The Art of Trust #1 – Transcript

Fraser Jack
Hello, and welcome to this series on the art of building trusted relationships. That trust is an unconscious feeling. It’s felt by somebody and it’s the most intangibles of the intangibles. So how can we put that into a business plan or building trust? It’s complicated and it’s very individualized. However, the research states that there are four main areas to trust behaviors, authenticity, reliability, and the feeling of somebody acting in your best interest. In this four part series, we will dive deeper into these four feelings and how you can tangibly implement them into your process. We hear from Core Data global CEO Andrew Inwood. Jane Ryan financial advisor from Fox wealth advisory Anthony Jones financial planner from Templeton’s financial and and fox head of advice at Australian retirement trust. In this the first episode we focus in on behaviors, and an episode two which had about authenticity. Episode Three is all about reliability. And the final episode, we hone in on the feeling you get when somebody is acting in your best interest. Thanks for joining me, Andrew.

Andrew Inwood
It’s my absolute pleasure Fraser.

Fraser Jack
thank you, we actually get into recording in live in person these days, which we’re very lucky to be able to do. Thank you so much for joining us, we are talking about the art of building trust somebody who has had numerous conversations with over a long period of time. And of course, whenever it comes to the science and the research behind it, you’re the person to go to so firstly, welcome. For those who don’t know, you do want to give us a quick overview of you at the moment what your role is.

Andrew Inwood
So I’m the CEO of core data. And that sounds a lot more important than it is. I’ve worked with Core Data, particularly in the Sydney office, but across the Global Practice, and I’m focused on, on having and managing client relationships and making sure that those things are okay. For those of you who don’t know, Core Data, we’re a research business, which focuses primarily on financial services globally. And what we’re really interested in is the customer side. And we’re trying to bring really robust evidence conversations based conversations to the customer relationships, because we think that’s the most important part of, of the financial services business, we’re really interested in better customer outcomes, and helping businesses provide better customer outcomes. Because at the end of the day, all the work, then all the energy that comes through the financial system services system is is to be is the stored value of customers around the world who are looking for better outcomes for themselves. So working on that and focusing on that is really important to us. And that

Fraser Jack
kind of exactly wraps up why we’ve asked you to speak today, understanding and understanding from the consumers point of view, why it’s so important to build trust and have those trusted relationships. We’re going to dive into the first topic of this, this and when I say this, I’m talking about all the things in and around the concept of trust and the history of it. The first is first thing I want to talk today is a behaviors and demonstration or behaviors. Talk to me a little bit about this as the first in the beginning and the research behind.

Andrew Inwood
So it’s not really a new idea about the way that trust works. One of the things that’s really important to understand is that in fact it is Humans have the ability to form relationships and store up behavior inside those relationships has allowed us to fundamentally rule the world. I mean, to not get too historical and scientific about it, there was a time that we shared the earth with Neanderthals. And the end of those were athletically better than us. They were stronger than us. They’re bigger than homosapiens, faster, and arguably smarter. There’s certainly their brain pan wasn’t particularly different. But what they couldn’t do was store up the value in a relationship that passed the behavior to each other. It’s the ability that we have to form teams and to build those teams tend to focus on future outcomes, which allows us to out compete, and to put trust in the future of someone’s activity. So so the way that trust works is that it works on a couple of levels, one of the things that you’ll hear a lot is the concept of reciprocity, the idea that a behavior that you give to somebody, they will be hardwired to give back to you. Which is always why it’s nicer to be nice to people, rather than mean to people. But the concept is, turns out to be absolutely true and scientifically provable. So by building networks that allow you to succeed, and by building networks that allow you to compete, you can build a better life for yourself, your family and for everybody else. But you can actually build up a kind of self fulfilling behavior where your satisfaction rises, their satisfaction rises, and that trust allows you to be better and better and better. And you can see that in all sorts of ways in gym endeavors. You can see it in clubs, you can see it in charities, you can see it in even religions in positive ways. You can also see it in negative ways. There are some you know, sort of anti semitism has a negative way of expressing that sort of the rise in in particularly far right or far left politics or ways of explaining it. So suppose a positive and a negative integer in terms of the way in which humans like to form teams and form tribes and come together. And those tribes work really well together. There’s a really kind of interesting piece of research, which has been done now around the world. And it’s particularly for immigrants coming from African nations, to Western European nations. And it’s the challenge for that is that when people in Western European nations see the police rushing somewhere, they tend to trust the police and get out of the way and make room for them. And they think that someone is in need when they hear a siren. Whereas in an African nation, if you say the police rustling somewhere in your belly siren is that they think the power is being used somehow or abused somehow. So it’s not about their relationship. So those trust relationships are really different. We tend to be more trusting government, we tend to be more trusting our systems. And that allows us to expand and grow. And to do those types of things. One of the My favorite example of this, and I don’t want to go too much into it, I’m already diving down too much into detail as I do is that we tend to trust our banks. And we give money to our banks. And we know that we’re going to get it back in the future. Five years ago, I was on holiday in St. Petersburg in Russia. And I was taken by my guide to the edge of Russia to a DACA, which is a small country house on a lake. And it was frozen. And I went for a swim in a frozen lake and I had a signer and was having vodka. And I said to Sergei, I think every Russian Russian guide in the world is named Sergei, how much is the place like this cost? And he said of about 80,000 euros. I said, You made it 800,000 euros, it’s another 80,000 euros, and I said, Are you serious this anywhere else in the world, something 20 minutes from the center of St. Petersburg would be worth millions. And he said, Oh yeah, but we don’t have banks here. People can save money and spend it. There’s no way of borrowing and no way of actually saving money. And so the bank in my lifetime is the same age as me. My bank savings had been wiped out, the bank simply disappeared. So that changes all sorts of things, it changes the way the capital works, it changes the way the businesses work. So trust becomes a really, really important part of human behavior and how we stay at a store of endeavor. I mean, there’s a sponsor of this is the Australian retirement trust. I mean, that’s a really interesting idea. And a really interesting people in Australia can absolutely trust the Australian retirement trust, not just because it’s legislated in the way that they behave. And they can trust the legislation, the people that I know that work there take this role really seriously. And they are going to do everything they can to deliver the best possible retirement to people. And it’s something that you can kind of in 80% of the cases bank on. It’s not true everywhere else in the world. So that changes people’s futures fundamentally,

