In this episode of the FPA Podcast, Simon Hoyle of Coredata and John Hewison of Hewison Private Wealth join Ben Marshan, Head of Policy, Innovation & Strategy FPA to discuss what creating a successful business looks like.

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Transcript

Interviewer: Ben Marshan

Interviewees: Simon Hoyle, CoreData & John Hewison, Hewison Private Wealth

Ben Marshan:

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast on how to create a commercially successful business. I’m joined by Simon Hoyle and John Hewison, and we’re going to talk about things like, what does a successful business look like, how do we create a business that’s profitable and successful, and a range of issues. But what I might just start with quickly, for those who don’t know our panelists today, we might start with you, John, can you let everybody know who you are and what you do and why you’re here today?

John Hewison:

My name’s John Hewison. I’m the chairman of Hewison Private Wealth, a single office, independent financial planning company in Melbourne. I’ve been in the financial planning profession for 36 years, and I’m not actively advising these days, but still head up a business that is carried on with me with my younger colleagues. I’ve also had a considerable amount of experience working with the FBI over the years, and I’m fairly passionate about professional standards.

Simon Hoyle:

My name is Simon Hoyle, I’m head of market insight for CoreData Research, being with the business now a bit over three years. Spent 30 something years before that as a financial reporter and journalist, and most recently was editor of Professional Planner magazine before joining CoreData. At CoreData, we do quite a lot of work, looking into what drives consumers to do things, what their preferences are, how they like to be served, and how they like to be reached. We work with financial services, organizations ranging from some reasonably small advice practices right through to the largest banks and financial institutions in the country. It’s my job to try to convert the data that we produce out of the work that we do into meaningful insights, more or less successfully, I have to say, sometimes more successfully than other times. But the idea is to give people something that is tangible and something that makes sense to them out of the vast amount of work that we do.

Ben Marshan:

Thanks, Simon. And to John, I mean, with the focus being on business success, a financial planning business that’s operated somewhat outside the remit of larger institutions and things for 36 years, what does a successful financial planning business mean to you, what does it look like to you, what experience of success do you have in your business that our members can learn from?

John Hewison:

I think before I became involved in financial planning, my background had about 20 years experience in corporate life and 10 years of that at senior management level. So I suppose I was fortunate coming into a private practice that I had already had a lot of experience in terms of business planning and management. So I was very, very quick to reflect in our initial business plan, a lot of the core beliefs that I wanted to have, bring into a new business, and the things that I was most passionate about, and now all around models of excellence, professional standards. I’ve always been a great fan of empowerment as a management tool, that I believe in the tiered management model. So [inaudible 00:04:12] was a very important thing.

And we also have said from day one that we wanted to have a succession plan, so that I wanted to build a business that I’ll be proud of, that had quality, and that other people would want to carry on beyond my demise. So that was their starting point, and I actually just went and revisited their current business plan, which was almost identical to the original. It’s got a few enhancements to it, but by and large, it’s exactly the same as it was when we first started out back in 1995.

Ben Marshan:

Do you think being a good financial planner by itself necessarily means that you’re going to have a good financial planning business or is there a lot more to it than that?

John Hewison:

There’s a lot more to it than that. And I think that there are different ways of going about financial planning, and how Abyss’s model, which we adapted based on our experiences along the way. I mean, our modal model of change, but experience has taught us to adapt to certain circumstances. So we very quickly adapted to wanting to build a business that was not transactionally based.

If you go back to the ’80s when we started, financial planning was by and large, a retirement business and was very transactionally based. So I saw that as being a recipe for failure, you couldn’t possibly build any sort of a business successfully and to have value going forward if you’re as good as your last transaction. So we look to form long-term relationships with our clients and to be able to provide an ongoing service, which we believe was essential to good financial planning practice. So that’s the model that we run now. We run true individually managed accounts, so every client’s portfolio is individually designed and managed on an ongoing basis, we’re all around relationships. Not everything we do is relationship driven, client is absolutely our priority, and achieving their outcomes.

Ben Marshan:

Who are the people around the business that are helping run the business rather than helping support the planners, I guess? What are they doing, what are they focusing on?

