#100 Andy Hart – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to Episode 100 of Ensombl Advice South Africa. I’ve been saving this guest for a really long time. This is a person that committed right at the beginning, but somehow life didn’t work out and my friend Andy Hart, I’m so glad to have you here for a conversation about all things life financial planning, and juggling a million balls at once, ya know?

Andy Hart
Very pleased to be here. So yeah, looking forward to this I run a podcast so I’m uh, I’m normally the other side of the mic. So this would be interesting. Getting a bit of my a bit my own medicine.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, I should have gone back to all the difficult questions, you’ve asked your guests over the over the years. But the idea with this is sort of a conversation where advisors can listen in to say, Hey, I’m struggling with the same thing. And here’s two guys that maybe have given some of it a stab. And we can share a little bit of what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. You have multiple projects going on at the moment, before we get to your side gigs. Tell me a bit about Maven advisor. And the work you do for your clients, like you’re very specific with who you work with, and how did you get to that niche?

Andy Hart
Yeah, so I run Maven advisor, which is a UK regulated financial advice firm. I think I launched it in 2017. But I’ve always been a sort of self employed advisor. It’s a solo practice solo advisor, I’ve got a sort of team that helped me sort of outsourced, we got a pretty strict sort of investment proposition, generally, Vanguard dimensional sort of index funds, you know, global, global equities, as it were being the the growth engine, financial planning, lead, and sort of behavioral coaching as well. So that’s the sort of three services that we offer. I’m basically building it to sort of be 50 families and 50 million aum. And I’m sort of on track at the moment, I’ll probably take on about another 10 or 12 families, and then that business will sort of just be complete, as it were. However, who knows, once you get to a destination, you do decide to train the goalposts. But yeah, that’s, that’s that business. And that’s the reason why all the other businesses are have been set up. You know, I’m a practicing advisor. You know, I’ve got the advisor voice. And then yeah, there’s a couple of other businesses that I’ve set up as well. So yeah, I suppose I look after sort of clients on the approach to retirement. I think my average ongoing, sorry, average age of an ongoing client now is 55. It used to be 61. But I brought it down, you know, the perfect clients to be taken on as sort of 50 year old business owners that are motivated and have got, you know, 120 months left to fix this problem called retirement. Yeah, I suppose over the years, I’ve just shrunk my circle of competence. There’s so much shiny new things in this business. And at first, you have to learn everything, you know, that’s the idea, you know, learn, learn, learn and and to become a real expert, you have to unlearn. And that is the real challenge. And there’s so much financial trash out there that people, you know, devise money to make themselves wealthy. And a lot of it is not needed for our clients. As I say, just bog standard index, global equity funds are going to be the growth engine that pretty much everybody needs. But then obviously, it’s asset allocation, that’s important. And it’s they’re not doing the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Hence, you know, us as financial advisors need to, you know, hold the hands rule, or market cycles and all life transitions.

Louis van der Merwe
And you mentioned the Maven advisors, the reason you do this, and the engine behind it, is that feeding the rest of your projects financially, or the rest of your projects, feeding clients into your business, kind of a bit of a symbiosis.

