#278 Thabojan Rasiah – Transcript

Ben Nash
Hey guys, Ben Nash from the XY advisor podcast here and today I’m really excited to be here with Thabojan Rasiah He is the founder and principal advisor at Rasiah Private based out in Melbourne. Thabojan. Thanks for joining us, buddy.

Thabojan Rasiah
Good to be here. Yeah, good to see you Ben and great to be on again,

Ben Nash
Mate, your a big friend of the show. But I don’t know people say that I’m a better interviewer than Clayton Daniel. I’ll let you be the judge at the end, you just let me know. But I’m keen to um, can you chat a bit about your service? I know you do things a little differently and unpack some of the learnings and how that’s all come about. But before we do, I’m keen to selfishly pick your brain a little bit on growing your team and the Yeah, the people side of your business. I know for a lot of people, it’s it’s a big challenge at the moment, we’re talking about this great reshuffle in the in the in the marketplace, a lot of good businesses struggling to hire ours included that we’ve you know, been on this recruiting campaign for it seems like forever, but definitely really heavily in the last six months. So I yeah, like we I think we all recognize as business owners, and even as team members within a team that, you know, the team ends up being the business like it’s like the crucial part of what we do and how it gets done and how we support our clients. I’m keen to unpack like, what are some of the the key lessons that you’ve learned on your team building journey?

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, look, I mean, building the team is so such a challenge, because as you said, the people are incredibly important for the delivery of everything, you know, we’re a people business, we’re helping, just real people. And, you know, having the right team members is critical for the delivery of that. And I guess, like in any business, you know, having the people, the right people to work together as well, as is a challenge. So, yeah, it’s, it’s really hard. And I don’t think I’ve got any answers of how to do it. But I do know that what we’ve tried to do is not just look at people on paper, but really trying to get deeper with them. In in a sense, it’s similar to how we work with our clients, but really trying to get deeper with people to understand what’s important to them, and making sure that the drivers that they have for coming to work are in alignment with what we do in the business. So I think that’s really important. As well as knowing that they’re going to gel with other team members as well. So depending on how you run your team, knowing that whoever is going to come in is going to fit in with that. So for example, we have an approach where we try and keep it very flat in terms of our structure. And I’m happy to sit there, you know, licking stamps, if I need to, to send things out to clients or, you know, wrap Christmas presents, you know, me and the other senior advisors, some Oh, and we said, we got together and caught up for four hours and wrapped wrapped books to send out to clients last year. And, you know, you do what you got to do. So I mean, from our cultural perspective, we need everyone to be comfortable that it’s not about us as individuals, it’s about the clients at the end of the day in the business and getting done whatever needs to be done. So you’re on the sleeves up, you know, you help each other out. So that’s one of the things that’s as an example of we always look for that those characteristics. The other thing is we we look at character, character, and what’s important to people we because we take a heavy focus on purpose and values with our clients, where it’s not just about making lots of money. We think that our staff and team members also need to have a similar approach. So we look for those sorts of things. In terms of, you know, you are mentioned earlier, not just looking at people on paper as well. I think skills are skills and experience and knowledge in particular areas, you know, is important, and it helps but I tend to prefer to find aptitude. So people that want to learn people that are good at learning people that have the right way of thinking about things because and I’ve seen this before, I’ve picked up staff before, who ended up being really really good. And they found it hard to get a role because they didn’t have explain experience for example. But but we sort of said well, that’s okay, we’ll teach them that and lo and behold, we hired them and they they picked it up, you know super quickly and you know It actually didn’t, didn’t didn’t impact impact, their ability to do the job, whether they knew explain or not beforehand, what they needed to show was the ability and the desire to want to learn, and the ability to learn. So I think that’s, that’s again, how we approach it anyway.

