Good afternoon, everybody. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here, not only because we are in the most beautiful part of the world, but because for the next hour we are going to share some intimate moments.

Now, what I’d like to do is to give you a brief introduction about myself just so that you can get some context around why I’m here and how I got to be here. I’m not a financial advisor. I’ve never been a financial advisor. But I came into financial services 20 years ago when I was a little 20-year-old girl in a very male-dominated business. And I started my life as a personal assistant to three financial advisors within a network in the U.K. called Allied Dunbar.

At the time, when I came into this business, I was very new. I was wet behind the ears. I was naïve in terms of the market that I was joining. It was a magical business and within a very short space of time I knew that I was going to love my new home. But I was 20 years old and I was female.

Financial advisors used to say to me, “Well, are you an advisor?”

“Nope.”

“Well, are you a secretary?”

“Well, no. Not really.”

“So what are you?”

And, in those 20 years, I saw things and now have a unique perspective on your world which is very, very different from the view that you all have.

You’re all here because, within your own businesses, within your own professional capacity, you’ve reached the top of your game. This is the top of your game. You have unleashed your own super power. You have tapped into that uniqueness that you have in order to be sitting in this room and being at this conference today.

But my question and my passion is: What next? How do we get you from being where you are today to where you really want to be in the future?

We’ve talked about unleashing your super power. I’m now talking about unleashing all of your super powers.

What I’m going to do is to take you back 20 years in order to take you forward 20 years. To put some context around what I’m going to talk about, imagine 20 years ago. I walk into the office of three financial advisors. I could just see an absolute barrel of craziness. It was unorganized. It was chaotic. There were no leadership skills. There were no processes. It was absolute barbaric. And I remember thinking to myself, “There is absolutely no way in this world that this is sustainable.” But they were all making so much money. I just couldn’t figure out. It was so haphazard and disorganized. It was just random. Random is the best way that I can describe it. But they were making so much money.

These guys were the top producers in this organization. My very first responsibilities were mainly administrative. But what I soon uncovered was many, many better ways of working. Processes put in place. The hiring, the recruitment, the building of amazing teams to support their amazing persons. The work was just endless. But what did I know? I was a coach. I was a consultant, but I wasn’t a financial advisor.

Now, as a contractor to these three guys, it was soon apparent that I was on to something. I turned three very successful financial advisors into hugely successful financial advisors. And I attempted to do it with such ease. What did I know? I didn’t know the first thing about products. I didn’t know the first thing about providers or giving advice to clients. I just looked at these guys like they were business owners.

And there’s the magic. The reality is that, in order to unlock your true potential, you have to shift your thinking. Whatever got you here, I don’t think is going to get you there. The world is changing. And as a financial advisor and as a financial planner, you have to change. Now I’m not ever going to take anything away from the efforts, the hard work, the love and devotion that you’ve given to your businesses to get you to here. But I’m telling you the world is going to change.

Now at the time, I saw things very simply. But I was getting objections coming at me left, right and center. “We don’t need processes. We’re not a corporate business. My clients need me. Why do we need more staff when I can do the admin in an evening or at the weekend? Why do we need to build a team? I don’t want a big business.” While these objections were very real in their minds, they made absolutely no sense to me. None.

And then I figured out how they were making so much money. They were working themselves to death. They’d missed their family’s events. They missed their children’s school events. Their relationships were in tatters. They were unhealthy. They were tired and they were on the brink of losing it. That’s how they were making so much money.

So I persisted because of the love of this business. It’s that drive and determination, that 20 years on have, gotten me on this stage with you today. Because I never gave up. When it came at me, objection after objection after objection, I kept standing. I kept going. I believe that if we can unleash the super powers that exist in your business, that in every single one of your clients exists, they will excel. You will bring magic and more magic to their lives. But I need to shift your thinking.

I want you to leave this conference, go back to your businesses and start treating them like businesses. Because the world is going to change.

If you go back about 15 years, what was happening was that, despite those people that I was taking care of the most battling with me to change, I knew that someday, somehow, something was going to make them change. Now sadly the clients that I had over that time really only made a change when they became really ill or their wives or their partners left them. In truth. There had to be a turn in their lives that made them actually realize that I was onto something.

So about 2009, particularly in the U.K., the market was starting to change. The regulators were putting more pressure on firms. Underwriting and the need to demonstrate your recommendations was becoming overwhelmingly restrictive. And it was going to continue. Consumers were becoming more demanding of what they wanted from you. Their service standards and what they expected were on the increase. There was a global obsession with designations, qualifications and industry recognition. People on your teams and in your life were no longer solely motivated by money. And your clients demanded a more intimate relationship with you.

