#284 Corey Wastle – Transcript

Ben Nash
Hey guys, Ben Nash from the XY advisor team and today I’m pumped to be here with superstar advisor and a good mate of mine, Corey Wastle. He is the founder of vers wealth based down in the great state of Victoria. Corey and I sort of came up together through the ranks of Syncron. Way back when and yeah, and I’m pumped to to get a bit of an update on where things are at I cheekily pick your brain a little bit before we fire it up the the old recording here, so plenty of gold made. But thank you for joining us.

Corey Wastle
Thank you for having me. Ben. Been looking forward to it. And just thinking about coming up the writing solution how far we’ve come up. But I do remember when we started I remember when you started pivot. That was enough that we started this and I don’t know if you recall, but we were having a couple of drinks at our old like wharf hotel office down in the great state of Victoria planning some time within the cyber Bureau to undo End Times of Change may now we have to be home by five and change diapers and calf, the nightly routine and all that kind of stuff. So there’s no fun.

Ben Nash
All that fun stuff. I’ve got the past I get to be 15 minutes late tonight just saw I can chat with you, Cory. So they don’t need some gold.

Corey Wastle
Okay, all right. There are no promises, we’ll see how we go.

Ben Nash
Mate, I’m keen to firstly pick your brain around, you know, hiring team and recruitment. I know that culture is something that’s really important to you and your business. And you put in a ton of work around that, obviously kicked a bunch of goals in starting your business. As you said a bit over six years ago, you might be coming up to seminars. But now like it’s a, you know, building team and going through some of the same challenges that I’m facing in my planning business, as well. And I think you like me realize that over time, like your your business essentially becomes your team and what you do. So what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned over? Over the years when it comes to building and growing a truly exceptional team?

Corey Wastle
I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Yeah. And kind of to the point you’re making, like hiring for me personally is becoming a much bigger focus a lot more of my time and energy and thinking goes into how do we hire well with consistency. Because like no one has perfected hiring. It’s not that easy, because they’re hiring humans. And there’s a whole bunch of things you got to get right, and a whole bunch of things that can go wrong as well. So I guess in terms of some of the things that we’ve learned, I’ve learned thinking about it. Number one is that when are really fixated on hiring for two things to keep it really simple hiring for culture and hiring high performance. And when we first started, like we’ve had, like he said, with initial obsessive focus on creating a great culture and a great environment, having people aligned to that. And we’ll never, we’ll never lose sight of that. But I think early on, I had the blinkers on. And that was it was really focused on I kind of had this, I guess, naive notion that if there are cultural fit, everything else will just kind of work out. But yeah, but ultimately, you know, to, to survive and thrive adverse and for the team and the clients to really prosper in the way that we want. You’ve got to be both cultural fit in the high performer. And what we’ve done over time is, as we’ve built and refined and can continue to refine, the hiring process is, you know, have elements built in where we’re fixated on making sure someone’s a cultural fit. And then we’re also trying to identify the likelihood or the drivers that will result in someone being a high performer in the role, because I mean, whenever you’re hiring really to keep it really simple, like any employer wants to either find a high performer or someone that can quickly get to be a high performer. And if over time, after investing the time, the energy, the resources, you can’t get someone to be a high performer. If you’re a high performing team, then you reach a point where you perhaps need to make a decision on exiting that person and making some space for someone that can be a high performer like, like an elite sporting team. Yeah. And so what what we’ve done is, I guess the cultural side of things is more the art of the hiring process, and working out, you know, what’s this person? Like? Are they going to fit the environment? Why are they going to get on with people? Are they someone that I want to spend eight, nine hours a day with, you know, is their energy just gonna make make life better and philosophically, or they align with how we do things and see the world in terms of bias and, and we get the team involved in that process as well. So we run a cultural interview with everyone, where there’ll be two, three verse teammates that will have a coffee or a zoom session over an hour and really just get to know this person and they’re just trying to work out how they’re going to be cultural fit. And then we asked that question afterwards. I’m not there. But they all asked that question. If anyone on the team says no, I don’t think they’re going to be a cultural fit. My commitment to the team is will never hire that person. cuz great culture means everyone owns it. Everyone’s got the right to protect it, look after it. So as a team Metaverse, you can actually veto or hire you really legitimately you can and this happened last week, we’re hiring an advisor and an associate, we had an associate I did the first interview with I really liked them, like their energy luck with their about, they went into the cultural interview and I head of ops and one of our associates to the interview, and they both came out said, I don’t think it’s a cultural fit. Here’s why I’m not sure the energy is what we’re looking for. So I said, Okay, well, I respect your judgment. And, and this is a small price to pay to have a great culture and have you guys feel like you won’t, because you do. So we weren’t moving through the hiring process. So culture is really judgment. And then the high performance, we tried to turn more into a science to I guess, to a degree. So we run psychometric testing through a firm called people logical, where what we’ve done is we basically take take a financial advisor role, we’ve taken a couple of high performing advisors adverse, and we put them through the one hour psychometric assessment. And what it does is it tested two things. One is cognitive abilities. And the second is behavioral traits. And we’ve taken kind of the averages of those those two areas, and created what we call high performance benchmarks. And now when we put a candidate who’s an advisor through that test, we benchmark them against those lab performance benchmarks. And we’ve created internally, because we know that those cognitive abilities or those behavioral traits are the things that are more likely to lead to high performance in in that in that given role. Yeah, helps us better understand the candidate and how we can potentially better work with them if we do. So.