Andy Hart
Yeah, I don’t quite know. I mean, like most things, it wasn’t really, you know, a hardcore strategy in the beginning, maybe a bit of a sort of background. I mean, I did a law degree at university, that was very useful. I touch upon quite a lot of stuff that I learned, then, you know, my day job now, I then didn’t want to become a lawyer, I thought, I have to do another sort of couple of years training and then a training contract. I thought, by the time about 30, I’ll be earning sort of real money. So I thought it’s just too long. So I thought, I just need to go and get a job. So I went to get a job at 22. I was an estate agent for a year, just literally the first job that would have me, and then I was selling houses. And I thought that was quite interesting, quite useful. And you know, I’ve got quite a fun job. And then I was interested in how people finance buying these houses because they looked like sort of normal people buying very expensive houses, and I was thinking how they finance in this, you know, what’s the mechanics behind it? I didn’t really know anything about mortgages, and then I became fascinated with the mortgage market. And then I became a mortgage broker. And then whilst I was a mortgage broker, I then decided that I want to become a financial advisor and, you know, help people with investments. So that’s my sort of journey into it. I’ve been self employed since 24. I’m 42 now so I’ve been 18 years. cracking away at this self employed sort of solopreneur type journey. And it’s obviously been tough at times, you know, high highs, low lows. What I mean is Maven advisors the reason why everything else exists. So my journey was sort of a financial advisor. I used to work at another firm, I then was using voient financial planning software. So voin is a company coming out of Austin in America. I love technology, and I love financial planning. So when voyant came into my life, it was just like, you know, the greatest day ever. And I was just training advisors for free, you know, yeah, I’ll come and sit with you for a couple of hours and show you how to use the software. And that went on for a while. And you know, as I say, We’re just doing it, because I loved it. And then one advisor said, Why don’t you charge us for this? You know, we charge our clients for various things that we do, why don’t you talk to us? I said, That’s a great idea. I’ll send you an invoice. He said, I don’t charge me charge other guys, you know, typical cost of the idea. Exactly, I’ll take a cut of the future revenue. So then I thought, okay, all right, how does this work, and then I basically became a consultant, and I was training financial advisors, specifically onboarding financial planning software. But then it was wider than that, because you can’t train someone financial planning software without, you know, sort of going through all the pieces of the financial planning process. So I became a bit more of a wider consultant, let’s call it a financial planning consultant, but specifically using the software voient. And then again, it just happened by accident, I thought, well, you know, I’m using the software called Valeant. I’ve just got that I’ve got the guts up for business. So I’ve got my invoice people, what should I call myself, I’ll call myself the voiding test. And that was it really. So I went all in on voyant software, I didn’t want to call myself, you know, the cash flow King or the financial planning, whatever. I just went all in on VoIP software. So I launched the void test. And that’s been doing that for about 10 years. And I’ve got another business on the back of that called voyant mastery, which is an online subscription, sort of video training membership site. That’s been a bit of a project. And then I suppose the final sort of brand is humans on the management that’s now we became friends, obviously, you spoken at, at hum SA, we do two conferences a year one in London, one in Cape Town, South Africa. I’ve done a couple in Dublin as well. And that’s a play on words. Obviously, it’s called humans under management. We all know about assets under management, but you know, managing assets as easy as the owners of the assets that all of your professional problems come from. And it’s Yeah, play on words, humans under management. And now it’s sort of a sort of content marketing company, where we financial advisors, subscribe, we’ve got about 200 members now, from 11 different countries, and we’re continually building out the product. We’re just trying to help financial advisors and give them as much collateral as they can to have better karma clients, basically, through marketing and communication. And that’s it. And then the final other sort of, sort of project I’m up to is called trap. It stands for the real advisor podcast, it’s a video YouTube podcast that we do every fortnight, me and three other practicing financial advisors. And that’s it so yeah, I live sleep and breathe personal finance. And you know, I’m I say I’m in the money business owner learn everything I can about the money business, obviously, I specifically on my money through, you know, financial planning and investments, but I want to know everything about the money business. Yeah, I wake up every day, and I’m immersed in it. I’ve got, as I say, different businesses and different logos and different email addresses. But it’s all the same thing for me, you know, I’m either talking to a financial advisor, I’m helping a client, I’m producing a bit of content. So yeah, it’s just all around the Yeah, the money business and specifically around investments in financial planning.

Louis van der Merwe
Andy, these things run so parallel and so close together, how difficult is it for you to switch gears into different businesses? Because they run so closely? I would imagine that that’s relatively easy, or do you find it that it’s a different mindset when talking to advisors versus clients versus software providers?

Andy Hart
Yeah, it’s the classic. The grass is always greener, I suppose. It’s like some people look at me and think wow, it’s brilliant. He’s got like three different businesses, multiple streams of income. I look at someone with one business and think you’re so lucky. Just have one business one zero accounts, like one set of accounts, one business bank account, I’ve got I’ve run two VAT registered businesses, and obviously one is regulated. So it is a bit of a challenge. I’ve got one employee and then I’ve got a team of sort of 12 outsource people. So again, if you find some a player, outsource team members like they are worth their weight. And yeah, I’ve honed that over the years, as I say, I’ve been self employed for 18 years. So it is all about having a great team. So I’ve got an amazing assistant in Maven advisor, a good friend of ours, Pierre, he’s sort of the co founder, let’s say, of humans on the management premium. So yeah, yeah, we do a lot of stuff together. So yeah, just find good team members. I mean, first of all, you should outsource to technology. You know, for example, Calendly, it’s like mind blowing, you know, zoom, all this sort of stuff. So first port of call is kind of find a tech solution that’s going to save me time, make more efficient, more productive, etc. If you can’t, then obviously, the next step is outsource to a human. And then the third step is, is employ someone. So it depends on what type of business you’re trying to build. Between my three businesses, I’ve got about 430 ongoing clients that are paying me monthly or annually. That’s obviously financial advice clients, that’s training clients avoidant on the volunteer stuff, and then that’s humans on a measurement premium and a few other sort of sort of coaching clients or various other things. So yeah, it’s quite a lot to deal with. But I think I’m at the position where I can sort of scale up to probably about 1000, based on the current team, the current setup and the current sort of business offerings. So yeah, it’s all fun and games, it beats working. You know, imagine if we had a real job. It would be a little bit more challenging. Yeah. I mean, recently, I’ve moved house. So I’ve been doing sort of builder work and jet washing and various other things. So yeah, I’ll stick to the professional services. Thank you very much. It’s quite lucratively paid. And not too challenging. You know, I’d sort of say, you know, I think hard for a living. You know, that’s, that’s the key thing. Really, you’re we’re in the ideas business, aren’t we packaging ideas, pitching ideas? And yeah, so yeah, well, good.

Louis van der Merwe
I’ve heard someone say, they pay me for what I know not for what I do, which is actually such an interesting way right of just putting in more effort. I want to ask you, the kind of credential route around financial planners, right. So obtaining a CFP designation a chartered? Is that something you’ve ever considered? Have you gone down that path and decided not to? It seems like a piece of that is, that isn’t not to say that I would have expected it to be there from what I’m seeing. So tell me a little bit more about that.