The reality is, the more clients you added, the less time you had available to serve the needs and change the lives of all of those clients. Something had to give.

It’s always been my passion that that has to stop. And it’s actually quite shocking even the Top of the Table members who I’ve spoken to during the time I’ve been here, still feel like that. Now I’ll be honest, I came to this event thinking, “Well, what can they learn from me? They’re the top of the game.” And it’s been really concerning how many of you still feel a little bit like that. And, if you ever feel like that, then something is not right in your business. And it needs to change. I want you to unleash the super powers that exist in your business. Because we don’t have 20 years to figure this out. I needed to act quickly.

I’ll tell you about a quick story. About two years ago I bumped into an advisor in the U.K. who I had been working with for about two years. Really lovely guy. So keen. He loved his clients, loved his business. And he had seen me a year earlier and he said, “I’ve been interested in this.” I had done a full review of how he was working. I was looking at his procedures, his staff. We had to hire some people, fire some people. We had to make some major changes because the things that he was doing that day were not going to carry his business forward. They were not going to make his business attractive for sales. They were haphazard. They were chaotic. It was a nightmare.

I saw him at this particular event and he came up to me and said, “Michelle, I honestly want to implement every single thing that you have told me to do. All of it. I’ve bought into fully everything that you’ve said and I want to make the changes. But I can’t find the team in this. I can’t find the staff. I can’t grow the business. I want to hire great administrators but there aren’t any. I want to hire people who have got the technical knowledge, but don’t want to be an advisor, but there aren’t any.”

At that very moment, I stood there literally in silence. Because I had nothing for him. I had no answer. I had no solution. I had no quick win thing that I could pull out of my pocket and make it right for him. We were both gutted.

But I’ll tell you what, it was the rock that I needed to hit my back side and I needed to work quickly. I knew we needed to unleash the super powers that were already in all of your businesses.

Let me ask you. Have you actually got what it takes to take your business to the next 20 years? Do you even know what you need to do? Do you know how to change what you’re doing for the better? To leverage and to build. Have you got it in you? Because what got you here will not get you there. Have you got what it takes to take it to the next level?

So, I said to this guy, “I’ve haven’t gotten anything for you. I’ll think about this.”

I went back to the office and I said to the team, “It’s time. It’s time to stop trying to turn an industry into a global profession by focusing on you as advisors. I need to go to the heart of the problem and that was the team.”

Your team, 100 percent, is your super power. No question. You have to make sure that every single member of your team knows how much you love them. Because, if they don’t, they will leave and they’ll go somewhere else.

So, if I’m right and your team is your super power, what did we do?

Actually we stopped trying to fix you, because by nature you are divas. You are rebellious. You like to do things your own way. And that’s what makes you amazing at your jobs. I knew that the only way we could do this was going to the heart of the profession. And that heart is in your business and that’s your team.

But there’s one more thing that I need you to consider. When I say to you, “Who’s your favorite client,” put your hand up if you have a favorite client. The client that you love the most, who, if you had all the time in the world, you’d spend your time with. Everybody’s got one. But if I ask you who your best client is, there’s only one name that I would expect you to give me back. And that’s the name of your business. Because your business going forward for the next 20 years should be your best and most favorite client. Because a happy business makes a happy boss which makes a happy client. A happy client does not make a happy business. And actually, the more pressure we put on ourselves to make our clients happy, the more stressed we become. The busier we get. The more complicated things can become. Focus on your business and that will be what takes you to the next 20 years.

So, I needed to move and I needed to move quickly.

Now every single thing that we have done, all the concepts that we’ve built, the ideas that we’ve brought to market globally have been world’s first. They’ve never ever been discussed. They’ve never been brought to market before and that makes it tricky. So what I needed to do was to build an ideal organizational structure for you to operate as a financial services firm which would see you through to the next 10, 20, 30 and 40 years. Because, in truth, there’s no fun in you exiting your business. Why would you want to exit a job that you absolutely love? What I want to do is to keep you in your roles, in your businesses without having to ever sell them, but to actually transition them over to the next generation, whatever that might look like.

Who has actually heard of a paraplanner? Awesome.

In the simplest sense, “para” means to work alongside. And paraplanner means to work alongside a planner.