John Hewison:

Well, we operate in what we call pods so that every client is going to have a service delivery pod consisting of a senior advisor, an associate advisor, that it’s somebody who’s going through a graduate mentoring program and a client service manager. And that client service manager, we’re responsible for all of the day to day communications in respect to managing the client’s affairs. So it really doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s banking, whether it’s paying bills for them, whether it’s arranging whatever they want us to arrange, that’s what the client service manager does. And then everything is interlinked through our internal systems, so that if you were to find a night of the phone today, and you were a client of one of my colleagues, I could immediately go to your account and find out exactly what you’ve been talking to your advisor about, and any of the issues that were outstanding.

Ben Marshan:

Simon, we’ve worked quite extensively with CoreData to build some tools and resources and training and education for our members around running good quality businesses and professional financial planning practices. Can you just quickly start off with, if you can, just covering the tools and sort of resources that we’ve looked to build together?

Simon Hoyle:

So the principal tool you’re talking about there, Ben, is what we call the ready index, which is a benchmarking tool designed to help the owners of financial planning practices gauge how their business is performing, both in absolute terms, but also in relative terms. So to benchmark it against against other practices, see where they’re perhaps doing well, where they’re doing perhaps not quite so well, and what leavers are available to them to pull to improve the performance of the business. It’s called the ready index. The word ready is an acrostic. Bear with me while I try to remember what the letters stand for, Ben, but R stands for risk and compliance. So that’s an assessment of whether a practice’s risk and compliance processes and procedures are properly documented, and indeed whether they’re followed. Because documenting them is one thing, obviously following them is sometimes something else.

E stands for efficiency and technology adoption. And we know through, not just the ready index, but through other work that we do, principally, the advice tech report that CoreData produces for net wealth each year, that the smart adoption of technology really drives practice efficiency and profitability. A in the word ready, stands for aspirations. That’s really kind of, how do the principals and the owners of the firm want the firm to grow? What are their growth plans, their respirations? D stands for differentiation to meet client needs. It’s a bit of a stretch that one, but that’s to do with client segmentation. Is the client base segmented, has the practice identified its ideal client? And having done the segmentation exercise, our service is actually tailored for each of those segments, and they are delivered profitably to each of the segments. And finally, the Y is for yield, and that’s around issues of profitability and so forth.

And so it’s a relatively straightforward process for a practice to go through that benchmarking exercise. It takes about 20 to 25 minutes. You need a little bit of financial information at hand about the practice before you start, so you don’t have to keep ducking off and digging out the numbers. It’s all conducted online. And then when you’ve finished it, you get a score on each of those factors, and an overall score for the practice, and it also tells you how you’re performing relative to other practices. It’s a handy tool, but if there isn’t a plan in place, if the business isn’t properly planned and sort of structured properly, then going through any sort of benchmarking exercise is interesting, but ultimately not particularly useful. I mean, businesses like John’s haven’t been running since 1985 by accident, right? Success isn’t an accident, success is the result of a process. And there’s a saying, I’m sure many people have heard, that planning without action is futile and action without planning is fatal.

And the key to it is actually planning, having a business plan. And the best business plan you can have is one that actually exists. It’s got to be on paper, it’s got to be shared with the relevant people inside the organization who are going to make it happen, it’s got to be monitored actively and regularly. A business plan that exists in your head is actually no plan at all, you’ve got to get it on a piece of paper. And there’s a process you can go through to do that. Sometimes licensees will step in to help practices get a business plan together, although we know from the licensee research that we’ve done this year, overall satisfaction with how licensees support practices on business planning is actually pretty low. Of the 12 service elements that we assess, it’s ranked 10th in terms of satisfaction. So it’s low. There’s a lot of scope there for licensees to step in and help practices plan better. But any plan is better than no plan at all, I guess, is the bottom line, provided you stick to the plan and do what you say you’re going to do.

Ben Marshan:

So I don’t think you gave yourself enough credit there, Simon, for remembering what each of the letters meant in the ready index. So well done with that. And just to finish off, there’s two more tools there that we provide members. There’s a ready index light, which is available for non-professional practices, and then there’s a client satisfaction survey tool.

Simon Hoyle:

Yeah. The full ready index has been initially made available to professional practices, as you say, but there’s a cut down version too.

Ben Marshan:

What I’ve picked up from just this opening conversation is that, number one, it’s really important to know what your business is, and for our members, their business is financial planning. In saying that, that’s what they’re providing to their clients, that’s where they’re making their money, but that’s not what is going to ensure that you’ve got to successfully run a business. You need to understand that there are metrics that you need to measure in your business, such as those that are available through the ready index, to ensure that you are making the right kinds of progress. And the way to make that right kind of progress is to have a business plan in place. So, John, what are the kinds of things that you look at in your business plan and you think about, how we’re going to move our financial planning business forward on a year to year, multi-year, a five-year type basis?