That’s a bit about what I’ve learned other things to kind of build on that is, you know, we were just talking about this before, you know, press play here was trying to minimize the amount of surprises. So once someone starts, because, you know, I’ve come to realize that like, you know, my judgment isn’t nearly as good as perhaps I thought it was, you know, five, six years ago before we started hiring, because you make hiring mistakes. You don’t know what at the time, but you learn these over time, and then hopefully, really reflective and you think about how did where did I maybe missing steps in that process? And how can I refine the process to minimize the likelihood maybe something like that happens again. So part of what we’ve done is build this really kind of diligent, thorough process, and it involves play for an advisor, again, it involves like a technical assessment, like a one hour type exam, to see where they’re at where they’re not at, technically, and involves role plays. So they come in, when you make a client environment, we give them a scenario where to give them whatever resources they want, they run meetings, so we can kind of see what they’re like, you know, on their feet, and you know, we’re not going to sit in a meeting with an advisor, once they start and go, Oh, geez, I thought it was gonna be quite a bit better than this. And so, you know, trying to try to put people I think trying to put people under pressure is really important, really important, because it’s easy to interview, well, particularly, there’s not much pressure, but when you put people in a pressurized environment, that’s where you kind of, you know, you can sort the chip from the chaff for whatever they say, you know, and, you know, there was a pre COVID, when we hired an advisor, late 2019, we ran two group interviews, over two nights, six advisors each of the night six or seven. And we had him doing like public speaking on the door, you’ve advised in front of the other candidates in front of us. And, you know, we went from 1210 days to to just over two nights. And that was before we did any one on one interviews. So again, you put that pressurized environment there for them. And, you know, you, you start to see who perhaps now is the real deal, I guess.