Now I’m going to talk to you about what a paraplanner is because actually this is your new super power. What we wanted to do was to create a global standard for paraplanners. A global benchmark for what this person was, what this person wasn’t, what this person would do and what they wouldn’t. And the reason is because I bet that, in one way, shape or form, every one of you has a paraplanner in your business. I bet they all do different things. I bet they’re all called different things. I bet some are better than others. So we needed to create a global benchmark.

The paraplanner role will change financial services from a global industry into a global profession. Now I say those words ever so easily. But there is huge weight behind what I just said. And I need to prove to you that I’m right.

So, what we designed was an international professional standard. I had a vision, a very clear vision, of what I knew this role would be and what it wouldn’t be. And what it would do for you.  And how it would support you. How it would truly transform your relationship with your clients. But we had to work quickly. We didn’t have 20 years to figure this out. We probably had about 12 months.

We formed, as an organization, a standards body. Apart from the speaking that I do, we are an awarding standards global certification body. We have all the equipment to design a global benchmark on what the standards were going to look like. We formed a global executive committee. I had business managers on the committee. Practice managers, compliance experts, consumer representation, award winning paraplanners, business owners, financial planners. You name it, we had input from across the sector. Why? Because whilst I had a vision, I needed to make sure I got this right. And sometimes the Michelle version of the world just leans a bit. Because I know that this single document will be the single thing that will change an industry into a profession.

I appreciate that this slide is not very clear to see, but this document is actually in the standard. We had to design how you deliver financial advice. It was the number one job. I’m going to run you through something. Bear with me because this might be very different from what you do at the moment. I’m not talking about today. I’m talking about what I think will become. Where the global movement of change will come from in the future.

So this is the new world of financial planning. On the left side, as you can see, this is a process that I call the “Good Ol’ Days.” This is when you had all the time in the world. You came into this business. You saw your clients. You were responsible for the sale. It was your job to bring in the business. For some of you it still is. You were in charge of the sale. The relationship. Building that relationship. Nurturing that relationship. Developing that relationship. Remembering all of the key dates, the key anniversaries and not letting anything slip through the net.

We then have coaching. Some of you probably in the good old days got involved in a bit of the softer side of the role. Really supporting, coaching, mentoring, guiding your clients. That was done by you also. There was time to do this. Then you had strategy. You were the one that when you sat down with the clients you were thinking about the big picture. Helping them think more broadly about their lives and putting down the plan of how their lives were going to change.

Then, you had to be very tactical. You had to be able to maneuver the chess pieces around the client’s board of life. Make the changes. Understand the solutions. This was all fine when you had all the time in the world. When you were building your practice. Building your business. But then you needed to be super technical. You needed to know all the products, the providers, all the ins and the outs, the recommendations, the solutions. Because, let’s be honest, if you didn’t know the answer to the problems you would literally not be able to do your job. So far so good.

But then you have to go back to relationships and administration. Now the challenges that are being put upon us as a profession is that at all of these stages, everybody wants more and more and more. And you’re running out of time. You can’t be all of those things. There’s no time. It’s like doing lots of jobs and none of them very well. And who recognizes that as their life? Right?

So what do you do? You build a team. You move from just you and you hire people. You hire administrators. You delegate. You hire people who have some financial services knowledge and you delegate. And, before you know it, what you’ve actually done is created a monster. You’ve created a business and a team that only truly exists because you do. Because, let me ask, if I took you out of your business for any length of time, how long would it last? Honestly. How much income would be generated? How much delegation and team management and oversight and leadership, how much of that would disappear with you? I suspect all of it. Or if not all of it, a good chunk of it.

In the new world, this doesn’t work. It doesn’t work today in truth. But you don’t know what the solution is. Now what some of you have also done is you’ve hired more advisors. Great. You’ve now got scale. Really what you’ve done is created little monsters. Right? Who quite honestly want to do it their own way. They don’t really listen to the company-way. They like to do it their own way. They like to do things in their own time. And actually what’s created is mini lifestyle businesses sitting all around you. Not going to work. That model is not going to work in the next 20 years. That model is broken. The truth is I saw this 20 years ago, but nobody could hear me when I told them. What did I know? I was 20 years old, a girl in a man’s world. And I wasn’t a financial advisor.

So, if I’m right, this is how it needs to look. Selling has to become a team sport. You need a strategy. You need a marketing plan. You need a plan on how you can raise as a business, the profile, the brand of the business. Not the brand and the profile of the advisors. A business of the future does not say, when getting referrals, “You need to go and speak to Sue. You need to go and speak to Ryan.” It’s, “You need to go and speak to the business.” The name of the organization should be the name that’s on the tip of the tongue at the prospect, the referrer. Selling is a team sport. It’s no longer the job as a financial advisor. Why? Because the best salesmen and saleswomen in the business might be a terrible technician. They’re totally different skills. Selling is selling. Advice is advice. Selling is a team sport.