John Hewison:

Well, I guess there are various stages to it. The first stage is that the shareholders meet four times a year to review their aspirations so that we can make sure that everybody is on the same page, that everybody has the same future aspirations for the business, where they see it going in the future. Then that goes to annual strategic planning day which involves the directors, the shareholders, and saying in management. And I work shopped through the current state of play where we see things needed to be improved, where we want to see the next 12 months and beyond, what initiatives we need to put in place, and that usually centers around people and systems. And we’re heavily reliant on systems, have been since the late 1980s, we developed our initial operating system, which allows us to manage IMS in a very efficient manner.

And that of course is blown out now to be a full practice management operating system, which incorporates all sorts of things, including client management, in-built compliance, features that ensure that our people are kept on the right track, not that we expect that they’d go off the track, but there are various mechanisms within the operating system that ensure that we’re compliant in the things that we’re doing. And over the years, of course, we’ve evolved into data downloads rather than manual entry and straight through processing, and various other things which bring about an enormous amount of efficiency. And we don’t see systemic efficiency being our ability to reduce the amount of people we have, we see systemic efficiency as making us more efficient so that our people can spend more time face-to-face with their clients.

So we’d rather our client service managers be jumping on the phone and asking Mrs. Blogs, how her new baby daughter is doing, rather than sitting around data entering all day. So I think they’re the sort of main focus. And I mean, obviously we’ve got a responsibility to operate a profitable business and to be providing us with sufficient capital funding going forward, to spend what we need to spend on the business, particularly in the area of systems, but then there are also the other growth pressures that come along. As you grow, you get more people, you get more people, you need more space.

And I think probably the most important initiative I’ve taken in my business life was that early in the place, we decided that we were going to close the business for two days a year and take everybody away, and then we’d sit down for two to three days and just workshop the business. How can we do things better? How can we provide higher levels of service? What sort of changes do we have to make to our systems? And our commitment at those, what we call a retreat, is that any decision made at that meeting was going to be implemented absolutely by management within the next three months. And we did that for two reasons. Either that there’s no point in taking people away and asking them for their input, and they’re not acting on it because at this point, give you an input in the future.

And we wanted to ensure that people are empowered, that they were all on the same journey. We all took ownership of what we were doing, and they got the pride of achievement out of what the company achieved. That’s just, they’re become very emotionally, these retreats. We’ve got a staff of about 45 people now, and at times, there’s a lot of emotion around the table because of the culture that’s built, and they’re also passionate about what they’re doing and passionate about each other. So I think that’s one of the few strengths.

Ben Marshan:

It’s very easy to spend all our time working in the business and helping clients and things, but it is important to take that time away and work on the business to make sure it’s successful and viable. I mean, just to get into the nitty gritty of the business plan, do you have big strategic areas such as people and systems, or have you got more just, we’ve decided we want to make an upgrade to the CRM or change the CRM or change calculators or something, and you’ve just got projects that are sort of based around those.

John Hewison:

We’re great believers in the user direct mythology of developing worthwhile systems. We’re into year five of the redevelopment of our systems right now, it’s cost us a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of grief, but necessary. I mean, our other systems were sensational, very efficient, but desperate needed upgrading, so we decided to recreate in more up to date technology. So it’s taken time and money, but we’re starting to see the rewards now, particularly through efficiencies.

Ben Marshan:

Excellent. Simon, what are you seeing done well from business plan perspective coming out of the ready index and the research you guys are doing?

Simon Hoyle:

Yeah. So it’s a little flippant to say a business plan, as I said before, a business plan in your head is no plan at all. When we see businesses that are going well, that are tracking along nicely and are headed towards achieving their goals, there’s a few common characteristics you can start to tease out of how they approach the business planning process. I won’t get down into the same level of detail as John is able to, but at a high level, it’s clear that what they do at the outset is pretty simple or at least easily understood and relevant, and above all, actually achievable business goals. They have clear targets, they set short-term targets, and they’re quite specific about what the short-term targets need to be. They set medium and longer term targets as well, but the specifics around those targets are necessarily a bit more flexible or a bit less prescriptive, they’re more ideas or concepts of where they’d like the business to go.