Ben Nash
Yeah. And and practically, how do you do that? Because, you know, you mentioned a handful of things there, you talking about alignment, you know, the cultural side purpose, also aptitude, ability to learn and pick things up. For me, I find it challenging to, to, to assess all of those things, when you’re having conversations and our interview processes has evolved significantly, I’ve been lucky enough to have the help of a really good mate of mine, who is a organizational psychologist, and he helped us sort of pull out what are the core competencies for the role. And then there’s a bunch of like recognized ones. And then there’s all these questions that you can ask around, you know, situational type questions and give examples of things. We also do a bit of psychometric testing and profiling. And even we’ve got it like a work sample in there. But I still find that the big gap for for individuals is that how do you have someone like you say some of those things that your ability to pick things up and really to work well in a team and to deal with challenges and setbacks and those sorts of things? And like, he can ask tons of questions, but I don’t know like, it’s, yeah, I just go shit. Sometimes you don’t know until you suck it and see. And then if you have, you know, a bad experience with with getting the wrong person, that’s bad for everybody. And you know, you think of the time impact and the costs that come with doing that. It’s like, total nightmare. So it’s, you’re trying to do everything you can but I just go there’s just like, the No, I just wish that there was a test. Or you could just stick a camera on someone and follow them around for months, see how they work and leave and stuff. But how do you actually tackle those sort of less apparent traits and attributes?

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, I agree with everything you said, it’s, it’s so hard. And you can do, again, I don’t have any answers, I actually don’t know, the way that we have done it is doing it in different ways. Early on, I just, you know, talk to people myself and found people that already knew that sort of thing. I then used recruiters, you know, a specialist financial planning, recruited help with a couple of paws which, which work to a certain extent. Excuse me, I’ve also used one of my business coaches, who’s, you know, I’ve had different business coaches for different things at different phases in different stages of the business. And so tapping into their expertise has been helpful. So one of those coaches helped recruit for our operations person, and it was very much about identifying the rights, the way that they think, as opposed to anything on paper, because it was more of an operations role, not an advice, related view. So, and I went through a whole lot of psychometric testing, numbers of interviews, as we did as well. And then I’ve also had another business coach, where we’ve done a different type of testing more around motivation, testing, and things like that, to compare what motivates our people. There’s this, there’s a system that we use, that was really insightful for me a couple of years ago called motivation, mapping. And so one of our coaches introduced that, and we’ve used that with all the staff that come in, to help each other understand the other team members motivations. Yeah, which was, which was, that’s been really insightful for me, actually, that the premise of it just really quickly is that we’re all motivated by different things. And a really good example is I like thinking of ideas and how we can take the business forward, and how we can do do some do something better, for example, so I’m always coming in with with ideas. And so you know, in a team meeting, I’ll be like, Oh, guys, you know, I’ve thought of this, you know, what do you think about this bubble by and I’ll be going on about it, just say that they’re not really getting getting up in a bad about it. And so I just kept talking about him and gone. Oh, gotta tell them more about it. You know, why isn’t? Yeah. And then, after doing these motivational mapping thing, I really realized that the drivers that I have are different to the drives that they have. So because we’ve recruited Well, a lot of the team and people in different roles, there are some people in the roles where they just they’re motivated by getting stuff done by ticking things off their list. And so if I’m talking about a new idea for me, yeah. I’m gonna do the work. Yeah, they’re like, here we go. Again, he’s got another idea. I’ve got a bunch of work sitting on my desk and he’s crap. Yeah, that’s something that you know, isn’t really going to help so. So now in those team meetings, when I do start, I go Hey, guys, By the way, if I’m going on about something, and you’ve got work that you need to get done, just let me know. Because that’s what I will, you know, I can go on like that. So that was really insightful for me that, that that exercise,

Ben Nash
huh? Yeah. Look that off posters. Yeah, sure. Because, yeah. God, just gonna say it’s all about that how people think I know that valve. And we got this through our business coach and their view on wealth dynamics, profiling. And it’s the same thing that you’ve got different energies of people. And for me, that’s been a huge help in communicating and explaining things to different people or different seats in that in the team. But yeah, it’s all those. Yeah, all of those things that are important to food, because it’s great to have great team members. But then you want to have a great team that works well, effectively. And it’s like two different things. There’s well that I know for me, one of the big learnings over the last little while is you go okay, that’s great, let’s get great people, but then you, you have to translate that to say how do we work? How do we work really well, too? Together? Hmm.