The relationship has to be a team job. Your clients need to know every single person on your team. Either by verbally being introduced to them, personally meeting them, or at least a bare minimum having a profile of them on the website which the clients are referred to. The world in the future cannot and will not be able to sustain itself when it revolves around you. It cannot. Because if you disappear, the business implodes. The relationships need to be with the team. Everybody knows the clients. The clients know everybody. We’re in this together. The choice of your team members is paramount. If there is anybody on your team today that you don’t love, and I mean love like they are the best thing in the world, you need to fire them. Because this business is like a labor of love. Anybody who works on a team in financial services that does not love this business more than you do needs to go. I love this business as much as you do and that’s why I’ve stuck around for 20 years. This is a labor of love. This business is a calling.

Then you have coaches. Let me ask you this. If I de-authorized you, took your designations away, said to you that, you are no longer able to give financial advice, how many of you would still have a job? Right. What I’m actually saying is, I bet that the majority of your role as a financial planner and as a financial coach is not about the advice. It’s not about the products. It’s about the client. So financial life coaching is going to be a big deal. And the reason it’s going to be a big deal is because clients’ lives are getting more and more complicated. Our clients, our lives are more and more complicated. Life is crazy. Life is nuts. Clients need help with their wellbeing, their wellness, their health, their relationships, not just the money. Not just the solutions to make their dreams come true. Then your clients, in most instances, need help designing their dreams and their aspirations. That’s not financial advising, or coaching, or mentoring, That’s guidance. That’s support. All delivered without prejudice or bias.

The financial life coach is going to be a new role and it will emerge as a super power on your team. So when you don’t want to get anymore designations and achieve anymore industry qualifications, what’s next for you? Coaching. Financial life coaching for your clients’ wellness and wellbeing is what they need you most. That is the next super power for you.

You’ve then got a financial planner. Now financial planning is planning, not advice. It’s very difficult for you to separate the two that financial planning is not giving financial advice. Advice is given based on the tactical recommendations that that client needs to do and agree to in order to move the chess pieces around their board of life. Planning is the plan. Now, if you’re doing true financial planning, you could do your plan for a client and everything that’s in that plan they could take it and walk to another financial advisor’s practice in your town and that financial advisor could deliver those recommendations based on your plan. Do your financial plans do that? Would they allow a client to take your recommendations as a planning level, a strategic level and walk into a financial advisor down the street and for them to implement those recommendations? If you can’t and they couldn’t then you’re not doing true financial planning. The future will need you to deliver true financial planning. And that’s the role of the financial planner.

Then you have tactical. The tactical is a less fluffy role. It’s more tactical, more straight thinking, more focused. In truth, that role is currently being done by financial advisors. Financial advisors are all over the world still doing all of those jobs that are in that first column. And we know from amazingly super smart people who are calling themselves financial planners and financial advisors, they can’t sell. They can’t sell. They’ve got some amazing salespeople who can’t advise. And the problem is, listen to this, we have spent decades and decades telling the world how amazing financial advisors and financial planners are. So you imagine the people that work in your business who never want to be a financial advisor. How do they feel? A failure that they’ve not made it? Like they’re not cut out for this business? Because I’m telling you, there are some people that I meet who are never ever, ever going to be financial advisors. Yet their job title is training financial advisor, training financial planner. They’re never going to be a financial planner or advisor any more than I am. But what else is there for them in this business if you’re not going to strive to be a financial planner or an advisor?

The truth is that the role to emerge in your businesses is that of technical genius. They love process. They love products. They love studying. They love designations. They love qualifications. They love being at the top of their technical game. And let’s be honest, if you had one of those to sit in all of those exams and do all of that studying and do all of your reports so that you could spend your time in front of your clients, how amazing would that be? How amazing would that be? But what we have in truth is lots of advisors and lots of people who feel inferior because they’re not you. It’s a really sorry sad state of affairs. That’s not to take anything away from you as a professional. But what I’m saying is there’s an emergence of a super technical power in your business. And you need to embrace it. It will be the difference between surviving the next decade and thriving.                   