Ben Nash
Yeah, it’s interesting. And I find that it’s particularly for me, I find it particularly challenging when when you’re recruiting somebody because by the time especially as, as a business owner, when by the time you get to recruiting someone, you really want to hire someone, like that’s why you start recruiting someone because you really want to hire someone, so then you start talking to people and like, I want every person that I talked to to be amazing, and I want to give all of them a job. And it’s really, plus I like to see the good in people. So it’s like you have these conversations and you want Yeah, you really want them to do well. So you’re looking for the good and it’s like the you know, it’s a bit of that investor psychology stuff that you overplay the positives, and you sometimes downplay the negatives and all these things but one of the a great lesson that I learned from a client of ours actually that did a super successful exit of a IT services business is that they put their candidates through a lot of different interviews with a lot of different team members. And they have a rule that if anyone says no for any reason, or for no reason at all, that it’s just automatically a no because sort of ties in with the derrick service stuff and it’s like hell yes or no. Which makes makes a lot of sense and especially when you are looking for high performance and to to create an an outstanding team or an exceptional team that really need to have that and it’s like If it for any reason, if the little cracks at the front end, if you’re saying then they turn into big cracks as you go through. But it look, he covered a lot of ground there, I think we had a pretty similar experience with the cultural value side of things. And I know that you’ve been supported by the superstar that is Michael back for a long time as we have as well shout outs Mr. Back. But we used to hire people and go on values, you know, values are important, and values are important, and culture is part of that. But I’ve had people and how I learned this lesson is I hired someone that was just so aligned from a values perspective, and was a very, very lovely person, but then she came in business and just could not work like just couldn’t deliver to the work. And it makes it really difficult that you go well, I can see that you want to do it, I can see that you, you are aligned here. But it’s just there’s also a level of output that you need to do. So I think I’ve been fortunate to have a mate, that’s an organizational psychologist by trade. And he’s helped us with a lot of the things that you mentioned, where you have the psychometrics, you do that they’re a little bit of a pressure cooker, but in in a good way to sort of tease that out. Because, ultimately, and like you say, even the pros don’t get this right, you look at the big companies like Google and those tech firms that put huge resourcing into their, their hiring and recruiting and they still don’t everybody that they would they bring in does not work. That it’s challenging for a small business where you’ve got finite resources, time and stuff to put behind your hiring to nail that. But the more you can do, yeah, minimizing those surprises, goes a long way to setting the person up for success. And I think that if you’re, if you’re pushing, like, if you’re screening someone out at the front end, it’s probably better for them than the coming in. And then it being a difficult situation for for everybody. Ultimately, it’s not as much as it’s not good for your business. If you’re bringing someone in, that’s not the right fit from a work perspective, cultural perspective, client perspective as well.

Corey Wastle
Really, really well said. And that’s kind of as, as the owner, that’s kind of one of the last places you want to be essentially is where you’ve got someone that is a real cultural fit. And they’re invested in the team, the culture, the clients, have, they give their all, but maybe they’re just not up to it. They just don’t have the skills or the abilities to be a high performer in the given role they’re in. You know, we have one of these scenarios recently where we let someone go. And you know, that’s not an enjoyable experience for anyone. So again, like just being fixated on how do we minimize those surprises for the hiring process to minimize the likelihood we’re going to be in that scenario is such a focus.

Ben Nash
Yeah, and luckily, I know that you’ve done a bit of advisor hiring recently. It sounds like you, you’re pulling in decent, like sort of candidate numbers and interests when the you know, when you are looking for people, how have you tackled that and got, like, you know, got the message out there so that you can make sure that you’re talking to enough people that you find someone where those ducks are lining up on all of those fronts?

Corey Wastle
Yeah, good question. A few, a few different things. So I mean, we’ve put like the traditional seek ads out and the LinkedIn job ads out and up on the X, Y, job board, they’re probably the three go to places in terms of just being a starting point. And I mean, as you as you know, like you get lots of candidates or lots of applicants, but you know, it’s only a small portion of those applicants that potentially really are someone that may be suitable for the role. So you know, you’ve got to be able to filter through all that stuff pretty quickly, the CVS and the resumes, and so on. I think, from my perspective, rather than just kind of like throwing the ad out and seeking just sitting there and waiting for what comes back, this that’s really reactionary, you want to be as proactive as you can, you know, that old adage of you always want to be hiring. I don’t know who said that. But it made sense. Because, you know, yeah, when you’re growing firm, your success is going to be defined by the quality of people that you get, and when you need them if you’re going to typically need to quickly as well. So you don’t want us to just throw a seek out and just be relying on that and just hoping that something falls in your lap. You want to be out there constantly, you know, meeting people in industry advisors and Associates and power planners and whoever and Bill and, and filtering all the time, you know, and finding those people that you think potentially might be a cultural fit be a high performer and nurturing relationship. You know, that doesn’t mean having coffee every time. But that means maybe finding one LinkedIn sending a message catching up for a zoom or coffee getting on a bit touching base in the future. Or out and like you’d know quite often, you might find the right person, but maybe the timings not right as well. So you’re constantly kind of nurturing a network of, you know, potential University mates is something that I think And, and try and do amongst all the other things that you’re doing.

Ben Nash
There’s a lot, a lot of blades to keep spinning, but as you said, a lot of ducks to line up with that. But obviously something super valuable to get right. So yeah, and watch this space. I’ve just been making a few notes there. So I’ll put a few of those things and stuff. In fact, today,

Corey Wastle
Most of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from you anyways. So, yeah, I’m sure there’s no, it’s not very long.