Thabojan Rasiah
Definitely, to to answer your broad question in terms of how do you how do you cut through, you know, we’ve got tests, we’ve got different processes for recruiting and things like that. But I haven’t found any way that helps apart from having lots of conversations. And having lots of conversations, I guess we call them interviews don’t mean recruiting. So having lots of interviews or conversations and, you know, getting off topic getting off, get getting into conversations that’s not about the job, or the role, getting to know people at that deeper level that has really helped. And yeah, I find it really hard to, to go through the, the interviewing the, sorry, the, the recruitment process, I’d say. And so that judge of character has only that worked by having, you know, some of those extra conversations, you don’t still don’t get it right all the time, but it definitely helps. You might pick up on some any go, you know, there’s something that just doesn’t fit there. And, you know, our ops guy, Peter, you know, shout out to Peto who’s just started moved down from Sydney, started with this in August, but moved down in January to start with as he’s, you know, because he was based in Sydney, it was a he was almost trying to find reasons why he shouldn’t come on board, because I could just say, there’s a lot of risk in that in hiring somebody that’s gonna move, every conversation he just kept. You know, it just made sense. And then it just, he had the right experience. And he had the right way of thinking and going about things. So yeah, that that was a that was a really interesting piece as well. Yeah.

Ben Nash
Well, maybe based on the fact that he’s prepared to move from Sydney to Melbourne, I would say that he’s deeply committed. So you should commend that, I would say, because that’s absolutely. Last Last question on hiring is just around advisor hiring. And it sounds like you got a great, you know, Senior Advisor in the, in the business already, as well as the, you know, senior team members that, you know, we’re looking to hire advisors at the moment. And it’s something that I’ve found challenging to find, you know, you’ve got a reasonably unique sort of service offering business and an approachable, I wouldn’t say words, probably unique in a lot of ways, but like uncommon as well, but I found that there’s a lot of advisors that have a lot of experience, and they’re probably fantastic advisors, as advisors. But when you think about all of the things that you want for your role, and, you know, finding them right, not only a great advisor, but a great advisor for your business and clients and team and approach, like, what would you say the the key lessons that you learned around that? Or what do you think is really important in going down that path?

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, so with hiring advisors, you know, you know, I’m again, not that experienced in that. So I don’t I don’t have any the answers for you, you know, you’ve been through it a bit more than me, but we’ve got Yeah, it’s myself. And then I’ve got one senior advisor, and she’s the only advisor, I’ve had to recruit. So shout out to Simone, she’s, you know, really experienced advisor, smart lady. And it was hard to figure out, you know, find the right person. So I came across some running through a recruiter. But it was really the conversations again, again, with her, it was multiple, she didn’t want to jump into a role either. She was being quiet, taking a time to find the right role and something that that felt right. So yeah, that helped to a certain extent, because you’re not you’re not running to this timeline of our they want to quickly get a job and we want to quickly hire. It was kind of a you know, it took time we had multiple conversations had some coffees really got to understand motivations, you know what’s important in life, you know, and getting that right alignment. And, and our business is quite different to what she was used to as well. So, as you said, the way that we give advice was was very different to what she was used to. But she really, she really connected with the way that we do things. So she could see why doing things a different way might actually be be beneficial. And, you know, she’s been with us for a couple of years now. But she still says, I’m still constantly trying to, you know, try to not undo but trying to change the last 20 years of doing things a certain way. I can see why doing it this way, Mike is better from her perspective. And so it becomes a motivation and a positive. And I think that’s important as well, because sometimes if if you’re recruiting someone who’s moving from a different environment to a new environment, the I guess the automatic thing is that it’s a negative that you have to do things differently, or you have to change the way you’re doing things. Yeah. So having having someone who’s willing to do things differently, even though it’s going to be a challenge, and it’s going to be harder. Yeah. And connecting with it at a level where they go, No, I can see why this is better. And, and I want it and I want to do it, because it’s better for clients and those sorts of things, then all those things help. I think all those things help.