Now the biggest pushback I get is: Why would I want anybody in the business that’s as technical or more so than me? What if I train them and then they leave? What if they answer a question that the client has and I don’t have the answer. Get over it. Right? Because what you’re genius at is seeing clients. It is changing their lives. It is interacting. It is making that sparkle appear in the clients’ eyes when you just told them that you’ve got them covered, that you’re going to help them fix these problems. It will be your support team, your professional paraplanner who will fit in your business, who may even come into that client meeting with you and will be the one who comes up with those recommendations so that you can sit on the same side of the table as the client, not the other side of the table. Which side of the table do you want to sit on? Supporting the client or presenting the recommendations? Your choice. I think I know which side of the table you want to be on. But in order to do that, you have to embrace the change that is coming. And that is in paraplanner.

Your current team members will be made of the technical administrator, client services administrator, client liaison coordinator, advisor support. They’ll have every job title under the sun.

But, very simply, the next stage is administration. Administrators come in two forms. They are either representing and supporting the clients or they are supporting the technical delivery of your financial advice and planning service. At the moment I would bet my life that if you go back to your businesses and I came with you and asked your staff, your team members what their job was, what they were doing, they would be a jack of all trades and a master of nothing at all. The problem with that is there’s no career path. There’s no growth plan. There’s no development for them. They are using you as a steppingstone to somewhere else unless you give them a path that is laid out, that is not directly feeding into being a financial advisor or planner.

We have told people for decades how amazing you are. And you are. But what that also has said is if you’re not like us, then you’re “just admin.” And we all want people on our teams who are striving or driven or ambitious. And if they’re that ambitious and you’ve got nothing for them, they’ll leave.

I was chatting with an MDRT member at the annual meeting. He said to me, “You know what, Michelle. We’ve just lost an administrator to Google. She’s gone. She has left. We had nothing for her. I would have loved her to stay, but she didn’t want to be a financial advisor. If I had known that this was a job, a profession in its own right, there was a top of its game globally, she probably would have stayed.” But he had nothing for her because she didn’t want to be an advisor.

So, in order for you to build a team that is going to take your business to the next 10, 15, 20 years, you need to embrace these other key roles that exist in your business.

The final stage in that process is your team. Your team are the one-stop shop for your clients, for your process. If there’s any element of your process that is too reliant on you when you go back to your businesses and look at your client journey, you need to change it. The only aspect of your client journey that you should be doing is sitting eyeball to eyeball with your client. Everything else needs to be supported by other members of the team.

Do an activity summary. Have a look at where you spend your time. We hear it all the time. Spend time with clients. Do more of this. Do less that. Say no to stuff. But you can’t do any of that if you haven’t supported yourself and your advice team with the people who you trust.

Now, I’ve got a question for you. I want you to go back to your businesses and forget about whether you trust them. I want you to ask if they trust you. Do your team members trust you to have their backs? Because when your team trusts you, they will do everything in their power to support you over the next 20, 30, 40 years of your business. You need a plan. You can’t keep doing the same things all of the time. You’ve got to change.

So, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I jotted that down on a piece of paper. And it is the optimal organizational structure for your financial services practice. That is it. There are 26 roles on that organizational chart and you know why I’ve only just started presenting on it is. The world is now ready to see it. You are ready to see it.

There is no time to go into the detail, but as you will see the purple side of this business chart is the technical team. It’s where the paraplanners live, the client services managers, the financial planner, the financial advisor. They are all different roles. And they all make up a beautiful, unique, designed, on-purpose team.

Now, how many of you have more than 27 people in your business? Not many of you.

Let me tell you what they’re doing. The rest of you, you are sharing 26, 27 separate roles, which is why you get to the end of the day and say, “I have no idea what I’ve done today.” Because you’ve been part admin, part paraplanner, part financial advisor, part MD, part CEO. You’ve been doing it all. You have to build a team. Now it’s okay for you to build this team and have people with responsibility for more than one role. That’s fine. I would have a business administrator, a paraplanner, a client services administrator, and I am Michelle. Not I am Michelle and I have a huge long list of tasks and responsibilities. Because how easy do you think it’s going to be to replace me with my long list of tasks? Impossible. Because I’ve built this list of tasks and responsibilities because of my personality and my skills and my abilities.

In order to take your business forward, you have to build your unique optimum operating team. That is what a future business does. If any of you, think about this, have gotten this far and are this successful and have achieved this amount of level of business and success without that, think about how awesome it’s going to be when you have that. When you have that in your business and you have surrounded yourself with people who love this business and their role more than life itself, you will feel like you’ve been shot out of a rocket as opposed to shot by a rocket.