Andy Hart
I must have built more financial plans, and pretty much any financial planner in the world probably, I certainly probably trained more financial advisors than as I say, there’ll be only a handful of other people. I have sort of said controversially, I’m proudly non chartered. Hiding behind exams is, you know, there’s lots of CFPs chartered that, you know, are probably not that good with clients. So no, I’m, I’m qualified up to the level that I need to be. I think I’m two exams away from chartered. But again, if someone’s looking for a financial advisor, and that specifically what they’re looking for, then probably to me, that’s probably a red flag from that client, you know, who knows what else they’re going to be requesting down the line? So no, I haven’t done the CFP. I’ve trained and helped lots of people submit their CFPs. But I’ve not done it myself. But yeah, I’m, I’m aware of the designation and obviously, it’s, it’s, it’s decent. Yeah, our sort of main one now in the UK is chartered. I think it’s called a chartered wealth manager. I could be wrong. But when regulation forces me to do it, then I will, I will happily do it. But yeah, at the moment, I’m not I’m not. I think I don’t have any exams. I’ve done I think I’ve done about 15 exams. But yeah,

Louis van der Merwe
makes sense. It almost like it gets you that foot in the door, if you’re looking for a good job, right. But the two things that you never want to be addicted to his cocaine and a paycheck. Yeah. And you’ve kind of figured out that recipe to say, right, I’m going to I’m going to do this myself, I’m going to figure out a different path or boss that’s unique to me, which is wonderful. I mean, that’s it’s always interesting to me, to see how this evolved in the piece that stands out is how much you’ve taken away. How difficult is it for you to say no, early on to say, Well, I’m gonna explore this, but this is my this is my kind of cue criteria.

Andy Hart
Well, yeah, I part of your first point. Yeah, I’m sort of unemployable, obviously, as most entrepreneur characters are, it’s not saying I can’t work well in the team, but I just, you know, some managers is telling me what to do and just, you know, do my head and I think I had a job for about 18 months and thank thank the Lord, I am set up on my own near to age 24 years, so I’m unemployable which is great, which means that you need to carve your own path out. At the moment, I’m pretty much at business capacity. Like I don’t really need to take on any any new projects. It’s just fine tuning Exactly. Um, what what I’m doing. I also run a podcast called Maven money. You’re You’re 100 of the show, which is obviously fantastic. I’ve got my 300 show coming up. And it’s just it’s relentless. Obviously. The great thing about weekly podcasts is a weekly podcast, the terrible thing about a weekly podcast is it’s a weekly podcast. It’s relentless. But just in sort of autopilot mode, we’re just creating content. In there’s some podcasts that I look back and think how, like, I forgot the totally forgotten button together, it’s like half an hour worth of sort of sort of a whole subject area. So it was I have to listen back to my own podcast to sort of refresh my memory about certain sort of financial element of something. Which is a bit weird. Yeah, I feel like my brain is full at the moment. It’s sort of like one in one out that if that’s maybe my age anyway,

Louis van der Merwe
I feel the same, right? There’s only a certain capacity and when when you get on to a topic in this hour, I’m gonna go deeper into this, like, looking back, what is the 300th? Episode? Like what has changed in the way of your thinking? Because you’re very specific with the words you use? Like, I can hear that. And they have, typically of what they say that it’s not rehearsed. But it’s well thought through, like, is that a function of the podcast? Or was that something that you were inherently born with?

Andy Hart
Yeah, I think I’m quite good at explaining complex ideas, quite simply. It’s just naturally happened. It’s not as if there’s any sort of strategic plan with it. I mean, public speaking something that I’ve worked at over the years, you know, I’ve sort of paid consultants I’ve, I went through the Toastmasters sort, of course. And it is very challenging. But I suppose I’ve got better and better at it, obviously. Running conferences. Yeah. That’s the skill isn’t it tried to explain relatively complicated concepts in a simple way. I don’t quite know what’s changed. I mean, 300 episodes is just madness, I think about 75 of probably interview, so most of them are solo shows, you know, when I just think of an idea, and then it just sort of sits with me for a while, and then I sort of make some bullet point notes, and then sort of record it. I suppose advisors listening to this, yeah, is all about shipping, which is a sort of Seth Godin term I recommend you do if you want to get, you know, build brands, and understand marketing, Seth Godin is the guy is come out with about 30 books, I must have read at least 10 or 15 of them, the Deep Purple Cow linchpin. All marketers alive, there’s loads and loads of them. Yeah, definitely read it. He’s had the biggest impact on me in terms of shipping ideas. And there’s never a perfect time to launch new projects, side projects. You’ve just got to, I suppose do it, haven’t you? And you should be somewhat embarrassed of your early content. You know, because if you are always waiting for perfection, you probably going to launch too late. And it’s just trying new things, isn’t it? Yeah, so I recommend Seth Godin. The person that’s had the biggest impact on me professionally, is Nick Murray. So Nick Murray is an advisor to advisors. And, you know, it’s a bold statement, but he’s completely changed my entire life, to be fair, not just business life. He just made me, you know, rise to a completely different level, and just think about things in a completely different way. So he’s a guy that lives in Brooklyn, I think he’s about 75 is 25 years as a financial advisor and 25 years advising advisors. A lot of people subscribe to his newsletter, which I recommend that you do. I think it’s about 300 bucks a year. And his content is, is amazing. Yeah, so he’s had the biggest impact on me, professionally. And then as I say, yeah, yeah, Seth Godin, as well. So, so yeah.