Ben Nash
Mate, I’m keen to change gears a little bit and talk about your service solution and development, I know that you’ve been at it for you know, a little while, what’s changed what’s changed in terms of what you deliver, or how you deliver what you deliver in? Since the, you know, the early evolution of your business?

Corey Wastle
How long have we got then?

Ben Nash
Clayton told me that I need to keep these succinct. So if you could give us the bullet points.

Corey Wastle
Yeah. Okay. All right. So, I mean, a lot of change, to try and keep this kind of like a high level kind of summary is to work with the evolution of the client experience and the advice process. So we started six plus years ago, and the intent was take this traditional, from my perspective, which was a product focus, portfolio, focus, commission, focus, kind of low value, financial advice, experience, and turn it into something that really is personal, it’s impactful, and it’s valuable. And, you know, and try and do that without the traditional kind of conflicts that have impeded the value of advice and the outcomes that clients get, you know, and really help shift the narrative, what it means to be an advisor, and what it means to get advice, which is the whole premise of why exploits is really in the first place. And so we started, I guess, you know, I’d come out of CBI had a co founder of the Tommy come out of CBI as well. And like we had, we had the intent I just spoke about, but we didn’t have the processes, and the tools and the systems and so on, it really was a process of kind of leaning into, like, what can advice be like, what can the adviser do? How great a coach can they be like, you know, and trying to move away from this kind of two dimensional product, portfolio focused experience, and lean into, you know, the goals, the intentions, the behaviors, the relationship between husband and wife financially, the cash flow, the disciplines, you know, the trade offs, the judgment decisions, all those things. So, we’re kind of been through this journey, which I guess we’re gonna be on forever, where we’re kind of have this curiosity about what is the role the advisor plays? And how well can they plan how much impact may happen, I’m sure you have your own version of this story in this experience, because what you do now would be, I’m sure a well a low version of what you were doing, you know, five, six years ago when you started as well. So we’ve kind of iterated the advice process and the pillars that that’s built on over time. And we’ve got to a point where we are right now where we’re doing an approach, which is based on the client’s values, intentions, and financial wellbeing. So the values are what’s important to them. And at the end of the day, really like what the money’s actually for, you know, family, health, and well being that balance community security, you know, the things that will bring contentment and satisfaction to their life, you know, because we could be helping them make money and great financial progress. But if they’re not contained and happy, and they’re miserable, and they don’t have the things that are important in their life, then they’re not making great choices. If they don’t make great choices, we’re probably not giving them great advice. So we start with the values, then we get their intention. So the things they intend to do or achieve in the future, some advisors are going to call them goals or plans, priorities, we get those, we get up to five, and then the things we plan around and strategize around, we don’t strategize around value so much, but we do around the intentions. And then we get their financial well being. So that’s a measure of how they feel about their financial life.

Because my experience is I’ve had plenty of clients come to us over the years, and maybe they’ve had an advisor for years or had advice in the past, but they’re still stressed about their money, they’re still not confident. So not in control of things are still fighting with their spouse, about the finances. And you can have an SOA or you can have a retirement plan, but still not feel how you want to feel. And the feeling is what you carry every day. So we track and measure people’s financial well being with a score out of 100. There’s 32 questions I do kind of on rapid fire, we’re about four and a half minutes on average. And we get that score as part of the onboarding process. And we get it at different points along the client journey to really just kind of dive into how they’re feeling. But identify where are the gaps, like what are they not feeling great about. And that can be the precursor to a healthy conversation to hopefully resolve it, improve it, and so on. So that’s kind of how the, I guess the intent has evolved into really clear philosophies which are integrated into the client experience. And then what we sought to do is we sought to make that scalable and kind of make it really technology enabled. So that, you know, when I when I first started, you know, maybe jump into it, we call it a discovery meeting at the time, and I’d lean into the you know, what are the important things in your life? What are you trying to achieve? And hey, I can See this, this this conflict financially between you husband and your wife, there’s some resentment here, let’s just talk our way through this. But most advisors naturally aren’t going to lean into those conversations, they’re not going to do them with consistent success as well in a way that’s good for them and good for the client. So what we’ve sought to do is take those three pillars I mentioned, and integrate it into technology. So now the advisor can sit in the office, host COVID. With us, Victoria has been locked down for 15 years, so maybe differently. But I can sit there with the iPad in the clients lap near it up on the screen, and they can talk them through the process of clarifying their values, and how well they’re happening in their life and getting their intentions and defining them and prioritizing them and working through trade off conversations and getting the schools around how they feel about their finances. So they’ve got this rich data to ask good questions. So you’re kind of taking the the artistry of advice, and the bit that perhaps doesn’t come as naturally to a lot of advisors that maybe have the technical chops, but that’s the harder part. But one of the meaningful advice and, and, you know, and build a process where it makes it easier for, for any advisor to be able to do that.