Fraser Jack
it’s interesting, it’s very interesting the way that trust works around the world. When you mentioned tribes, I always think of tribes as you know, there’s a lot of different people required to make an effective tribe work and they all need me to trust each other to do their different parts of the process, because not everybody can do the same thing. And I also think of when you mentioned some of these behaviors are around aligned values, and how does that come into? So that

Andrew Inwood
it’s a very interesting part of the way in which people work and if you want to read about that there’s a great British social scientist called Robin Dunbar who came up with this concept of Dunbar’s number which is that Maximum number of relationships that any human can support is 150, which is a really interesting integer and the way things work. And I encourage you to read that those stored and aligned values, something which, which kind of fundamentally worth examining. Again, that’s, that’s regional and local. A great example of that. And there’s lots of research pieces have done on this, that people have done it in different countries, a man called Philip Synbio did it across the world. And people have done it in small towns and large towns. And again, so the classic example that if someone fell over in this in London, someone who appeared to be drunk or disabled, all people would walk around them, if that happened in a village, the person would stop and help them because they can think they can affect the outcome, that people tend to congregate in the line values. And we have to start to think about those in all sorts of interesting ways. Because our nation is changing fundamentally. And we’ve got lots of different generational values and lots of different societal values that sit in inside organizations, one of the biggest filters for this tends to be money. And people who are rich tend to behave in very specific ways. And so let’s let’s make rich having more than a million dollars in investable assets. And let’s make it inside super as well as outside sector. So it’s a very big part of the Australian population. So it’s north of 4 million people in Australia. So it’s a big number of people, there are a couple of correlated values with that which really stick out. One is that they’ve tend to value education really highly. I think that that’s important. The second thing is that they tend to,

