And it people in your team don’t have to start day one being awesome, provided they’ve got those, those that intent, and that requirement that empathy, they can grow with you as they can with many other quality, quality practices. And with with that, in mind, this is all about lifting leads on on on practice management in Australia, lifting lid on the the wonderful, I suppose, and colorful, different ways in which, you know, our community is servicing different people in Australia and, and kind of getting away from the binary kind of you’re in or out or we do this or you don’t, we are very good in financial planning, at actually caring for our clients. And by building a great quality engine room. It gives our advice community, the opportunity and the air to do their best. With that in mind, James, thank you very much for your time. And I wish I wish you insufficient funds, all the best. And I hope that I only have a handful of insufficient fund things come out of my ATM for if not for the limited amount of time that the whole exist in the future.

James Millard
Absolutely. Rocksy may thank you so much to you. And the whole ensemble crew. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate the call up and yeah, I hope that’s been helpful and yeah, that you guys are doing some amazing work.

Andrew Rocks
And if you want any details in relation to to the sufficient funds business, there’ll be links here and and as James has already pointed out, he’s he’s got an active and active out there for people as well. Look, have a great evening, James. Take care.

James Millard
Thanks. Bye Cheers.