The next thing is what the future business is doing. We’ve got the new standard of professional excellence. Now again, these documents, the reason they look like that is because they’ve actually been drafted into that international standard. They’re that important. Let me explain. We are currently experiencing a global obsession about academic achievements, qualifications. In fact, in Australia, they’ve gone north. Level six, huge numbers of qualifications, education. It’s going through the roof. Now that’s amazing. There’s so much more to every individual than just their academic achievements. There is their technical knowledge. That’s just basics. If you have a role that is technical in nature, a person in a technical role needs their academic technical knowledge as an entry point. What you’ve then got then is their applied knowledge and understanding. You can have somebody read a textbook and pass an exam, but if they don’t understand how to develop and apply the knowledge they have, we’re going nowhere. I could sit in an exam and pass and walk into your firm and say, “I know about pensions. I know about investments and insurance.” But I would be useless to you. I would have no idea how to apply my knowledge.

Your team needs to be on a development plan which covers these five levels. This is when they won’t leave.

You can’t go from level one to level five. You have to ascend all the way to the top in the order that they are on here. They need to learn skills and abilities and gain experience which only you can teach them. A business of the future has a proper training and development plan for the team members. I’m not just talking about, “I saw an article. I’ve seen the workshop. Can I go to it?” I’m talking about a plan for getting them here to there. Planned, designed, timely, suitable to their way of learning, their personality, their style. Theirs, all theirs.

From that, you then need to share with them the essential attributes that they need to have to be part of your business, to be part of that culture, to be part of that magic that you have built. I’ll tell you for now, you take it for granted. Because it’s just there. When I walk into firms, I spot it straightaway. I spot that magical ingredient that you don’t see. Never underestimate it. The people in your business, the paraplanning team, the administration team, they need to have that magic ingredient. What is yours? The people on your team, paraplanners, administrators. And you say, “They just don’t get it. They’re just not on the same page as us.” Because you’ve not told them what page to be on. You’ve not shared with them the stuff that comes so instinctively to you. It makes them the whole person. It makes them amazing at their job. It makes them part of your business.

Then, if you are going to embrace the messages and the concept that I shared, the paraplanner role is what is going to unleash the super powers in your business. Adding more advisors won’t work. Breaking down that journey, that process from sale to relationship, allocating those steps out to the most appropriate person. Stop trying to do all the roles all of the time and be the center of the universe. Ban the words “me,” “my” and “I” from your business vocabulary. It’s “us,” “our” and “we.” The business of the future does not exist because one person sits in front of clients. The business of the future is a team sport. Don’t ever be fearful of developing your team members. Ever. Don’t ever be fearful of letting people on your team have more access to your clients than they’ve had before. That’s just the wrong people.

Build a team, embrace people who have different sets of skills. The paraplanner role is the next future super power that will exist in your practices. I promise. I saw this 20 years ago. This has been coming for an awfully long time.

So now the choice is yours. You can disregard everything I’ve said. There’s no way I can get 20 years’ of work into a session that’s lasted 45 minutes. You’re just going to have to trust me. This is an opportunity for you to redesign your client journey, change how you work, think differently about your role as a financial planner. Think about coaches. Think about building a technical team that is way better at the technical goings on, the ins and outs of that process, that client journey than you are. Embrace the power that exists in your business.

The world is in your hands now. There is absolutely in truth no real reason why you should change and listen to anything I’ve said. You’ve made Top of the Table. You’re the best of the best sitting in this room. But now it’s about taking your business to the next level. And I don’t mean just more production, I mean taking your business to the next level.

It’s been my absolute pleasure. I’m here all week. I’m here until Saturday if you want to know any more information about anything I’ve said. I would love nothing more than to talk it through with you. It’s been my pleasure. I think I’m done.

Thank you very much.

Moderator

Thank you, Michelle. We are going to open the floor for some questions. I’m going to walk around with the microphone. Say your name, where you’re from and to speak loudly into the microphone.

Ryan Pinney

I’m a 10-year Top of the Table member. Michelle, thank you for your presentation.

This last slide you had, the progression of step one to step five. The thing that struck me about that is in my business, I hire people on a routine basis. We have about 75 employees, and many people want to come in at level-five pay. Straight out of university. And this instantly when I saw it, showed me a progression with, “Yes. You can get to level-five pay, but here’s how we start you out.”

Can you talk about how you would apply this as a training tool in actual practice?

Hoskin

One of the advisors was here earlier talking about a member of his team. If you have somebody come into your business, you need to sit down with them and ask them to work with you to design their journey through that. Use it as a physical tool. Say, at level one, what qualifications, what exams, what studies you need. Work out a plan step by step by step. Then talk about the third-party training. What workshops are there? Other areas that you’d like to get involved in. Find out more about it. So literally use it as a tool.