to value deferred pleasure really highly, they’re prepared to put pleasure aside for some thought future benefits, so they’re much more trusting of the system. The third thing is, it’s really important to think if you think about value, as they start to attend to it, they tend to value the concept of their pleasure really highly. Now the pleasure isn’t always the same. For some people. That’s expensive things. For some people, that’s a big balances, for that some people that’s the ability to display things. So those pleasure drivers are very different. Don’t Never underestimate pleasure, in terms of a driver of human behavior. But never underestimate the kind of stored value of plays, you know, I live, I’m lucky enough to live in a in a street where it’s expensive. And you know, I worked very hard. And I’ve worked very hard for a long time. And I’ve had more than my fair share of luck to allow me to get into that situation. And I can see this different pleasures being sought by people on that street really, really clearly, some people’s gardens are magnificent. Some people’s are driving $2,000 cars, when I know that they’re worth 10s of millions of dollars, because Because pleasure for them is to have money in the bank, not money in the street. Some people I know who are struggling driving cars that I couldn’t possibly afford, I drive a you know, a 20 year old German car because it’s relatively cheap. So, so those sorts of things are really important to understand. So never underestimate treasure pleasure in terms of a motivator. And never underestimate pleasure is the way in which tribes are formed, because people are finding the same happiness in the ways in which they work together. Now I belong to a bunch of tribes I belong to belong to an ocean swimming tribe, and they come from all over the world and all sorts of people, but they all have the joy of swimming in particularly cold oceans with us. And they’re an interesting group, I belong to a tribe of people who, who do lots of sailing. And sailing for me is the kind of ultimate Marxism because those who can provide the yachts and those who can’t, but a skilled provide the services on the outside, both of those fit together. So those tribes are much the same. And we live our lives unconsciously inside those tribes, that different to family, although some people’s family, a tribe. So building your tribe, is really important. I think, I break up my working down into a whole bunch of things. So I have work operations, sales, projects, and HR is my daily things that I have to do every day. But on my right hand stack, I have family, which is first self when I do things for myself second, and the third thing I have is tribe, because you’ve got to bring your tribe together. My tribe comes from all sorts of places and parts of my tribe. And one of the members of my tribe is a is a heart surgeon. And the other one is is a guy who, who fixes boats and different places. And they form different parts of functionality. But they do have all the same kind of behavior. They like information, they like to talk they like to walk they like to exercise they like to do so things. So building that tribe is really important. When you’re building a business like particularly a financial services business, one of the things which is really important in that is this concept of mirroring. I’m sure you know what that is. And I’m sure most of the people on the podcast know what that is. But for those of you who don’t know, it’s giving back behaviors to the person that you’re talking to which reflect them and some mirroring. So in some ways we mirror ourselves in our tribe, we build up people who are like us and go through those processes and we’ve watched it a lot in financial services. Very good planners and very good people in those sort of those sort of operations are very good at mirroring the needs of the persons giving to them. because the person is entering the conversation with a set of needs every time and if you can give them back to them and solve those needs, whether you say it explicitly or implicitly, it’s actually a really important integer to building trust. One of the things that we’ve noted and this is may sound offensive to some of your listeners in Melbourne is that most financial planners in Melbourne when asked can very clearly describe which football team they support and why that doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the universe that we do this mystery shopping and certainly not in Western Australia. Absolutely not New South Wales, to a much lesser extent in Queensland, but in Melbourne, particularly in the city of Melbourne has an absolute truth, I’ll tell you, and they’ll be able to articulate why. And when people match up to those things, then they will mirror against it. The weird thing is that if people don’t like that team, for example, Collingwood for all the Collingwood supporters out there, you know why they don’t like you. They will literally say it will be much less likely that they will support that advice. Okay. Yes, Collingwood support doesn’t really like it. So that mirroring part is quite interesting.

Fraser Jack
Mirroring is a fantastic one. They all mentioned the mirroring. But I do love the concept of overlapping tribes and how everybody’s got more than one tribe and to be able to work through that interest. Football Teams is obviously an interesting one, whether people are into sports or arts or whatever they might be within the different personalities. Apart from marine though with behaviors, what do you sort of suggest if you’re working with financial advisors that they may partake in as some of the key behaviors for them. And

Andrew Inwood
so the really important part of this is that to acknowledge no matter how well you know, the person that your service level degrades over 36 months, because one of the things that advisors do, whether they’re conscious of this or not, is that they’re very good at taking chaos and turning into order people’s lives unless they’re putting lots of energy into attend to after the first order that the the advisor provides degrades, and it degrades on about a 36 month cycle, so that they have to keep coming back to that. The second thing is that whenever they’re talking to someone that no one is in that state, is what the psychologists call a tabula rasa, a blank slate, they’re not they’ve got jobs to be done in their mind. And one of the great things that advisors do whether they acknowledged or not one, number one is provide structure and order. The second one is they take jobs away, and they get those jobs done. I’m not sure as an industry, we’re as good at charging for those jobs that we as that we should be, because we’re actually doing a good job of that. So understanding that the person in front of you isn’t a blank slate, most people, particularly men, and that’s not true, necessarily of men, it’s also true of women aren’t always great at describing the jobs to be done or the problems that they’re facing. So I’m sure that every planner knows this, that they have to be paid psychologists and being able to ask about the task asked about the jobs to be done and start to sort of stimulate those, those things. The other part of that, and I’m not a psychologist, though, I mean, for pleasure, I read a lot about it. But that doesn’t make me a psychologist and psychologists is a is like advice, it’s a protected terms, I’m very clear to say I’m not is is the difference between stated and revealed beliefs. So people tell you things all the time, but you have to be careful to observe what’s revealed through the conversation. My favorite example of that is the state of reason why anyone has ever purchased a Rolls Royce, it’s always for the resale value. No one really buys a Rolls Royce for the resale value. And it’s true of what’s going on in people’s lives. And there’s so much psychology about that I couldn’t go into any detail and be accurate, but it’s worth understanding that making sure that you’re asking the right questions that you’ll be pushing a little bit to understand what’s going on. And understanding what is really, really helpful. It’s that combination of skills that a great advisor has between the technical advisor, social advisor and behavioral advisor. So getting back to that behavior point that you’ve been bringing up Fraser, one of the gain, one of the unconscious things that advisors do is help people, you know, go through great behaviors, making sure that they’re doing the daily, weekly monthly tasks that a person should be doing for their finances and making sure it’s done properly. And that’s that’s a real core part of the job.