Ben Nash
Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely takes a bit of unlearning, if I know for me personally, even just in, you know, the approach and the education work that we do with clients that you sort of as a financial advisor, you learn to explain things in a certain way, or assume a certain level of knowledge around things. But yeah, it doesn’t, doesn’t always fit into that nice, neat box. And that’s why, you know, I think these newer, different sort of advice models are getting traction with clients. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t always make it super easy when you’re in that seat, either, but may thank you appreciate you sharing the the learnings around that. So I’ve taken a whole bunch of notes there. So how get stuck into a few of those off the back of today. But I know that you’ve you’ve you’ve been on the podcast a couple of times before, but for anyone that isn’t across that, can you just give us the sort of higher level like your service solution? And how did you actually go about sort of coming up with that and building it out?

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, yeah. So I guess if I, if I go back back, to give a bit of context, you know, I was fortunate to start my second or third role in advice with a guy called Kevin Bailey, who ran a company called the money managers, really successful guy really ethical guy ran a very good business out of Melbourne here. So I was fortunate to join, join his business became involved in, you know, part of the new business side of that, of that as well. And then, you know, became an equity partner in that firm as well. We then joined with shadforth, which was, you know, for those who know, shed for a really good bunch of, you know, independently minded boutique firms that got together high quality firms. So, I’ve been fortunate to have have had some really good experience with some great people. Another another person that people might be more familiar with, who’s still active in the industry, David heights, you know, worked very closely with David for many years. And still still catch up with him on various things here and there. So, so that’s so that’s one thing I was really fortunate to have. And one of the things that I’ve picked up and learned through working with some of these guys is, you know, the way you do things today isn’t the way it’s always gonna be, you know, it’s always challenging the status quo. It’s trying to find better ways of doing things, especially in an industry, which is becoming a profession that is so young. And I think that that mindset is something that is just innate in me now. That always trying to find something better and find something different, it creates a hell of a lot of problems as well, because you can’t just sit still and focus on doing what you’re doing. But our long term and long term, it works out really well. So I’ve generally got that mindset of always trying to find ways of doing things better. And I’ll always feel like yeah, we’re not doing things very well. We can always improve, we can always improve, we can always improve. And then people from the outside sometimes say, you know, you’re actually doing you know, what you have to improve it’s going pretty well. But I think you know, that’s that’s yeah, I’m sure you you feel like that as well running a successful advice practice. So, when I left I’ve shed for the shadforth business, which is a great business really good quality advisors delivers, you know, really good advice. For me, it was about when, when, when, when shadforth listed and then got boba WF it, it was, you know, huge, you know, I’d have a massive group, all that sort of thing could enable that it became the size where it was harder to move and change. So that whole that I had where I want to be able to challenge things and introduce new things, it becomes harder and harder in a large business. And for me, I think one of my mentors said, you know, can you see yourself, you know, they could tell that something wasn’t quite sitting well with me and said, Is it because, you know, can you see yourself here in this business for the next 10 years. And then when I thought about it that way, I just couldn’t. So when I left and left, left the business to start fresh, which is really hard decision. I started with a back blank piece of paper, and in some ways not being allowed to take any clients with me and start from scratch, which again, was massive challenge. And not having made the decision not to buy a book, it was all a blessing in disguise, because I said, You know what, let me what I didn’t want to do is start the firm and just do the same thing somewhere else. I wanted to try and get the opportunity to try and reinvent what could be. And and that enabled. enable me to kind of say, in an ideal world, what would client what would you know, ideal client experience look like? Put compliance aside put put the way that we’ve given advice in the past aside, and how can we do it and and a kind of landed me on the conclusion, which has gradually developed and become stronger over the last few years.

landed me on the point where we effectively want to just be adding massive value to clients. There’s there’s a selfish element in that as well, we don’t want to be doing work that’s not that impactful. I guess there’s lots of ways to make money in our, in our business in financial planning. And yeah, that’s all, it’s all fine. I think for me, I said, it’s not just about making money, it’s about you know, having impact in the world and having the impact in people’s lives. And so, in order to do that, my assessment was we need to approach it in a particular way, we needed to be not focused on products, but focused on the clients that we have. And a lot of these things are consistent with some of the messaging out there from from, you know, other advisors and you know, I think in the XY group as well, but, you know, really challenging ourselves on that to make sure that there’s nothing that’s going to push us in the wrong direction. When we’re, when we’re trying to do add add that massive value add to cart. So that’s kind of a high level premise, which which I think is important in the way that we try and try and run the business.