Ben Nash
Mate, I love it, I’ll have to pick your brain on the tech stack around that afterwards. But I think that it is key. And I think that for you, like it’s one of the things that we focus on is that consistency and experience as well that, you know, the more structured you can be with how the advisors are doing what they’re doing, the more that, yes, it gives scalability, but that consistency that you know that each client is going to get something that looks and feels pretty similar is what allows you to then refine and evolve and build on on what you’re, what you’re doing and what you’re doing as a team as well.

Corey Wastle
It’s such a great, great point, Ben, and yeah, I mean, that’s something we really leave here as well. So I think in most advice firms, you know, you have one of a bunch of advisors, and they all kind of do their own thing to allow us to grow. Like one might have a two meeting onboarding process, and one’s got a three or four and one talks about goals. And one just focuses on portfolios and investments and economic conversations, and so on. And then you create these advice silos within your business, which helps with risks as well with your get your business owner hat on. But setting that aside, it also comes with a risk that you don’t have a predictability around the kind of experience that the clients going to get. So no great business is unpredictable. And we want to make sure like, I know you do that when someone comes to verse, we have a real understanding as to what experience they’re going to get, what steps they’re going to go through how they’re going to interact with them, what touch points is going to be, and everything is refined down to like a fine art to a large degree. You can’t, you can’t refine all the conversations of force. But, you know, making sure there’s consistency and predictability to the experience people are going to get and consequently their level of satisfaction, happiness, with the experience. And when you when you when you have an experience, and it’s a process, then you’ve got something to make better. You know, you can look at it and go okay, like, you know, right, so this part of the sequence here, like our conversion has dropped on this part. And here’s what we think we need to do about it. Here’s what it means for the other parts of the process. And it’s kind of like you’ve got this, you know, almost like it’s like something you’re building, right? And you’re tinkering with it, adjusting things, and you’ve got the data that tells you what’s working and what’s not working. And you can’t do that if you don’t have a consistent, you know, one one kind of client experience approach.

Ben Nash
Absolutely. And I think it also supports the team in know that you’ve got, you know, an offshore team plus you bring new team members in Associates, and then when it’s when you’ve got that consistent process that allows you to train them into it so that they know what they should be doing at the right times. And I honestly blows my mind that I don’t know how any business works, where or how the people within a business figure out what they should be prioritizing, or how they should do if you’re, if you’re doing things a whole bunch of different ways. So I know that for me, I’m just naturally process minded. It seems to make sense. I know that other people do do it successfully. So obviously, then suddenly, I don’t but for me, I just think it create, especially when you’re growing and growing, building new people into your team. It’s just something it’s seems to make a lot of sense. Yeah,

Corey Wastle
I think I think you I think if you are growing, and you don’t take that approach, where you’re trying to systematize things and create that consistency, what ends up ensuring on the back of the growth is just chaos, things get chaotic and messy and overwhelming for for the owner for for team and you know, there’s a lot of businesses that start to grow and then it gets too chaotic. So they decide to go back and be small and stay small in life simpler and easier that way. And you know, one of the impediments to growth is the consistency in process and consistency in operations. And, you know, there’s no shortcuts to doing that takes time. But it starts with an intent to systematize things and create the create the consistency.