Fraser Jack
It certainly comes to, you know, the the understanding of both the behaviors within the business and the behaviors of the clients. And that’s certainly really, really important that what how is the client behaving? Even though they might be saying one thing? Do you think that comes with experience? Is that something that you find that is is probably more than an experience advisors then then some of the technical stuff?

Andrew Inwood
That’s a really interesting question, because there are a series of beliefs around this and I don’t have the evidence to answer it, honestly, is that some people have that innate skill. I certainly know people who’ve got unbelievable emotional intelligence and can pick up what’s going on very clear. Some of the people who work for me and core data are freakishly good at this and I’ll walk out walk out of a meeting. They’ve got a whole bunch of different signals to me and I’ll be surprised by them. They’re often right. I’m thinking might be really weak at that. But the but can it be a learned skill? I mean, probably anything can be learned to a certain extent, but I think That’s a really kind of soft skill in the way that maybe anyone can learn to play music, there’s probably only a few people who are really good musicians. And maybe it’s on that part of the spectrum. So I would suspect that the advisors that I’ve seen are no, no hundreds of advisors in the same way that you do. And some of them are freakishly good at it. And some of them who came to advice or engineering, we don’t need to say any more than that. Their technical skills are very strong, their interpersonal skills are weaker.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. We’ll, we’ll put it into this particular episode. But we’ll, we’ll hear again from you in the next episode when we start talking about authenticity. Thanks very much. Jane, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the conversation.

Jane Ryan
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Fraser Jack
Oh, you’re very welcome. Now, do you wanna give the listeners a very quick overview of you and your business at the moment?

Jane Ryan
Okay, so my name is Jane Ryan, I’m a financial advisor, I have been in this space of financial advising for about 15 or 16 years now. About five years ago, I decided to go out on my own and start my own financial planning business. And I was a bit hesitant at first, I must admit, I didn’t know whether whether it was something that I could do. And, and looking back now, I realized that it’s something I, you know, I probably should have done long before that, but really enjoy it. No, I mean, regional New South Wales. So I travel a lot. I’ve got clients, you know, sort of from Sydney, all the way up to the Queensland border in regional New South Wales. So I, so I get around to different regional spaces, which I really enjoy, I get to see people in different environments.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, fantastic and amazing, amazing environment to, to, to go and see people. I’m feeling like a lot of your clients want to see people or, or get in front of them. And we’re talking about trust today, obviously. But getting in front of people and seeing them shaking hands. It was is that correct? Is that an assumption I’m making?

Jane Ryan
Yeah, look, you’re absolutely right. I find and, you know, I’ve had some of my clients for a very long time. And they’ve really always had the preference around sitting in front of people. And obviously, COVID has been challenging for that, because I wasn’t able to get out and about and sit in front of them. So you know, we had to, to improvise with communication. But that does do a lot of around forming trust, because I’d had a long standing relationship with them. And they had seen me I’d sat in front of them, they were able to transform into a space over COVID, where we were just verbally communicating. But their preference has always been for me to sit in front of them. Absolutely.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, I feel like that’s, this is a really primal thing, this proximity piece, isn’t it, because, you know, having somebody that and it comes back to behaviors, because having somebody in front of you, being nice to you, as opposed to being a threat to you builds trust a lot faster with those behaviors of you know, smiling and, and physical handshakes, that just that physical contact of head shaking somebody’s hand, or, or, or giving them a hug, or whatever it might be, if you’ve known them for a while. But just that proximity can, it can speed up behavioral patterns in someone’s brain?

Jane Ryan
Look, I completely agree. And that’s the thing, you know, I, when I’m talking to people, particularly new clients, you know, sort of setting expectations, and having them understand me, is as important as been being able to understand them. And one of the things, you know, I explained to people about some of my behaviors is that I would be a really bad poker player, because my facial expressions will tend to mirror how I feel. And particularly with my eyes, you know, if someone says something to me, my eyes will tend to open or tell the story till the response. And so, you know, I sort of say to people, if you say something to me, or you know, if a client has an idea about something, and I don’t believe that’s in their best interests, I won’t say no. If my face says yes, and vice versa, because the other one will give it away. And so I think that is really important. People need to be able to read expressions, I think it’s, it’s an art form where people can learn to interpret how someone is communicating with them, because their words may say one thing, but their face may say something different.