Ben Nash
So when you were when you were working through this process of, you know, blank piece of paper, are you thinking about the client experience? I’m just interested because I know that a lot of people in the XY community are either you know, considering starting businesses or constantly revisiting their service offerings and what they do to help them Did you start with a specific client in mind? Or was it targeted? You mentioned, you know, and I know we’re just chatting a little bit offline, but about like clients that you can add massive value to, like, client experience is obviously very, very important. But then when you’re building that advice, practice, it’s like, what? What are you actually going to do? Like, what problems are you going to solve? How did you tackle that part of your service development?

Thabojan Rasiah
I think the reality is with that is that it’s going to it’s going to change and evolve. And for us, it definitely has, we’ve just last year, we introduced a new adjustment to the way that we service our clients, which which, you know, we’re testing out, and I think it’s in the, in the, with the aim of delivering massive value to clients and doing more for clients. And adding more value to them. So it’s, I think the starting point is always understanding why you’re in the business and what you’re trying to do, why and why you’re doing it. And, and so so the way that we the way that I was able to try and come to that is remove the things that you have to do that you don’t think you know, for the client. So for a good example, is the way that we bring our new clients on, we onboard our new clients without an SLA, we have an ongoing service agreement, to do things for them to help them with particular things in their life. And when they need an SOA, we do an SLA. So starting with a blank piece of paper enable me to go hang on. So is the statement of advice valuable to the client, I came to the conclusion is that the statement of advice itself is not it’s an important piece when you’re making certain recommendations, but the client doesn’t value it. What adds the value in my mind was the client experience the conversations, we’re having the delivery and the execution of the advice, and connecting it with the clients purpose and values. That’s what identified as being actually valuable to the client. So that led us to then saying, well hang on a sec, do we need to push a client through a process? So we can give them a statement of advice, collective fee? And has that actually been a valuable exercise for the client? And have we focus too much on this thing in the process? That’s actually not that valuable to them? And so that’s the way that we’ve, we’ve redesigned it now. And we haven’t had a single client who said, Hang on a sec, I wanted a statement of advice. How come I haven’t got a statement of why. So, so yeah, that that’s a good, that’s just an example of, you know, just really thinking about what does the client get the most value from? I know that if I’ve got to spend if the business has to spend 10 hours doing a statement of advice that that you’re using to explain everything to the client, I know that the client would get better value from 10 hours of conversations. Yeah, maybe with the advisor or members in the team, explaining the advice. So yeah. It’s a diff. Yeah. And that sort of the test that we’ve always said, Is this a, is this valuable to the client or not?

Ben Nash
Yeah. And obviously, you know, your business has been going for a bit. And you’ve, you know, we all start somewhere. And it’s great to have a great plan around what we’re going to do. But as for our clients, we know that, you know, life doesn’t follow our nice, neat, straight lines. And then we learn stuff on the way and things change and all that sort of stuff for you. If you think about your service, what and what you do for clients, and how over the last sort of four and a bit years, what’s what are the been the biggest changes or shifts in in what you’ve done? And what what sort of what were the insights that drove those?