Louis van der Merwe
Can I ask you around? Nick, you, you mentioned that he’s had the biggest impact. Was that kind of one on one sessions with him? Or is that working through his newsletter content? Like what what did that engagement look like? Was it something more formal?

Andy Hart
Yes. So he is someone call him a friend. Now? I don’t think he might echo that. So I’ve, I think I’ve been consuming his content for, I don’t know, maybe about seven or eight years. And I’ve sort of, I don’t know somewhat popularized his content in the UK. So his books are amazing. I think I read the behavioral investment counselor first, which is a fantastic book. The excellent investment advisory is also a great book. I mean, I’m reading a book now. of his blog articles from I think 1993. So it’s just one book with sort of 20 articles in 1993. And there’s still an enormous amount of content, you know, valuable content in the blogs that he wrote in 1993. His content is somewhat evergreen. So it’s not specific to 1993. It’s all the principles and practices that we, as financial advisors just bang on about with our clients. So yeah, I read his books, and I was reading his newsletter. Then I went to New York to his conference. He’s come to the UK a couple of times, when he came to the UK to had my SAT, I was lucky to sat next to him and have dinner. That was probably the scariest moment of my life had to say a few words for Nick Murray. After after a meal we had in London. And the joke was, we bought you a gift, Nick. You know, we wanted to buy you something that, you know, that you didn’t have already. And then the joke was, I bought you a bond fund. But no, we had a like a, like a rare map of London or something. It was a quite a quite interesting. So yeah, yeah, he’s just had a huge impact on me. And I know, that’s sort of the case for a lot of other advisors.

Louis van der Merwe
Like someone that you resonate with, and you can actually see the impact in your life. How do you balance that consumption of content versus creation? Because I find for myself, it’s either one of two modes, it’s either I get to like, Okay, now I’m in research mode, and now I’m in production. How do you balance the two? Or does it just kind of gel together more easily?

Andy Hart
Good question. I mean, we are inundated with information at the moment, aren’t we? With obviously podcasts stuff on YouTube? Books, newsletters, subscriptions? Yeah, I suppose that is the challenge, isn’t it? How you curate the information that you consume? I don’t consume as much as I did in the past, I don’t think I generally listen to various different podcasts, I obviously, listen to books on audible, which probably means I’m not consuming them as deeply as I did. When I used to read dusty books. I still try and read dusty books every so often. But again, just the time is not really available. Yeah, that is the challenge what to consume. So yeah, I do consume the Nick mine newsletter every single month. And various other as I say, podcasts I listened to and stuff. How do you find your ability to sort of curate the information that you consume?

Louis van der Merwe
I think I’m going to answer that by looking back to my early days as an advisor, and I looked up to my now business partner, Morris, and I thought, like, how did you consume so much information? And, and the trick is, you get to a point where it’s maintenance mode, where you have that foundation where yeah, oh, this idea is similar to that thing, and now it fits in. So now what I’m trying to do is to find something that doesn’t fit in the traditional mold and say, Oh, wow, here’s something that actually breaks this previous idea of what I what I thought about

Andy Hart
what I think the other thing is, I remember when we first went to conferences, when we were fresh to this business, I’d literally write 12 pages of notes, like maybe even more like, just everything seemed like, useful. If I go to a conference now and I write down one thing to do, like, that’s been a good day, you know, oh, God, I didn’t think about that. The other thing would conferences, it’s mainly not what they’re saying. But your brain goes off and another, you know, sort of tangent, you know, you’re sitting there talking about blue cars, and then you thought of an idea about red cars, you know, what I mean? It’s, it’s, it’s the ideas that sort of relay off them. So yeah, I suppose we have consumed a lot. And younger advisors, it is all about consuming information. You know, learn as much as you can, but then the real skill is obviously unlearning. That’s where the sort of mastery comes in. I’m genuinely trying to shrink my circle of competence all the time with clients. You know, again, I know the right thing that they need to do I know the right financial prescription for them. I mean, yes, we’re gonna sit down and listen to their symptoms. But then we know what the financial prescription is, don’t we, you know, invest just about an uncomfortable amount every single month, predominantly in global equities, control your tax, don’t do anything silly. The markets around predict, you know, just the same sort of, you know, we’re almost on autopilot with our clients, which is not a bad thing. We’ve got to like reinvent the wheel every time we sit down with the client. You know, the financial prescriptions pretty much set before they sit down in the chair. I mean, yes, they’re gonna now tell us, you know, their individual pieces of their lives and their specific, you know, challenges and transitions, but when we write that financial prescription, it’s something we’ve written, you know, many, many times before, you know, this whole sort of fallacy about tailored and specific advice. Yes. Of course, all of our clients are not exactly the same. But as I say, the financial prescription is very similar. You know, insure yourself against bad surprises, you know, take out the right, you know, insurance, and, you know, invest every single month, pay yourself first, you know, all that sort of stuff be patient principles, a lot of the principles and practices, yet, the foundational principles are pretty much set in this game, it just depends on how quickly you can sort of get there. The apprenticeship phase is quite long in the financial advisor business, I think it’s probably a decade, which is good, you know, because once you’ve through your apprenticeship phase, you know, as someone said, to me, the key to being successful in this business has been in this business. So your first year is going to be the worst second year is going to get slightly better. My total turnover of my first 24 months as a financial advisor was 12,000 pounds. There’s basically nothing if i minus expense, so I basically lost money for the first two years. And now I sort of generate, you know, way over that per week. You know, I’m just mentioning this because, you know, the more successful you are in this business, the the earnings potential is, is technically unlimited. Certainly, you don’t even need to have any degrees to become a financial advisor. So it’s one of the still one of the very lucrative professions that don’t require too much. You know, too much entry, but the apprenticeship stage, just say, it’s probably about 10 years, you might be able to short circuit that. But you know, on once you’re through your apprenticeship stage, like you sit down with any client, you’re confident enough to know sort of what the answers are, and and how to sort of direct them forward. So yeah, yeah, there’s quite a long apprenticeship phase in this business.