What you then have that sits behind that is a development plan. I’ve got a template and I’ll share it. What’s the next step? What is the journey for them? What are the achievables? The outcomes that they want to learn, to know as they ascend through that process. It’s just a tool. A discussion tool. But you’re right. Be careful also on job titles. Grand pay comes with grand pay role titles, but they only get the big money when they’re doing the big jobs. When they’ve actually excelled in those roles and they’ve ascended through that journey. It’s very clear when you present it to them. That’s the journey. You can’t go there before you’ve done that. And it seems to work. Thanks.

Craig McClurg

A newbie. This is my first TOT session. From the U.K., obviously.

I enjoyed your presentation. When you were talking about the 26 roles of individuals, it was reassuring to see so many people in here who have businesses with less than 26 people. My question to you is: Do you take those 26 roles and carve them up as to what suits the individual or does the individual suit the role when you’re pairing up and doubling up?

Hoskin

The way that we would present this, if I was part of your business, I would do a presentation to the team as a collective and I would say something like, “We’ve mapped out the future of this business. In order for us to thrive and grow, we need to work differently as a team. We’ve mapped out the key roles in this business and these are them.”

But what I would then do is I would also ask them to think about it and then come back to you and tell you which roles they like the sound of, which roles they think they like the most. They might say, “Actually I could give that a go.” Now it might be that you have somebody who is in that gray D level, that support level and says, “I want to be the MD. I’m going for that job.”

That’s fine. You want them to feed into you first. But naturally you are going to have people in mind. You’ve got to have that in your mind and then engage in a conversation with them and say, “Can you do this? Do you know what’s expected? Can you be developed and trained to do this role?” All it is is open communication. Because, quite frankly, if I mapped out what most of your businesses look like, you would have advisors at the top. The only way up would be to start advising. Well, not everybody wants to be a financial advisor. So they don’t know like that. There’s nowhere else for them to go.

This shows a clear career progression and you’ll get people very excited on your teams about that. I’ve heard people say, “This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.” They’re bursting at the seams because that gives them growth, scale. And the reason they grade it is because there’re also pay grades. There are also salary rewards and recognition. If you want to get a pay raise, you need to kind of slide up the scale a bit. It serves a double purpose. And you would publish this and you would publish all the job descriptions that go with it. You engage in conversation with them.

You’re welcome.

Eszylfie Taylor

Seven times Top of the Table qualifier. I loved your presentation and I agree with it.

You obviously want a business that runs in spite of you, not because of you. I think, if I’m speaking for everyone, my concern is where the money comes from. At the end of the day, it’s a challenge. If I had some $10 million capital injection of private equity, sure, I could go out and hire 27 people and sit back and manage all these people and give them job descriptions. Ryan and I were talking earlier. When your run rate is $2,000 a month, I assume it’s also progression. You don’t necessarily say go out and hire 27 people tomorrow. Just practically how do you start?

Hoskin

Let’s say our business has five people in it. The first and most important thing that I would do is to look at where the income is directly generated. And we have a conversation as a team. We’ll make it very obvious that it’s Samantha’s job as the advisor to generate the income. But the reality is the business wouldn’t get on the books and actually get into the business without everybody else’s work.

One of the things that we have to move away from is thinking, “I’m the advisor. I own all the money. I’m the most important person in the business.” Right? I get it. But we actually, as advisors, can’t do that job without all of those people sitting around helping us.

To answer the question, you would say, “I’m the only one who can do X. It’s sitting in front of a client. I need to do more of that.” With the same four people supporting me I would think, “I’m doing these 30 things. Who can take them off of me?”

I promise you, if they are the right four people in your business, they’ll say, “I will. I’ll do it, I’ll take it.” I bet 40 percent of their day is just waste. It’s chatting in the kitchen and moaning and groaning about who’s not doing more. Actually, we’re squeezing it out of them a bit more. So, you can’t go and hire all those people. But the fact that you know all those roles exist is a start. They’ll say, “I’ll take on that marketing role. I’ll do training and development to generate more income for the business, to put a strategy together.” It’s amazing, without the budget, without spending all this money, how people just lean in. They just put themselves forward. “I’ll do that. I’ll take that one. I’ll help,” if they’re the right people.