Fraser Jack
I love the old nonverbal cues. It’s hilarious, isn’t that and that’s probably somebody that our process around how you write things down all the time and take full notes in missile those nonverbal cues and facial expressions. I wanted to talk about behaviors in a way that, you know, when it comes to, you know, conscious thought around what sort of behaviors you’d like to to have I’m introducing to the relationships that you have with your clients, what sort of, you know, any expectations around what you will do as an advisor and what they will do, you know, as a client, any conscious behaviors that you really bring forward to the conversation,

Jane Ryan
oh, conscious behaviors? Look, I think that it’s very important that people can see the transparency of conversation. And so if, if it’s a new client, obviously, the preference is for them to be sitting in front of me, sometimes that’s not possible. If I have people from a distance that obviously, you know, of course, during COVID, that was impossible, but it is about being uninterrupted. And one of the things that I talked to all of my clients about, and my existing clients are acutely aware of that. And that is, when they are in a conversation with me, they have 100% of my attention. And so I make them aware of in terms of, if after the conversation, or at any point during our business relationship, they need to get ahold of me. And if they can’t get ahold of me, if they ring me in, and I don’t answer, I set that expectation that is because I’m, you know, either in a meeting or I’m working on something, there’s something that has my attention, and that requires my undivided attention. And so they, it’s really important that they understand that behavior around when I’m talking to them, they have my undivided attention, because I don’t want to give their business and their life, their financial life a half priority, I want to give it a full priority. So that’s a behavior that I set out very clearly. And that is from the outset is and that is, if you can’t get hold of me, there’s a reason for that. And it’s because I there is something else that requires my attention. And that when they come back to me, or I obviously get back to them, it’s because I have 100% want to invest in that conversation with him. I think that’s really important.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, I really like that idea of them. They’re bringing forth a conversation around attention, because it really does make them feel feel like they’re listened to. I guess

Jane Ryan
that’s exactly right. Because I think there’s lots of instances nowadays where people feel that they are not being listened to. And I know I’ve been in situations where I felt that I haven’t been heard what actually I’ve been heard, but they’re not really listening. And I don’t like that. And, you know, I don’t want to walk away from a conversation with a client, nodding my head and really thinking about something else. Because then I don’t recall the conversation, and I’m really not working on their plan very well. I’m not working on what it is that we’re on that pathway. So I think undivided attention is a is a really big thing.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, I also like that this being part of the conversation, because the expectation around accessibility, the expectation around being able to contact you 24/7 is instantly negated the expectations then are well, you’re probably listening to somebody else or, you know, giving somebody else your full attention. And then when you can, you’ll get back to me.

Jane Ryan
That’s exactly right. And, you know, I explained to clients, what my life, you know, I give off myself to my clients, I, they, they understand my life that I have small children, and, you know, I have a lot of things that go on in my life as everybody does. And, and I provide a lot of flexibility. So, you know, I’m happy to see clients after hours, sometimes I see clients on weekends. But there are times where I’m unable to see them or unable to, to have a conversation with them because of that. And I think when people really understand what your whole existence is like, well, that helps them to understand you and build that trust.

Fraser Jack
I definitely want to get into that when we talk about the next episode of authenticity. Are there any other behaviors that you talk to your clients about? Whether it comes to the you know, behaviors for them getting information back or, or behaviors around your business and how you, you, you show up every day? Yes, look,

Jane Ryan
one of the things that I talk to clients about is we try to give them as little bit as little homework as possible, because we all know what it’s like to go somewhere and see someone and be really leaning into that conversation invested in the conversation. Yes, that sounds great. Yes, we want to, we want to move forward that and then, you know, potentially you go to see someone and they give you a little wad of paperwork. Yes, I’m going to do that and you walk away and you get in the car and you leave and you put it on the front seat or put it in your handbag and then put it somewhere and you never really get around to it. So one of the things that we talk about with clients is we’re really not there’s not too much that we’re asking you to do. And if we are asking you to do what we really need you to do.

Fraser Jack
A giant thanks for talking to us about, you know, the behaviors and your business. I look forward to catching you in the next episode when we tackle the authenticity piece. Thanks, guys. So thank you for having me. Thank you for joining me, Anthony.

Anthony Jones
Hi. Glad to be here.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic to have you along there. To give the listeners a quick overview of you and your business at the moment.

Anthony Jones
Sure, yep, no, we we run a relatively small practice now was at larger practice several years ago, in Brisbane, called Templeton’s financial, and business has been operating for about 40 years, and I’ve been there for just over half of it. And I guess we’ve probably seen the whole raft of changes right from start right through to sort of where we are today. So and, and look, I guess we’ve got a fairly defined sort of target market. These days, I guess we’ve we’ve learned a lot of things over the years, in terms of what works and what doesn’t, and I think we’re in a sort of good spot, quite a comfortable spot. Now, as far as that’s concerned,

Fraser Jack
fantastic. So was a larger business shrunken and became a smaller business. Interesting, interesting. For part of this conversation, we’re talking about, you know, trusted relationships and the art of building trusted relationships. And then probably the also the art of, of moving moving relationships on, which is also probably something you’ve been through, to join us that, I really want to get into this conversation today to focus on some, you know, behaviors around what spoke to expectations can be and tell us a little bit about from your business, or your practice point of view, how that’s worked for you, for new clients, and also for existing clients.