Louis van der Merwe
And how did you engineer your apprenticeship phase, because you know, at the age of 24, going solo, I’m assuming you you didn’t have a mentor, looking after was this through consuming Nick Murray’s work and the other greats of the world?

Andy Hart
Well, I became a mortgage broker during the sort of boom property times in, in the UK in London. So I didn’t really overthink it, I was sort of just sort of busy from when I started really. And, and obviously, it’s, you know, connections and people and who you know, and professional introduces and stuff like that. So, being a mortgage insurance advisor is obviously a stepping stone to them becoming a financial advisor, I mean, everyone’s got their own different paths of doing it. I mean, generally, these days, you become like an administrator or a firm, you then sort of become a report writer, maybe. And then you become a trainee financial advisor, and then obviously, a, you know, a senior advisor or whatever you want to call it. But but you can do it in a shorter time. I think people are doing it in a bit of a quicker time. And obviously, there’s exams to do along the way. I don’t know just I’ve just always just just got on with it, I suppose. But been hugely interested in it, and always wanting to learn more, and always sort of meeting people that are further along along along the line. Yeah, reach out to people. I mean, it’s a very giving profession. Try not send cold emails, they’re just, you know, there’s just the low friction to do that these days, you know, call people up and have a couple of touch points with people, you know, interact them on LinkedIn, send them an email, call them up, rather than just send one cold email and expect to get something from it. But yeah, we’re very given profession. We don’t really have any competitors. You know, there’s enough clients, as Nick Murray says, you know, wealthy clients are falling out the trees. You know, they’re everywhere. You just, you just need to go and get them. Yeah, so yeah.

Louis van der Merwe
I want to shift gears to talk a bit about him. And I remember sitting in a training session where Rob McDonald came back, and he said, Guys, I’ve just been to the UK, and this is what I experienced. And he attended the London version of him. And he made a commitment saying, I think we’re going to bring this to South Africa. Like, how did that journey happen? Was it one of those things where, oh, here’s an opportunity, and you have the right people in the right team, and let’s build it out to talk me through the birth of South Africa.

Andy Hart
Yes. So humans are the management is obviously a play on words. We all know about assets on the management, you know, it’s never really a good business story that starts with I just checked to see if the domain was available. And obviously, it was, you know, no, nobody is gonna register humans on the management. It’s just a bit of a weird name. Obviously, people in the business know it. So originally, I was going to just, I was gonna write a book called humans under management. And then I thought and then a couple of people in the UK we did an independent conferences. This is 2017. I believe. I did my first one. I think it was 140 people in London. We sold out 140 And then it just progressed from there. The conference business is a tough business. I’ll just break it down briefly. So first of all, You got to book speakers. So you’ve got to know a lot of people and have connections with people. And obviously, a lot of times you’re looking for mates rates, you know, their official quoted fee is, you know, 10k. And you’re sort of groveling to them and saying, Can you please do it for a little bit less, it’s just the little, little old, me independent sort of brand as such. So I booked about 25 speakers a year. So I’ve booked over probably about 150 speakers now since 100. Launched, you’ve then got to sell tickets to financial advisors, which is obviously marketing, and then you’ve got to worry about pricing and, and all the other stuff that goes along with that. Then you’ve got to know exhibitors. So that’s large companies that can, you know, come and sponsor and you know that that’s how it functions. If you didn’t have exhibitors. It’s a very, very expensive business conference business. So then you’ve got it, you’ve got to know companies and people hyping companies that can make decisions. And then you’ve got to have sort of organizational skills in terms of how are we actually going to put this on. So it’s a conference that I would want to attend. We generally don’t have any panel debates, every single speaker gets 30 minutes. And it starts at a nice time and ends at a nice time. And there’s one track so it’s not three different tracks. So you’ve got track a track B track, see they all finish at different times all confusing. Did you see that? I didn’t see that. No. So I just want one track. Other people find they might want to do two or three tracks. Yes, we did it London, then we did it in Dublin. And then Pierre contacted me, obviously a good friend of ours PFL yard. And then rob MacDonald, obviously, is a very well connected consultant. So it’s basically me, Rob, and Pierre, who sort of are the organizers of Humph, South Africa. And we do it in the Alan gray auditorium, which is a lovely place, the same format, so I help them with, obviously, the logistics and booking speakers. And we’ve got speaker, coach, Carrie, who I’m sure you’ve worked with in the past. So she helps all the speakers to be the best they can on the day. Yeah, we just try and yeah, as I say, put on a great conference. And yeah, that’s it. Really, I think South Africa is going to be our dominant force in South Africa, with obviously a couple of COVID in the middle. Yeah. And it’s September, the accounting of the date. 21st, may be your 19th. Let me a very