The best businesses only measure what’s really important to the business. They understand what the key things are that drive the performance of the business. And those are the things that they measure. They don’t waste time measuring things that they’re not going to then use, or don’t give them any advantage. And they only manage the things that they do measure. So they’re reasonably efficient in how they measure the performance of the business, and they reasonably efficient, well, they’re actually quite efficient in the way they manage those things that they measure. The other thing they do that stands out is that they monitor their progress against the plan quite frequently and quite formally. And they’re pretty brutal about whether they’ve achieved the goals, hit the short-term goals, or they haven’t, and what the reasons are for that.

They review the plan periodically because things change, conditions change, businesses change, the hopes and aspirations of the business owners change over time as well. So they adjust the business plan as appropriate, but keep to that structure of quite granular short term, and quite specific short-term goals, and a bit less, medium, and long-term goals. And I think to the point that John just made, the owners of the business are quite open and quite happy to share their aims, share their goals, and share their progress towards those goals with everybody in the business. So everybody in the business understands what’s going on, they’re all pointed in the same direction, and they really are pulling as one team. Now, the detail of how you do all of those things and the amount of work that goes into achieving all of those things is obviously quite significant. But the question was, what are some of the top level things that successful businesses are doing? And those would be my observations.

Ben Marshan:

So, I mean, just to move across to the nitty gritty, John, what are some of the key metrics that you look at in your very successful business?

John Hewison:

We obviously look at cost setters and whether they… Key metrics guide a change according to the business. For example, our business would spend more on IT than some other or many other financial planning businesses. But we want to see where we get the efficiencies from that expenditure. Obviously one of our key measures is what we are spending proportionately on people, on space, on marketing, and things that can be variables. We obviously look at our profitability. We’re not too concerned about issues that we can’t, for example, some of the key issues that we’re probably going to be talking about are around things like compliance cost and PI insurance and some of the other big ticket items that… Our view is that they’re requirements of doing business, they’re not variable, we can influence them, but we can just make it as efficient as we possibly can and run a business as compliant as it possibly can be. And that should result, and if we don’t have any clients that have probational indemnity insurance, it’s going to help us get the premiums there.

Ben Marshan:

Yeah, absolutely. So there are fixed costs in any businesses, there are variable costs in the businesses, how do we get the most out of the variable cost to make the business run profitably and efficiently?

John Hewison:

As Simon was saying, we have a very specific plan, basically our short-term plan, but, for example, in terms of our people, we have a projection that we update regularly on where we see the need for additional people in the business going forward. So as we put on additional senior planners, they’re going to need an additional associate planner. We need associate planners in our mentoring program, who are eventually going to become senior planners. And eventually, that goes through to our succession plan. And then the same with [inaudible 00:28:46], that as our business increase, that we need more of them to provide service. So we had this five-year projection of where we’re going to have to increase our staffing, and then that obviously flows through to our premises and so on.

Simon Hoyle:

The research that we’ve just pulled out of field, the licensee research suggests that only around eight in 10 advice practices are actually profitable. 12% of them are actually not profitable, and puzzlingly, around 6% of the respondents to the survey said they don’t know whether their practice is profitable or not, which is a puzzling and worrying result. But there is scope for business improvement across the board, when you look at that level of profitability across the industry, and you also have a look at some of the results that came out of the ready index band, which you’ll have seen as well, even the practices that you think would be amongst the best in the country, there is significant scope for improvement in business performance. And a lot of that comes down to the planning, as John has said, a lot of that comes down to having the vision for the business in the first place, and then creating the plan that’s going to help you get there to achieve that vision.

John Hewison:

Yeah. It surprises me when you say that, Simon. I mean, to be very simplistic about it, so like any business, that you need to have a product or a service that represents value to the consumer, and that the consumer is readily prepared to pay for, and that you can produce that product and the quality at a price that will make a profit. And we’ve never had a problem from that point of view. I mean, we want to provide a very, very high quality service, but we’re able to price it. So through systems efficiency obviously, that we’re able to price it at a level that is attractive and it’s profitable.

Ben Marshan:

And do you think you’ve been more successful in achieving that because you’ve had a bit more control over the business yourself, the way you’re doing business, what you’re measuring in the business, and not have necessarily other businesses telling you how it should work and what they… Being the focus of their business, not your own business.