Anthony Jones
Yeah, I think with new clients, I mean, we’ve always only ever accepted referrals, I guess, we’ve never really marketed we haven’t gone and sort of tried to get people off the street, so to speak. And I think that as an opening sort of point, there’s already already that sort of little bit of trust there, I guess, in terms of, you know, being referred by someone who may have been a client for some period of time. And one of the things that we always do generally is, particularly if someone rings and says, Hi, I’m Santosh, I’ve been referred by whoever it might be, I always take the opportunity to ring, the person that’s referred them out for two reasons. One is just to thank them, for thinking of us. And But secondly, and probably more importantly, I then just have a general chat to them. And try and get a little bit of background on you know, how long they’ve known that person where they’ve known them from, because I think to some degree, that gives you a little bit of an idea, not not always you don’t sort of try and preempt. But it does give you a bit of an idea about the sort of person that you might be dealing with. So at least you’ve got, you know, a little bit in front of you. So when you do meet with a client, you know, you’re not sort of starting from scratch. So you know, for example, if someone’s known someone for 30 or 40 years, you could pretty much rely upon the fact that probably got some traits that are fairly similar in a large respect, because if you’ve known someone for that long, you’ve obviously got known for that long. So you probably share similar types of arrangements. So we find that is a really great starting point for us.

Fraser Jack
It certainly is there, because it’s always interesting to work out what’s been said, isn’t it? i What, what did they say about you? What was the expectations that they’ve set around you? And also, you know, the the other way to, you know, what, what’s the expectations coming in?

Anthony Jones
And I guess sometimes we sort of might not not so much a joke, but you make it fairly light hearted in terms of oh, what are they? What have they said about me or those sorts of things, and just, you know, puts everyone sort of at ease. And, you know, I guess we don’t take ourselves too seriously, we always keep, you know, our conversations with the clients that we’re dealing with pretty, pretty casual. And as far as that’s concerned, I think that this gives people that immediate sort of sense of, oh, yeah, it’s not too over formalized because a lot of people just have no idea what to expect when they first turn up to meet you for the first time. So in that regard, I think that the more casual, you can make it and sort of referred back to the relationships and, you know, just things like, Oh, well, I’d sort of talking, I had a client recently, and they’d obviously been referred by another client of mine, and the other client of mine actually gave yourself a bit of a warning on these people, blah, blah, blah. But they’d been dancing together for 20 or 30 years. So you know, just using that as part of that conversation immediately. And the client sort of just almost sort of felt at home that or, you know, you know, you already know that we do this, this and this, and you’re showing a bit of interest in the sort of things that are important to them.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, I think, um, you mentioned that with expectations, the I think that’s really important, you know, setting up expectations at the beginning expectations around what you do in a practice, and how you how you behave, and how you, you know, how you act, but also the concept of maybe how the client, what the expectations are on the client as well. How do you approach that sort of conversation

Anthony Jones
with that, and that’s really important, because I guess we take the view that most clients probably haven’t come and seen the financial advisor before, somehow, but then you can’t sort of rely upon the fact that they may have going through a similar process. So one of the first things we always do is sort of confirm to them that because they’ve been referred by whoever it might be, there’s no cost for that initial meeting with us. Because I know people get quite apprehensive and say, Well, how much is all this going to cost? And what am I actually going to get? So, so the first thing we do is say, Look, you know, I guess we have no sort of expectations about what we may end up doing for you. But what we need to do is just find out a little bit about you what you’re trying to achieve. And then we can actually work out from there, whether there’s anything we can do to help you. And if there is, and we do need to do some work, then we will provide you with an outline of what the fee is. And say to them, Look, there should be no expectation from you then that you have to pay an ongoing fee. Because once again, we need to sit down and work out whether there’s anything you need on an ongoing basis as well. And I generally find by doing that, people are immediately almost at ease, because, you know, we’ve explained the process, what they’re going to go through, how are we going to do it. And we have a general chat, and we can sort of decide from there. You know, whether there’s compatibility, because one of the things we are now very, I guess, we’ve got certain philosophies about the way we do things. And so we’re not a great fit for every single client that walks through the door. And one thing we might do is compromise the way it what we do and how we do it, just to sort of fit in, you know, someone that may not necessarily fit in with the way that we want to operate. So

Fraser Jack
I think that’s a really important conversation to be able to understand what your philosophies are upfront in that first meeting, or if not before, so the clients understand that, and then, you know, you can make it fit conversation Well, before you get involved.