Louis van der Merwe
the 19th. Very quickly, somewhat next month, if you don’t have your ticket, and you’re listening to this, I have some bad news. I think it’s sold out. Andy,

Andy Hart
I think there’s a few tickets left. Yeah, we twist

Louis van der Merwe
someone’s arm and maybe see if Yeah, exactly. To be one of those things, where, like, yes, you have to fork out a bit of money. And most of the presentations that you get to attend, you don’t have to pay, but guess what, they are primarily sales events, right? Are people trying to convince you to distribute these products? Yeah. And that’s something that took me a long time to realize because it’s just so well hidden. Yeah. Right. This is this is completely different.

Andy Hart
Yes. And it’s mainly around behavioral financial advice, which I think’s the good stuff. So I used to go to conferences, like everybody, and there’d be 10 speakers, nine of them will be talking about investments, which I call lying from the stage. And one of them will be talking about marketing or behavioral finance. And I think that was the best talk of the day by a mile. So why don’t we have the whole day, the good stuff and a tiny sprinkling of the investment stuff? So I sort of flip the whole format. So yeah, it’s all around psychology of money, behavioral aspects of money, behavioral economics, all of the sort of, as I say, I think the good stuff. And yeah, we have stuff on leadership on management on marketing. Yeah, just a whole different sprinkle. And as I say, each speaker has only got half an hour. So I mean, there’s nothing worse than the speaker coming on. And you think God, this is gonna be terrible, and it’s just painful. And then you look at the program, you’ve got an hour of it is it like, you know, if someone comes on anything, oh, God, this is gonna be bad. And then you look down and go off. Thank God, they’ve only got half an hour and they’re already 10 minutes into it anyway. So you think great, you know, almost these days are worse and worse and worse. So we’ve got to try and Pandit that.

Louis van der Merwe
Is there any speaker that stands out for you kind of head and shoulders above the rest? I’ll share with you who stood out for me, but I want to hear like who’s, who’s the one is the one or the risk of not treating other speakers?

Andy Hart
We yeah, I’ve had a few repeat speakers. I mean, for me, it’s Rory Sutherland. I mean, he’s an absolute wonder he’s an absolute wonder. It’s very rare that you know, someone that writes very well and also speaks very well. have Nick Murray writes very well, but doesn’t quite speak at the same level. He writes, if that makes sense, was Rory is just just so articulate on the fly. It’s unbelievable. And he’s an absolute professional. And when he first spoke at Harmar sort of told the story a few times, he was on it, let’s say half for and I’m frantically looking around for him. A riser caught a bass for I think he’s gotten it a bit of fine here or anyway, you know, managing talent, this is it speakers. Anyway. So I say, Yep, I’m Andy. I’m the host, etc, etc. He says, oh, Andy, just just just just for you go. He said, Is it a fireside chat or a keynote? This is 15 minutes before he’s going on. You know, most people who told him I was a keynote, fireside, you know, that that’d be that’d be flapping about? And I said, No, no, no, no, it’s definitely not a fireside chat. Um, you know, it’s a keynote. He said, Okay. Yeah, fine.

Louis van der Merwe
Are you at that point? Sorry, are stressed we, you

Andy Hart
know, I think it gets kind of a theme, though he’s doing it anyway, that he went up and did a superb 45 minutes keynote. It just absolutely fantastic. I think he’s got the highest rated. Oh, yeah, we also the after the event, we get everybody to rate the speakers. And surprise, surprise, we’re getting to rate them out of 10. You know, why would you want to rate the speaker like good, very good, quite average, you know, it’s just ridiculous. So we’ve got EMI for every speaker, and the average score for most speakers in the entire history of harm. I think it’s close to eight, let’s say it’s like 7.8 7.9, which is incredible. You know, considering we’ve had about 150 speakers, so the standard is, is very high. I think the speakers, certainly financial professionals, they really, really prepare for it, because they’re speaking to their peers, which a lot of people they find that quite fearful speaking to their peers. Whereas I’ve sort of always been doing it. But you are vulnerable on stage, you know, you’re, you’re speaking out. And sometimes you’re you’re taking a few bullets. But it’s a lot of fun as well, when you when you get it right. So um, so yeah, that’s the sort of story of Hum, I sold out London six months before we’re, we’re we’re before the mic off. That’s on the ninth of November. So next year, I think I’m going to have to find a bigger venue and go for 500, which is very scary. Going to be very expensive, very risky. But hopefully I can pull it off. So but yeah, if you sell at a conference six months before at 330, then it sort of seems like you’re, you’re you’ve got to go to the next level of new,