Thabojan Rasiah
Good question, probably the biggest change has been this change in how we serve as our ongoing clients. So as I said, with our new clients, we don’t push them through a process really quickly, we don’t charge an upfront financial planning fee, we basically start the engagement as an ongoing client from day one. And we’re not push we’re not pushing them in a particular direction, because we need them to. So we can do an SOA or so we can get paid on far more so we can get an insurance commission. So we’re not driven by any of those things, which really allows us to let the client circumstances guide how we deliver that, that onboarding process. So from an ongoing client perspective, however, you know, a client’s been on board and you’ve got a relation with them, you know them pretty well. And now, our job is to make sure that they achieve the things that are important to them and make adjustments along the way. So I guess in a world that potentially we’re trying to make advice, more affordable, and we’re trying to make it more efficient. We’ve gone from annual meetings to four, four touch points, four key areas that we do catch on during the year. And so our workload has increased significantly. But the aim with this, and this is to be proven, but the aim is that clients are going to get a lot more value. And we will be far more structured in the way that we deliver our advice. And we don’t miss anything that that that’s really important to the client, I think it came about because you know, you have your your typical annual review process, which is, you know, pretty standard. And but what I found having done sort of an annual the review process for 15 years is that, you know, you go into the meeting, you got an hour, an hour and a half. And there’s a whole lot of things that if you’re covering everything, there’s so many things to cover, right? Yeah. But what tends to happen is the client ends up talking about the things that they want to talk about and raise the advisor addresses those things, but then focuses on the things that they want to address and raise. But there’s always a whole lot of things that just get a bit of lip service, if anything, or just don’t get done. And so without having the structure around delivering all the things that the client needs, it’s easy to miss things. And I think that’s not necessarily from the perspective of having to do particular things. But for us, most of the value that clients will get is that they don’t have to worry about money anymore. And they know that they’re going to achieve the things that are most important in their lives. And a large part of that comes from knowing that your advisor is going to take care of the things that need to be taken care of whether or not the client remember Zona so yes, client, knowing that we’re going to go through this four side four, four stage cycle during the year, and they know that we’re going to address these things with them. You know, the the concept is that they’re just gonna go well, I don’t know, I never have to think about this stuff. I just,

Ben Nash
yeah, what I was told to, which is a good place to be, right.

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah. So as long as we can deliver that, with efficiency, I mean, you got to be able to be able to run a business profitably, so that you can exist for your clients in the future, so long as we can deliver that, that, you know, efficiently, then then that I think is going to be there, that’s a change that we’re seeing. We started implementing it last year, obviously teething teething problems, and you do the best you can do. So we did it, okay. But this year, we’ve sort of ramped it up in terms of putting structure around that, and really making delivering on that as much as possible.

Ben Nash
I love that, because I think that like, Yeah, and I’ve said this a few times before, in conversations with people that I think, you know, historically, evolution of financial advice that in, you know, back in the 90s and noughties, you sort of needed a financial advisor to get financial products, like it was like a necessary thing. And then we evolved into this age of planning where it’s like, you know, people and I, and this is obviously generalization. Because there’s always been a lot of fantastic advisors out there to deliver it really well for clients. But generally speaking, you know, being focused on delivering financial plans, and the pretty bar charts and pie graphs and stuff, and people are getting all excited. But as you know, like, when the rubber hits the road is when the action starts happening. And people walk out of the office, like it’s great for them to walk out all excited. But we want the dollars in the bank account, the investment income building up, you know, the deck going down all these things. And I feel like we’re now at the next evolution where it’s like people are coming for these results. Like yeah, a plan is a plan is a plan. And there’s a lot of value in going through a planning process. But ultimately, the plan is a tool to help people get the outcomes to get the results that they want. And yeah, I think you know, I have a big focus on that stuff in our business. Great to see more and more people doing that. And I think that if we, if every financial planner is delivering amazing results for our clients, and that’s just going to massively increase the, you know, public perception, I suppose. But ultimately, the ultimate public perception is important, but ultimately the actual value and outcomes that people are getting, and then more and more people are going to turn to advice and think for a lot of times we talk about this glass ceiling of you know, 20 kanimozhi is getting advice or whatever that I think that that’s the key to unlocking that and smashing through so yeah, I think that’s for us that people they there’s like almost like a jewel accountability that they’re coming to the results if we’re not delivering the results. And it’s like, why are you paying like, why are we paying you if you’re not doing what you said, Now, sometimes things are out of our control. Sometimes it’s back on the clients, but I think that as as planners, the more we can get behind having this amazing solution that is going to deliver those results. The better our clients are and the better it is for growth and the future of our burgeoning profession, I suppose to be a little bit cliched there, but yeah, great.