Anthony Jones
So and particularly, I’m in something as simple as you know, our investment philosophy, you know, you might have a philosophy around this is the way we operate portfolios, or, you know, we only use index funds, or we only use active funds, or we only do this or we do direct shares, we don’t do direct shares. So, for example, we don’t do direct shares at all, we don’t do it. So if a client came in and had that expectation, then one or two things can happen, either we walk out after five minutes, or there’s no, nothing further to do unusual. Or we can say, Look, that’s okay, if you’d like to do that, we don’t do that. But there are other people that we can organize to do that aspect of that sort of thing for you, but because I guess we’ve learned over the years is that I think when you first start out, you’re trying to be all things to all people. And you soon realize that at some point, you know, the Piper has to be paid down the down the track. And, you know, you’re sort of it was difficult because you started to sort of build a business, but you realize down the track that that’s not necessarily the the best outcome, and guess what sort of start to sort of refine your offer to clients. And I think also to when once you really have that philosophy, and you you believe you truly believe in it, then I think that comes across to the client in a very positive manner. And they get some confidence that, you know, yes, we think this is the sort of thing that we, we think will benefit from,

Fraser Jack
Yep, yeah, I want to touch on some of that more of that conversation in the next area. But before we move on to that, I want to also the talk about the concept of leaning into the fees, conversation and leading into charges. And I guess that to me, that comes back to a fear in the back of the client’s head with this, if there’s something not sure or if the, if something hasn’t been brought up at the beginning. So to lean into that concept of here are all the things that you might be thinking or feeling that are fearful or unusual. And we’re going to lean into those immediately so that the client doesn’t have to ask uncomfortable questions.

Anthony Jones
And I think the really important thing is, is explaining to them that we won’t always use a very simple example. But we won’t do any work and charge you unless we believe we can add some value to so for example, not going to charge you $100 If you get $20 worth of value out of it, for example. And, and again, those sorts of little another sort of simple but putting ourselves in the client’s shoes, I mean, they have absolutely no idea to a large degree, what to expect from the process and how things are going to operate. So I think the simpler that we can make it, I guess I’d probably fall into the trap years ago, where, you know, all you’re all you’re trying to do is show the client in the first thing, just how much knowledge you’ve got and how you can do this to the other. But at the end of the day, you soon realize that that’s not really what the clients there for they’re there to sort of improve on their position or because they’ve got some fears or concerns. And that’s really our job is to allay those concerns. And but I think having that upfront conversation, people feel at ease and can then concentrate on the rest of the meeting. Otherwise, they’ll be sitting there for the next half hour going, how much is always going to cost how much is this going to cost? And not really be listening or participate in the live I should have been in the conversation? Yep.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. Anthony thanks so much for being part of this first episode. Now I do want to dive into some of the stuff that you’ve said in this in the in the additional episodes, especially around the concept that All of your new clients come from existing clients from existing clients, which obviously, you know, tells us there’s a lot of a high level of trust there already. So let’s dive into another conversation in. Hello. Thank you for joining me Anne Fuchs.

Anne Fuchs
Fraser Jack, it’s been a while it’s so great to see you.

Fraser Jack
Absolutely great to see, you know, we are recording this live. So you might notice that dynamic in the conversation, but let’s start with you start with the giving us a quick overview of you for our listeners.

Anne Fuchs
So I have been around a really long time. 25 years, we’ve worked together a long time, I’ve heard of advice of Australian retirement Trust, which is the marriage of Q super and Sons super, two big super funds coming together with 2 million members $200 billion of assets. And my job is to make sure that the nurses and the teachers and the retail workers and the small business owners and the farmers and the miners and all of these people around Australia get more financial advice.

Fraser Jack
Wow, fantastic. And thank you for taking the time out to speak to us because that’s obviously a huge, huge job you’ve got ahead of you. And obviously I think we’ve been speaking Off mic, but you’ve had a lot of work to do.

Anne Fuchs
Yeah, we’ve got there is a lot of work to do bringing these two big funds together with two very different histories with the Queensland Government and then obviously, sudden coming from the private sector. But you know, we’re heading to where we’ve got this aging population, we’ve got the retirement income covenant, so the team are really excited about the impact we’re going to have. So more members retire with dignity.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. Now, this first episode we discussing and opening up the conversation around the art of building trust. And in particular, in this episode, it’s around behaviors. Tell us a little bit about what that means to you, and how you’ve seen advisors adopt an attitude towards focusing on their behaviors for building trust.

Anne Fuchs
The advisors that inspire me around building trust, have such a sense of service, and humility and integrity, which is just, I’m drawn to them and and inspired by them, I can see their faces in front of me. And look, I recognize that there’s, you know, there are a lot of affluent, high net worth investors that advisors want to work with. But I’m particularly inspired by those advisors that want to help the ordinary person, the mum and dad who’ve worked hard all their lives, and they’ve got 300,000. And they’re not seeking to create complexity to justify a fee, they’re seeking to find simplicity, to help somebody live the dignified life they deserve to live, because there’s so many Australians now we’ve had three decades of super SGX, it had its 30th anniversary a couple of months ago or in July. And so there are all these people that are wealthy for the first time that wouldn’t have been wealthy, but their financial literacy is low. And these advisors just have a lovely approach to finding that simplicity. So people can sleep at night and just living income and just appreciate the simple things, you know, and they don’t really want to talk about investments and portfolio construction, they just want to know their money’s gonna land in their bank account every month. You know, those very, very simple, important things,

Fraser Jack
certainly is important thing for trust with money blending in the bank account, when you said was gonna lend the bank account, took me a bit more about that simplicity around the concept of taking the complex and making it simple as a behavior rather than creating more complexity.