John Hewison:

I’ll probably won’t be so diplomatic in my answer. I got the impression from a very early stage that I didn’t understand the structure of the financial planning industry. I didn’t understand where the tiers of management came into place, and there were so many levels of the old sort of fund manager, dealer group advisor, sort of strata, and everyone’s charging a margin. I mean, at the end of the day, the client’s just not going to pay enough to support that. So we very early, particularly after our experience with the 1987 stock market crush, we decided just to bring everything in-house and set up our own portfolio administration systems. We didn’t worry about a trustee because we put everything in the name of the client and addressed them here at our office so we could look after it all. So there’s a couple of levels of costs cut out immediately. And then having control overall about our internal cost structures and ability to look for efficiencies has been a great asset to us.

Ben Marshan:

So you talked about empowering your staff earlier, John, how much visibility do you give them over the business plan? How much do you give them the ability to run aspects of it, to take ownership of different bits of it.

John Hewison:

We have absolute transparency. We share everything with everybody. They all understand. We want them to know that it’s a successful business, that they’ve got a sound job, and they’re working for a company they can be proud of. So we don’t hide anything. We share with them the shareholders’ aspirations. If you come into our office, you’ll see things plastered all over the wall about their core beliefs and about the business plan, they all have access to the business plan, and we go through it with them every year. So we concentrate very heavily on this involvement empowerment philosophy so that if somebody joins us, we tell them what our expectation is in terms of them being prepared to take ownership of their own tasks. We say to them, “If you make a mistake, we don’t want to hear about the mistake, we want to hear how you solved it.

Obviously they need to report what mistakes have taken place, and then go in our various registers. We give them the ability to recompense clients, if they’ve made a mistake and the client’s upset, they want to sent them a bunch of flowers or want to send them some theater tickets or whatever it is, they’ve got the ability to do that. And we look for them to use their initiative and make their own decisions. And you find that that forms a culture and an environment that people just live by it. I mean, they just love it. And they feed off each other, looking for things that they can do and solutions they can reach, and it just gives us as a business a huge amount of powerful input from our front end users.

Ben Marshan:

And you mentioned before that one of the key focuses of the businesses is kind of succession and that succession planning, do you find that that kind of empowerment and an ability to take ownership of problems and issues and solutions enables that buy-in to that succession planning process and gets them thinking that they’re a real part of this business and they’re a future bit of the success of this business?

John Hewison:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s very powerful. And I think, I mean, the succession part is a very important part because we employ graduates into our graduate programs. So a commerce or business graduate is going to take probably three to five years to get through our mentoring program. And we sponsor them through their post-grads, and they work under the mentoring of senior planners, have experience in working with clients and so on, but they’ve also been told upfront, that if they develop themselves in the way that we expect them to, not just getting their education qualifications, but actually developing themselves personally to be future leaders of the business, then they’ll have an opportunity to acquire equity. So we tell them that pretty much from day one. And that does two things. There’s obviously our desire to develop them personally and to develop the succession plan, but there’s obviously the commercial interest of retaining people. You can put a lot of effort and money into developing people, but if you don’t offer them some incentive for the future, they’ll leave.

Ben Marshan:

Yeah, absolutely. And Simon, so just going back to a broader view of the research and what you see up there, what are the kinds of metrics or what are the kinds of things that financial planning businesses need to be thinking about at the moment for the next couple of years to make sure that they’re on that right success path?

Simon Hoyle:

Yeah. So it’s a good question, Ben. It’s going to come back, to a certain extent, to what the individual aspirations and plans are for each of the businesses that are listening in. But there’s a few things that you can say are emerging as the drivers of growth, if we want to talk about that for a moment, where the businesses think that their growth is going to come from. But before we get to that, we talk to advice practices about how they view the current operating conditions, how do they view the state of their business and the state of the industry that they’re working in at the moment? And it’s fair to say that right now, where we sit at the moment, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. About a third say that the current operating conditions are okay. A bit over a third say operating conditions are either poor or not good. About a third say the operating conditions are good. But only a very small proportion, a tiny number say that the operating conditions are excellent.

We’re probably in a situation where the outlook for the next three to 12 months, certainly for a significant part of the industry, is a little bit tough. And we know some of the reasons for that. There are increasing costs and there are all these other issues that are playing into how advice practices operate. But when we start to talk to the principals of practices about where they think growth is going to come from, overwhelmingly, they say it’s going to come from just putting on new clients. They’re just going to get more clients, more clients through the door, and they’re going to grow that way. And that’s an interesting outlook because the evidence suggests that what’s actually happening is, the number of active relationships advisors have with individual clients is declining. Couple of years ago was up around the 200 clients per advisor mark, and now it’s down to around about 140 or 150 clients per advisor.