Thabojan Rasiah
So 100% It’s something there’s something you touched on there then which I think is important. which is, you know, consumers getting the value. And one thing that’s helped helped us, for one thing that’s helped force us to be really, really conscious of, of making sure we’re delivering value is telling clients and being willing to tell clients, if you’re not getting value from our relationship, then you shouldn’t be a client, you shouldn’t be paying for something unless you’re getting massive value. It’s kind of really bad for, you know, financial advice to tell someone to pay for something if they’re not getting value for it. So just like that our services as well need to be really valuable to the people we’re dealing with. And I think consumers are going to be want be more discerning around getting that value. And if they’re not getting that value, it’s going to be you know, they’re not going to be as willing to be paying for it. So which is which is, right, I guess that’s that’s the way it should be.

Ben Nash
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, totally. May, I could honestly chat about this all day. And I know that you’ve unpacked a lot of that stuff on the on the podcast before but really appreciate you sharing your insights there. My last question for you is that if you could go back to your bright eyed, bushy tailed self that you know that on to you the day after you received your ASIC registration, when you set up your business, basically, they thought of the company, what would be your your one piece of advice to give yourself at that time?

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, that’s a great question. hard one to answer. But I think it would be. And that’s always hard, because knowing what you know, now, you can always answer those questions. Right. But he would, it would be trying to be as clear as possible on why you want to why you’re doing what you doing, and, and how you want it to look in the future. You know, the way we do things now, and even the sorts of clients we help now has shifted. It’s not it’s not, it hasn’t shifted so much that I think we got it wrong, but it could have been clearer and better. And I think as well, saying no to things that maybe. Yeah, I think saying no, no to things is always is always really hard to do when you’re starting, but it can it can set you up because saying yes to too many things. Take, you know, does take you away from the things that are most important, whether that’s, you know, business development, or spending time on the business, you know, getting it right. You know, you need, it’s hard because it’s a balance between, you know, having revenue when people want to work with you. You know, to be honest, that, you know, early on, we did take on clients that we probably shouldn’t have. Maybe because we were we were doing too much work for them. And they weren’t paying us enough or something like that. And we haven’t worked out how much we need to charge and enough and things like that. So, but but that that holds you back and the I don’t know if it’s possible to know that upfront. But I think it’s important to be thinking about those things to try and avoid that as much as possible. But

Ben Nash
absolutely, yeah. And I think it is I actually just made a note of that to go like, why why are we doing what we’re doing? Like, what is it for our clients? What is it for our business? What is it for the team? What is it for us? Personally, I think it’s easy to lose sight of that, because you just caught up doing things and doing the next thing and doing the next thing. And there’s always a next thing and 10 next things in front of that thing. So I think it’s a good idea to take that stop. Because when you apply that lens, it does bring a different level of thinking to Yeah, if you can, if you can start again, like you say, and I think we have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves all the time. Obviously, change management is challenging. But the good thing about advice is that you could completely change turnabout face on your service model. And for the next person that walks in the door, you tell them that this is the way that it is and they don’t know that, you know, it’s the first time you’ve done it, and that you’ve been doing it differently every time and for me that was something that always I always enjoyed that about financial advice. He can make some little tweaks and people with obviously with good intentions, but like people don’t know that it’s any different. And then it’s like a test tube that you can, you know, tinker and measure and see what works and what connects and what doesn’t. But yeah, interesting times ahead. Thabojan really appreciate you sharing your insights, buddy. I look forward to seeing you continue smashing, right.

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, and I great to be on Ben and learn from each other and the community. So no, it’s really great and good stuff on the podcast. Good to have you on and I don’t know who’s better yet mate – whether it’s you or Clay, but…

Ben Nash
You can tell me offline. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure that I relate. It’s really quite awesome, man. Okay, thanks again. I’ll catch you next time.

Thabojan Rasiah
Yeah, brilliant. Thanks for the chat.