Anne Fuchs
If I think about us, when I started years ago, you know, it was all around investments, portfolio construction, and the advisors value proposition was solely around almost concrete creating complexity to justify a fee, year in year out, I think in this regulatory environment, we’re in the advisors that are that are the exemplar in terms of professionalism, and just living that trust are the ones who just distill and remove all that complexity because most Australians aren’t that literate financially and show them the simple things that they can do. They talk them they talk their clients language, they they don’t try and speak jargon to somebody who’s who might get paid a lot of money they might work at BlueScope Steel and be fitter and Turner, but they don’t understand that much. And so they’re able to mirror the the client’s language, body language and distill all of it and show them how they can create save some tax. Sulfur longevity and and those things which really most people need.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, fantastic. So simple simplicity is a great cornerstone, I think for this conversation with the you know, the many members you see, as you said your 2 million 2 million members and the advice industry predominantly been towards that more higher end was side of it. Talk to us about how what the opportunity for advisors in the in the middle mark,

Anne Fuchs
I get here so I remember years ago, Graham rich from portfolio construction forum showing up at one of his conferences, The Seven Up series, the BBC Seven Up series and it was obviously the wealthy kid who went who’s went to Oxford and every seven years that check in and he was he was reading The Times magazine at 16 which was a little bit precocious, but that’s alright and then And then it was the other kid who was the orphan who emigrated to Australia and became a builder. And at the end of it grand rich asked the audience, Oh, what, you know, what, what does this mean in terms of advice and what you do, and everyone’s kind of just at the blankly, and I didn’t speak up. And I said to Graham, after I said, I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to look silly. And he said, What was the he said, what’s the answer? He said, Well, we should be helping those people who have worked really hard to accumulate a decent nest egg, but that they need to make the most out of it. If you’re rich, you’re rich. And so I see an enormous opportunity with 2 million members, that our aging rapidly, and we’re heading into really, really turbulent economic and geopolitical times. And so people are going to be more nervous than ever. So they’ve got a big nest egg, because of super, very challenging economic times, people are living longer. So how do we help those members get financial advice? And so the advisor can help them find that there’s some simple strategies that allow them to just get on with life, rather than making it more complicated to, to justify fees year in year out?

Fraser Jack
Yep, yep. Fair enough. Now, apart from taking the complex, making it easy, but what about some of the other behaviors that you see from advice firms that are doing it really well,

Anne Fuchs
I love seeing the advice firms that are using really innovative ways to help support financial literacy that are embracing technology. I’ve even heard about, you know, these really cool digital SOA days and video SOA is anything that we can do advice documents are the opposite of easy to understand. They’re bad enough for us who were in, you know, who are in the profession. So I think that the advisors that are actually finding innovative ways to support that informed consent and understanding is great. And I think, you know, embracing that one good thing that came from COVID was teams and zoom. And so that’s, that’s the other thing, I think, is just that advisors that we know from our research that members love the relationship with what we’ve found from member research around the trust and innovation. And we’ll talk to you I mentioned, obviously, one of the good things from COVID was teams and that accessibility, how much of that supports the relationship, the research we found is that that relationship is what members want, they want to be able to talk when they’re worried. And being able to do that face to face over video is fantastic. And at the port at the you know, the corner of it all is people are happy to pay a fee when they see value. And if you can create simplicity and show the value through that, then people will be talking about you to their friends and family barbecues and the like.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, I love the idea of being able to transfer the the idea of value not just to a financial gain, like obviously a financial gain is required. But then obviously to say that what I really got out of that conversation or that in that relationship with the advisor, was this understanding because now I understand it or Yeah, and

Anne Fuchs
I and it could be actually guess what I can I hate my job. I’m a 62 year old nurse, I’m so tired of working, I can’t stand on my feet. And my advisor has told me I can afford to retire or scale back to two days a week. So it’s not about the money at all. It’s about that this advisor has created a sense of empowerment and relief almost that they couldn’t they’ve got other choices. So that’s certainly what we the feedback we get from our members about the advisors that work with the art members.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. And I look forward to diving into a bit more of that research as we go through these episodes because I know you’ve done a lot of research from both advisors and also members so we’ll get stuck into that when we join when we join you again in the next episode, we’re talking about authenticity.

Anne Fuchs
Okay, sounds like a plan Fraser.