Louis van der Merwe
either too cheap, or you’re doing something valuable. For me, it was a good macro Sonya that was in Cape Town. And he just blew me away with his energy. And I experienced a speaker with so much energy. And I can remember like, how AMTA was asked, after just listening to him, you want to get up and jump around and said, Yeah, no, he’s

Andy Hart
brilliant. He’s brilliant. I remember when Abraham first I think I was at his first public speaking gig, he did a gig, he did a like a talk at, like a training event I was running. Obviously, he’s very unique in how he speaks and delivers. But, you know, we were thinking God, what the like, we need to take this guy aside and say, Look, there’s ways you do things, the ways you don’t do things, you know, we needed to give him some training, let’s say, but we would have ruined him, you know, if he goes to the public speaking course or me, like, you know, we’re rough around the edges and sort of people like, you know, when it when it’s too polished, it’s like, oh, you know, you need to, you know, downgrade the Polishness. So, yeah, at first we were thinking, God, this guy is crazy. You can’t be doing any more public speaking. But he gets top speaker and a lot of events that he talks up. So yeah, if we gave him some training, we would have ruined him. So yeah, that’s a quite an interesting story. If I practice, it’s good

Louis van der Merwe
and right. If you’re remarkable, and you stand out from the crowd, and you find something that works for you, you can make it a success. Like don’t try and take that away, but rather amplify

Andy Hart
I think, is another Seth Godin, you want to be a category of one. Which is, yeah, so we catch you thinking like this. Yeah. being unique, telling your own story. Yeah, Abraham’s a great speaker. I haven’t seen him talk for a while, but I’m sure he’s got some new content kicking about.

Louis van der Merwe
Can we talk a bit about trap and, you know, this business of creating content, sharing ideas around what we can do in our practices, yet? There’s so much information out there, like how do we pick what we actually implement? And how do we get that, that accountability? It’s something we spoke a little bit about beforehand, but you were telling me that advisor firms were getting together working through the content, like how do they get to actually implement some of these things? All these businesses that are naturally curious and want to see what happens when we actually do something? Is there a recipe for businesses that are doing things well, versus ones that are failing to implement

Andy Hart
it? I think it’s a niche per Bri thing that I’ve picked up about cloning. Humans are generally very bad at cloning. Some people are very good at it. You know, when you say, Look, this is what I do. This is the letter I send this is when I send it, it works really well. Good cloners go, we’re going to do that was the overthink is go, okay. Maybe we’ll send the letter two days later, and we’ll follow up with an email, and we’ll charge them and you go, no, no, you’re not listened to me. I’ve told you the format. I’ve told you it’s working. And do it. So if you’re a good Cloner you’ll do very well in this business, because no ideas are totally new. I mean, yes, there’s sort of overall Lee packaged as sort of something that’s unique. But most things have been done before in this business. So trap. It’s, it’s sort of a Yeah, it stands for the real advisor podcast, it’s every two weeks. The good thing is Nick Lincoln does most of the preparation and the editing and the uploading, he sort of enjoys that side of it. So he’s our sort of chairman. So it’s quite good. I just rock up every two weeks for two hours. So it’s not that much time. But it’s doing really, really well. I mean, we’ve think we’ve got listeners all over the world. The numbers are ratcheting up, and we’ve got we’ve got concentrated dedicated listeners. So if we have 1000 downloads of a new episode, I’m pretty sure 1000 People have listened to it. And also, we’ve we’ve got it on YouTube, so that there’s a video version. Yeah, we’ve heard all things about it, you know, certain episodes, or essential listening for new recruits, and episodes or things for marketing departments. And we have heard that firms like 610 12 people on a certain day, sit in a boardroom and listen to it and watch it and pause it and then discuss all the points and say, Can we do that? Can we not do that? What about this? So talk about an awesome, free. You know, it’s like four consultants, all four of us because we’re all practicing financial advisors, hence the real advisor podcast. You know, lots and lots of people tell us how to do our job and a lot of consultants, they go into great firms, the firms tell them the great things that they’re doing. And then they go to the next firm and tell them the great things that they should be doing. Well, all they’ve done is just taken it from a great financial advice firm. I’m obviously being a little bit harsher on consultants, but you understand what what I’m saying. So people like to hear from practicing financial advisors. There’s me as a solo advisor Nick Lincoln is a solo advisor Alan Smith that runs quite a big business capital asset management and Khawaja, he runs Metis island. So we’ve got different perspectives. We’re all sort of different ages been in the business a different time. Yeah, we challenge each other and push back on it on each other. But it’s also quite light hearted and fun. Yeah, we play like random jingles and stuff. So it’s, yeah, obviously, it’s a serious matter. But we’ve we’ve tried to make it a little bit more enjoyable.