If you get people who say, “I’m not doing that,” they need to be fired. All they are is a drain on your resources. It’s progression. It’s slow. But if I’ve got four job descriptions and there’s actually some money in the bank to start hiring more people, my job as an administrator with four of those job roles is to say, “Which three am I keeping? Which one am I giving to somebody else or delegating to that new person?” Ultimately you end up at the time with just one person with one role that they’re doing full time.

I practice that same model in my business. Kelsey and Helen were sharing roles. We’re now going to hire one person to take the two roles off of them so that they can focus on full time roles. It’s just progression. It’s just slowly, slowly organic unless you get a load of money coming in to inject. It’s just slow growth, steady. You’ve got 20 years to do it.

Susan Paterson

From Australia. My comment which is probably a follow up on what this gentleman just asked. We actually have paraplanners. I’ve got one who is full-time staff but the rest of our paraplanning we outsource. That way, we’re just costing it against the return from all the revenue that comes in from the business that we’re doing. That way I haven’t felt the financial impact of trying to carry the extra staff.

Hoskin

It’s interesting because the paraplanner role, when we launched it internationally, we got huge interest from outsourced paraplanners who work in India, in Singapore, all over the world. Now even if you outsource paraplanning for that, if you were to read that standard as a paraplanner role in a book, if you said to them what you wanted them to do, that’s fine. Even if you outsource them. Employed or outsourced, it doesn’t matter. The role is the role and when done fully and properly you’ll thrive. You’ll just go through the roof and it will be so much more enjoyable.

Question

This my third who I’ve trained for the past two years. But it is a time-taking process. I only lately started getting the result. I spend more time with my staff members to train them. Two things are a problem. One thing is it is a time-taking process. Second is money. In fact, I spend a lot of money. I must be a super communicator to the staff members. I need more training. I spend more money on training and a second office preparing the staff members. So, I agree, I’m totally now realizing the success of the employees and the team. So, a little more light on this subject. Thank you.

Hoskin

There’s no choice. I’ll just say if you are an advisor and you’re spending lots of time training your team, that’s a huge investment of time away from clients. You’ve got to be very careful on how you balance that. It might be more cost-effective actually to bring somebody in to train the team. If you wrote a training manual that they could literally read, they would be trained by default the majority of what the processes are. Try to make your training and development program less labor-intensive. Maybe it’s online. There are videos, so that it’s not relying on you. If you’re an advisor, if you’re training, you’re not seeing clients and bringing the money in. And that’s a sure way to bankruptcy. You’ve got to balance that and make it automated or bring somebody in to help with some of that training so you’re balancing out. But what you’re doing is fabulous. You’re investing in your team. I would want to come and work with you over an employer who doesn’t train. Very admirable. Well done. Well done.

Leanne Bull

From Bundaberg in Australia. Yes. We are going through a lot of turmoil at the moment. But I actually have done something similar to this over the last 33 years. Over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve grown the team from six to 16. How I started was putting on a CenturyLink person who had worked at CenturyLink for 25 years and just wanted some part time work. Then I found an insurance specialist who just wanted to do all the insurance. They took that off of me. Then we added on around so that we’ve now got a group of people who specialize in all of the areas.

The biggest challenge is then having a really good communication system that enables every single person in the business to know what is going on with that client even though they may not be involved in all the areas of the business.

Hoskin

If you see the leadership team piece on this org chart, you have business manager and quality manager. Those two roles take care of the business. Not the client journey, not the service, not the technical side of the business but the business, the operating model of the business. On this side though, you have a client services manager and a technical manager. Communication, in a financial services firm, has to flow through an individual or individuals. I call them the conductors of the orchestra. You’ve got all of your musicians doing the day-to-day work, making the delivery of the service. You absolutely have to have one or two or as many as you can people who are literally overseeing it all happen, making sure communication is fluid, information is flowing. Supported by IT in terms of communication platforms. But if you are at the top and you have lots of people underneath, that’s an absolute nightmare for whoever is sitting at the top. Because you’re the point of reference for every single member of the team. You need that middle person to buffer. Think about it as an hourglass. All the sand always goes through the middle. And you need that little team in the middle to filter and buffer that. Telecommunications is essential.

Question

Just a comment. At the recent AALU meeting in Washington, one of the main platform speakers said, “We are all talent development organizations masquerading as financial services firms.” I’ve been at this 40 years and not just as an advisory level but also the officer level of a $200 billion company. You are dead on about where we have been, where we are and where we have to go.

Moderator

Fantastic way to end.

Michelle Hoskin has more than 20 years of experience working alongside some of the world’s most successful financial organizations. She is an internationally recognized author, speaker, coach and expert in identifying and designing international best-practice standards of operational excellence.