Ben Nash
Yeah, absolutely. I know, for us, that’s a big focus at the moment there. It’s like, you get to the point, and you need to find great people and bring them in. And then you’ve got, especially when you’ve got a smaller business, you know, a dozen people, couple of dozen people, you can easily figure things out, but one of the things that’s been playing a lot of my mind is that, how do you do it, if you’re five times or 10 times the size that you you can’t have you can’t be diving in when there are issues or you can’t have a, you know, got an ops person that’s able to just dive in and address things. But if you 10x, then it’s just not not working in the same way. And I think I was actually just chatting to do the opposite of monthly one on ones today with our guys. And yeah, they’re going like when you start a business with a blank piece of paper, that you don’t have all of that stuff in place, and you immediately focus go shit, I need clients now, obviously, get some people walking through the door and to do that, and then you’re like, I need to improve that. And then I can do that better. And there’s a bunch of different things that happen along the way. But then you get to a point in your life, we’ll actually need a process around our team development and management, and then how do we get building that feedback? And it’s not just the things it’s like, yeah, it’s like,

Corey Wastle
yeah, this, there’s so much to it, isn’t it? It’s like a great big Jigsaw that you never kind of solved. But I think like, to your point in terms of you know, when you’re kind of scaling and growing much faster and getting much larger, and how do you deal with it, then I think the best way to deal with it is having great people like coming back to the hiring, conversation we started with like, basically, every problem that ever gets solved in a business is solved by human. And every problem that exists, typically, you can trace back to a human as well. And as like, as you grow, I think for a lot of businesses, what happens is the, the average quality of your employee gradually diminishes over time, like when you’re just starting and as a fan or a couple others around them. Everyone’s highly skilled, capable of doing a lot, it’s fast pace. And then as you grow, like what you want to do is replicate those kind of high performing employees. But it’s not easy to skip, bring in high performer after high performance to high performer. But as you grow, and you get these growing pains, if you don’t have the quality of team and people to deal with the chaos that naturally develops, it just becomes more chaotic. So just making sure you just keep bringing in high caliber people with the console problems, deal with problems get stuff done, you know, is I think, like for people like you and I is is the first thing we need to get right? Because if we get that right, it’ll start to make everything else that bit easier.

Ben Nash
That’s right. And I know that for me, it’s like and I think it’s a natural tendency that when you’re a founder of a business that you like, I’m constantly falling into the trap of going, Ah, this needs to happen, I’ll do you know, I need to do this, or I need to do that. But one of the things and I’m really stoked that over the last little bit in our team that we’ve now got some great people that are really capable, motivated and enthusiastic that they can do a whole bunch of stuff as well. And one of the great things that a mutual coach of ours in David Dougan says that he learned from the good Sir Richard Branson is there. He’s a massive they call it a Hoover where it’s like, like some people go or what’s the problem? Or how do we solve it? Or when should we do it? But it’s like, who can solve this problem for us that it’s, I’m really pumped that at this point in our business sort of we go okay, well, there’s an issue here, who is the person for that? And there’s, there’s a lot of who is that you need to talk to about stuff? And, you know, that sort of becomes the job. But yeah, it is good to be able to, like you say you find those high performers. They’re super capable, like, give them give them the, the resources, and then they can solve problems and do things and make everyone’s life easier. Mate, what some what’s the I could talk about this stuff all day, obviously, and will no doubt do that over the next time that I’m allowed on a plane. But what’s what’s coming up for you, mate? What are you focused on now?