Louis van der Merwe
Who said financial planning can be fun, right? We can, we can have exactly this doesn’t have to be such an overly serious profession. I like what you said about cloning. Some people are really good at it. What I’ve seen, and I know this is some of the training, you’ve also been through like someone like the George Kinder work, like the actual, the impact on some of those questions is the specific words that they use, and they use reason it’s not like, I’ve seen people kind of copy and paste and change the three questions over and over again, with less than half of the impact. Is that what you mean is like, don’t try and, and change too much. Yeah, weigh the impact.

Andy Hart
As I say, some people can claim Well, some people can’t. And when you tell them, This is what I do in this order, they like to tinker and tweak. And it’s like, you’re asking me because you think i My opinion is valuable compared to yours. I’m telling you the answer and then you’re deciding to sort of go off piste. You know, the sort of people you know, you’ve got friends and family that, you know, they say, I mean, what did I was looking for a child minder for my kids as an example. The other thing is, well, financial advisors, they’ll say you’re going c&d And then the person comes to you as a referral and they say you’ve been looking after my mother, brother, best friend for 15 years. And then they’ll say I still want to get some references from existing clients and you’re like, Do you not trust the person that’s been I’ve been looking after for 15 years. is so nice oh no, but it’s quite serious when you’re gonna get get financial advice you need to like get references. Just trust the other person that’s done all the sort of sifting out through. So I had to find a child minder for my kids. And I’ve got a friend of mine were mentioned her name anyway, she’s very, very thorough in her, you know, assessments of people or whatever. And she said, she’s been using this child minder for all three of our kids for the last whatever. I’ve got no questions to ask this child minder. She’s done everything I might, here they are. There’s the two of them. Where do I sign? She’s She was like, John, I read the contract. No, no, I just gonna sign and here’s my kids. Because this person has done way more research, and I’m gonna do and I’m trusting her done, you know, sorted with something. If I ask someone I respect, you know, a good painter, and they say, Yep, cool. This person, I’m gonna immediately call them, I’m not not gonna say, Oh, can you give me some quotes, and, you know, just trust other people’s judgments. That’s sort of a tangent of cloning. But yeah, just get quite good at cloning. If someone tells you a good idea, just implement it as such, later on, you might might tweak it once you’ve become an expert in that idea. But when I do train, so just do this. I’ve been doing it for 12 years, just follow exactly what I’m gonna tell you in a year, you may be able to tweak it, but don’t tweak before you’ve learned the way I’m going to tell you. And then when people do that, they’re like, five years later, they say, Oh, I’ve not changed at any since you told me and I’m like, brilliant. This is good. Because other people are like, oh, yeah, we did that five years ago. And then we did this, and then they’re in a mess. And I’m like, Well, now you’ve ruined all this, you know, because they don’t understand the impact of the tweaks and changes anyway, cloning is, yeah, Mohnish pabrai talks about it. I didn’t really think it was a thing until I heard it. But most people’s cloning muscle is very weak. Whereas other people, they’re brilliant cloners. I Buffett talks about as well, I think probably Munger talks about it as well. Yeah, anyway.

Louis van der Merwe
So do you say like, hire someone in your business? That’s credit cloning, like you get it get an outsourced person in your business that could clone that? Or is it a skill that you as an advisor need? Is it critical for delivering advice?

Andy Hart
Well, again, it’s like your investment proposition, like speak to someone who, you know, has done a lot of thought into it and has got an answer. I don’t think you need to specifically employ someone who’s very good at cloning. But, yeah, it’s just something to be aware of, when someone gives you a good idea that’s like, perfectly packaged. Just embrace it. If you need to, and it’s important for whatever you’re doing, don’t Tinker, and change things that are perfectly packaged, I suppose. You know, good cloners. Because they they build a business on the back of just loads of stuff that they’ve heard. And they stick to it. You know, they’re not always looking for new shiny stuff.

Louis van der Merwe
Andy, what does the future hold for you? Is there any new ventures that you’re adding on anything you’d take away?

Andy Hart
No, I think I’m going to stick with what I currently have, as I say, I’m going to be a practicing financial advisor. And yeah, the main thing really is building out humans on the management premium, which is our subscription service for global financial advisors have said, we’ve got about 200 members now from 11 different countries. Yeah, that’s going to be my sort of biggest impact, I suppose to the wider profession. Yeah, I can continue doing what I’ve been doing really, as they say, we’re just getting started. So yeah, it’s been a it’s been a fun journey.

Louis van der Merwe
It’s wonderful to see from the outside and hear a little bit from the inside of this journey. I wish you all of the success in the future, like hope, premium and harm replicates across the globe. And yeah, thank you so much for being here today. Any any pearls of wisdom? Thank you very much. Leave our listeners with

Andy Hart
no, if anyone wants to reach out, you can email me Andy at humans on a management.com. I’m on Twitter at Maven advisor and also on LinkedIn. But yeah, also check out my podcast Maven money. That is for end consumers but also quite low financial professionals listen to it as well. So yeah, no, thank you very much for having me on, mate. And I’ll see you in SA soon.

Louis van der Merwe
It’s been great fun. See you soon.