So the number of active engagements or number of active clients advisors are dealing with appears, at least on those numbers, to be declining, and it kind of runs contrary to the idea that they’re going to generate growth by putting on new clients. So elsewhere, they’re starting to look at things like repricing their existing advice offers. We’ve seen quite a lot of that taking place in the last six to 12 months, a significant number majority of advice practices, at least in the surveys that we’ve been doing, have increased the price of their services, and a significant proportion say they’re going to increase prices in the year ahead. And there’s some overlap in those figures, which means that there’s practices that they’ve raised their charges in the past year and they’re going to raise them again in the year ahead. And that’s good news for those practices. And they’re also going to look increasingly to offer additional services to existing clients. So add-ons to the core offer that they’ve got.

Ben Marshan:

So just to wrap up, we talked about the importance of knowing your business, we talked about the importance of having metrics to measure how your business is progressing, we talked about the process of having a business plan so that we can focus on the aspirations and the strategic future of the business, is there anything else that you want to share with members, John, before we finish up today’s podcast?

John Hewison:

We’re very excited about the future. We didn’t quite know how to budget for COVID, but we got that wrong, we budgeted for very little business, but in fact, we had a record year. We think that the outlook… There’s going to be a strong demand for very high quality financial planning services, no question about it, but those that step up to the plate and provide those services are going to do very well. And I think it’s the things that we’ve talked about, that you’ve got to make the investment in people and make the investment in your service offering to ensure that you can provide a quality service offering to clients who absolutely have a huge appetite for it. They want to be looked after, they want to have their hands held, they want to talk to somebody that they can trust. And that’s really where I think our demand is coming from. All of our business comes from referral, although we have spent significantly on digital marketing over the past few years, and that’s been huge for us. So that’s another area that we’ll be concentrating on in the future. So I really see the foreseeable future as being very, very exciting for our profession.

Ben Marshan:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been saying for a long time that while these couple of years were going to be tough with the SIA changes and Royal Commission implementations, that consumers are desperate for good quality professional financial planning assistance. And if members can think about how they educate themselves and get through this transition period, and think about how to run an efficient, engaging, consumer focused business, that things are looking really bright and really positive for them. Is there anything you wanted to-

Simon Hoyle:

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. The demand for advice is solid. In consumer surveys that we do quarter by quarter over years, demand for financial advice remains solid. There are still some issues around trust and finding an advisor, but those can be overcome, right? Those issues can be addressed. The other side of the ledger of course, is that the supply of financial planning services is declining at the moment. The number of advisors in the industry is contracting. So you’ve described the transition period ahead, it is going to be rocky for some, it’s going to be challenging for everybody, I think, but when we come to the end of this transition period, the industry that is created and remains is going to have an absolutely golden opportunity. High demand for the services and a relatively constrained supply of services. I’m no economist, but I think that adds up to a reasonably bright future.

So the decision that advice practices have got to make is, do they just want to sort of futz around and muddle their way through and add on clients here and there as they find them and so on, or do they want to sit down and say, listen, we can take a structured, disciplined, forward-thinking approach to developing a business, and we’re in the right place at the right time to create something truly amazing and truly valuable.

Ben Marshan:

And I think that’s a fantastic point, Simon. The number of conversations I have with members saying, it’s not the same as it used to be, we can’t do business the way we used to be, it’s not fair, I think there are so many more opportunities by thinking about what is in front of us, how can we better do business going forwards, what are all the growth opportunities for financial planning going forwards? And focusing on those, I think, about how we get to there rather than focusing on what’s changed, why has it changed, why is it not fair? Because I think there’s a really positive future out there for the profession, for members, for their businesses, and if we can just focus on that and grow our businesses, then I think things will look fantastic going forward.

So just in summary, I think that the key messages that come out today is, understand your business, understand the metrics that you need to measure to make sure your business is moving forward and being successful, and have a plan in place. The same way that we work with our members to understand their goals and objectives and financial plan position, and put a plan in place, we need to do the same for our business. They’re different plans, but they’re equally important if you’re looking to run a successful financial planning business. So I want to thank John and Simon for your time today. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, members. Join us in community to have a conversation about this, share some tips, share some ideas on how you’ve done your own business plans and what you’re thinking about for your business going forwards, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the FPA podcast.