Corey Wastle
Well, I mentioned to you earlier on that we’re making two hires at the moment. So you know, where we’re growing. We have we have a lot of growing pains, I guess, which are good problems to have. We we kind of came into January, short on teammates, you know, knowing that, you know, advisors kind of booked out till now but down to like mid late March. You know, if you want to book an introductory chat on our website, it’s a free 30 minute zoom session. You can’t book it for a month just to just to chat to someone if you’ve got an inquiry. So we’ve got these capacity challenges, and we need to solve them by bringing good people So, for the last couple weeks since I got back from the break, like all of my energy, most of its gone into, you know, running this hiring process and doing some of the things that we’ve spoken about the interviews, the cultural interviews, that the psychometric tests, the role playing all this kind of stuff. So we’ve asked this morning, actually, we sent an offer for the associate advisor role we’re hiring for expect yet, I expected the next fortnight that we will have an offer ads for another advisor as well. And perhaps soon after, need another one too, you know, we end up having 110 leads in January. And we we actually cut our marketing budget in half for January, because we have these capacity issues. And then we don’t want to go to 110 leads, and I think Jen is a good time to find people looking for advice, of course, for you know, all the obvious reasons. But you know, at the moment, my focus really in the short term is on is on hiring good people, onboarding them, integrating them into our team culture, into the role setting up setting them up for success, and helping our existing team manage the capacity challenges. So we’re having constant conversations about people’s workloads, their capacity, how we delegate things, I’m actually jumping back on the tool, so to speak, and into the advisor role for the next maybe 123 months, I haven’t, I haven’t done that for about 18 months, I didn’t think I was gonna be doing it again. But you know, just sometimes just gonna grab the shovel and start digging, that’s what the team needs. So, so I’m going to try and balance that in the short term. So these people that reached out to us when they’re, you know, they’re kind of motivated to take control their finances, we can help them boost momentum, rather than saying, Hey, you can talk to us in four weeks, and then six weeks after that, you can see an advisor. So in the short term, that’ll happen, but I guess more broadly, you know, beyond kind of hiring and culture, just a lot of my focus goes into into marketing and growth, you know, making sure that we’ve got the volume of inquiries and leads coming in, we’ve got the right quality of client coming in as well, that we can deliver service to and grow around and, and continuing to build on, you know, the client experience that we’ve built, and, and improve things and, you know, and help the team, hopefully, just kind of improve operations and, and, and so on as well. So, I know, there’s a few hats there on my head right now, that are in the hiring hat. But, you know, they’re kind of the things that consume, most of my time now, I probably spend, you know, maybe 234 hours a week as an advisor, got a few existing clients still looking after. But, you know, largely, that’s where my, where my time is going?

Ben Nash
Well, maybe that’s, that can be the topic for our next podcast when we talk about how you’ve cracked that marketing code. But yeah, there’s plenty plenty on there. And it sounds like keeping you on your toes, good luck balancing that within advisor workload on top of that made, so I’ll do you can teach me that efficiency trick when we when we tap next as well.

Corey Wastle
I haven’t, I haven’t succeeded yet. So we’ll see how we go. I do have a good team around me fortunately. And, you know, if I need to slow things down a little bit, I will, I’m past that point where I’m going to work 7080 hours a week, you know, I got two kids at home, like you do, you know, and just maintaining a good balance in your life becomes like the most important thing. So

Ben Nash
I’m sure I’ll be able to figure that out. Made so I look forward to getting the insights there. And look, really appreciate you giving us some of that gold. My last question for you is that if you could go back to your self thinks six and a half, four years ago, you know, opening the doors and throwing down a shingle for the first time, what would be your one big piece of advice that you’d give yourself back then?

Corey Wastle
So he’s one a great question. I would, I would make sure that I have really good mentors, in my corner. To have consistent conversations with me, I think that was something that I was lacking for a few years early on. And it’s something that I’ve had quite a bit over the last three to four years. And I think one of the byproducts of having that has been that I have been able to be more commercially minded than I was in those early years, like had this, this vision for what advice could be should be and so on. And that really drove a lot of my decision making. But you know, being able to commercialize that and grow that scale that without working 8090 hours a week. You know, being able to pay yourself pay yourself well bring on Team pay them well be profitable. You know, perhaps I could have had I could have minimized some of the some of the pain in those first few years. By you know, having having great mentors in my corner that can help you see your blind spots, and some of those just natural biases that you take in but you don’t Even though they biases they’re just your truth. Your truth is what I’m saying not not the truth but your truth. So yeah, make sure you’ve got great mentors in the corner that kind of walk the path you want to walk and once once they can, can talk me the brutal level of honesty with you I have found them to be the most valuable the ones that tell you the things that you naturally don’t want to hear but yeah, if you internalize those things, it’s quite often so much value in them

Ben Nash
totally and I think that’s the power of a good coach a good network as well and I know that that was something you know, early days the XY community I learned a ton from we sort of came up as well. We’d some of that stuff and then bringing in people that have all walked in those shoes before even just outside of advice to see is there thankfully, it’s all a muscle that you build and flex and that grows over time. So you know, lessons, a wasted lesson as long as you’re taking the lessons so well said Phil about the journey. That’s right, mate. Well, Cory thanks again, buddy. Really appreciate you sharing your time may keep kicking those goals.

Corey Wastle
Thank you, Benny. Appreciate the time mate and looking forward to having to be with you at some point soon.

Ben Nash
That’s fine, bud. All right. Cheers team. Bye for now.