#335 Daniel Donovan – Transcript

Fraser Jack
Welcome back to the xy advisor podcast. It’s Fraser jack here and today I’m joined by Daniel Donovan. G’Day mate.

Daniel Donovan
G’day Fraser.

Fraser Jack
How are you?

Daniel Donovan
I’m going very well mate going well, how about yourself,

Fraser Jack
Yeah, tremendous thank you for asking. And now we, we wanted to talk all sorts of sort of things today about your journey through financial advice in where you’re heading in the future. So give us a bit of a round off to start with, tell us a little bit about where you are at the moment, what you’re doing.

Daniel Donovan
I work with a fantastic company called verse wealth. I am the head of operations and one of their financial advisors as part of the product team.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. I love the fact that you’ve got two heads head of operations and financial advisor, we’re gonna get a little bit more into that as we go through. But But let’s go back in time, let’s talk about your career and your journey. Tell us where it all started. You know, you left school, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Daniel Donovan
That’s a great question phrase. And I think like a lot of people, I didn’t have a great idea at the time of what I wanted to be. I applied AI. During the uni days, I worked at Apple in one of their retail stores here in Melbourne. And I was there for five years and in lots of different capacities, across sales and technical support and the like. And I guess that’s where they I really first really got my first experience in a really culture based company like Apple, literally value that people value their customer experience, value their systems and processes. And I love my time now it’s one of the one of the best jobs that I’ve had so far, after uni, jumped out of uni into a into a great role in a consultancy firm, again, not knowing what I really wanted to do, but thought I’d give that a try worked in a bit of risk and compliance, still wasn’t really fulfilled, want to do something more in the money space moved again into a funds management role in operations, which I enjoyed the operation side of it. But again, the business didn’t quite align with my values. And then I thought, well, I looked at financial advice early on in my career. Most of the roles are quite salesy, and very focused on targets and more than numbers rather than the people. And that’s where I thought, well, if I’m going to move into advice, I’m going to find a company that aligns with my values, and does it the way that I think it should be done. And funnily enough phrase x y via the podcast was one of the first resources that I that I looked into and utilized in part of my journey, what are the roles you’ve applied for advice require experience, even at entry level, like most jobs, and I thought, well, how do I get my foot in the door, and the thought learning that other people’s experiences would be, would be a good way to start. So 6070 have any podcasts they were at the time, many more now, obviously, but binge listened through all of those. And that’s what kind of kick started my love of advice.

Fraser Jack
Well, I love the old longtime listener, first time caller scenario here. Back, when it goes back, throughout, I will get I’ll get to the stuff of value, because I think they’re really important. I’m gonna dive into that a bit deeper. I want to go back to the Apple store the culture, obviously, you know, there’s certain you know, these large businesses, if we talk about the McDonald’s, McDonald’s type thing, you know, when things are set up, there’s lots of systems, there’s lots of support network teams, you mentioned a really cool culture. Tell us about those learnings from that environment. And I want to know a bit more about how you use them today, obviously, but I want I want to know that that structure that was involved in that larger business, because a lot of people come into this in a small business way. And they haven’t had that, that experience through a really strong culture business.

Daniel Donovan
I can, I can sum it up for I guess my first day at Apple, I remember walking down the corridor of the shopping center. And then this, this roar came through the shopping center. And it’s 830 in the morning before the shops open, I thought that’s a bit strange. Anyway, turn the corner into the Apple Store. And that same raw happened to me and it’s how, I’m not sure if it still happens now, but Apple welcomes all employees with a large topic called a warm welcome. And it’s just everyone going absolutely crazy excited wooing clapping cheering for you as he went to the store. And I just remember being thinking like, this is my first experience of working here. And it’s such a cool welcoming experience to already feel a part of the team not having that anyone else there. So it’s kind of from there, you know, the team was small. We spent a lot of time together, great leadership around, you know, going above and beyond for customers really focusing on you know, under promising over delivering and, you know, people would come into the store and just see all these people everywhere and they think how do you how do you cope it’s just noise it’s people everywhere and we’d like to have it all the time organized chaos, everyone knew exactly what they needed to be. Everyone knew exactly what coverage areas they needed to look after. What questions to ask. There was no ever pressure any sales or anything like that. So it was very much people driven. And one of the key things for Apple is that the best soul is there P Boom. And they really did live that, throughout my journey, they’re always seeking to give great feedback, always seeking it and, and giving it as well in both ways, not just from from teammates, but also from from customers as well through the net promoter score system. So a lot of those a lot of those key pillars, I guess that all coming back to I guess people in the first instance, Apple really believe that if you look after your people, they’ll look you look after they’ll look after the customers. And that’s something I think is really rings true. In today’s day and age with a lot of businesses,

Fraser Jack
there was something that was consciously talked about, you know, the fact that you’re gonna get looked after here, because we want you to look after our people.

Daniel Donovan
Absolutely, yeah, I mean, the fact that I could go through an entire day sell a pair of headphones, and the person next to me could sell eight iPhones. And we were celebrated the same way just kind of indicates that we were talking about the product, because he loved it. And because we really wanted to give that great experience to customers to really help them in their lives, rather than trying to push a product on that might not be right for them. And they’re not gonna be times where I’d say actually, it sounds like based on what you’re talking about, that an iPhone or a Mac isn’t actually what’s best for you, in this in this instance, and, and people just believe that, honestly, really, I think that’s, you go into a shop like that, and you think, Well, I’m just going to be sawed up sold and cross sold. And I’ll walk out with eight things I didn’t need in the first place, you know, with a top spec computer to do a bit of internet browsing. So, you know, it was that kind of customer first culture that really was was celebrated daily in not just the interactions you had with customers, but also, you know, in the way that we were, where the metrics and the targets worked as well, or the lack thereof. In that sense.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, just listen to your story. If it feels to me, like you were paid to do a job at the time, but the learnings from working in that practices will continue to pay dividends to you for the rest of your life as you go through your career.

Daniel Donovan
Absolutely. Fraser 100%. I just think, if if a lot of people I mean, I can’t speak to the culture, now, it’s been a while since I’ve worked there that if everyone had gone and gone through that experience, working customer service, you know, with that kind of business behind them that supported their learning development into just being a better person, and, you know, progressing and growing and developing, I think, I think they’d be a lot better be working people in this in advice and other industries, yeah,

Fraser Jack
probably also gave you the opportunity to, you know, from a tech background point of view, you know, to engage in the ways that technology can be used in the user experience or customer experience,

Daniel Donovan
spot on spot on, I think, you know, I always love technology growing up and, you know, enjoying learning the new things, but also see the technological development in the store itself, from the point of sale system, to the concierge system to the repair system to the ordering system, whatever it was, Apple heavily embraced that. And it just got better and better throughout my time there to really enable the team members on the floor to be able to better help customers by knowing you know, who’s in the queue? Where are they? Where are they? You know, there was no kind of waiting area necessarily, you could just wait anywhere in the store, but you would know when your next appointment would work? Would they be based on the system and a brief description of what they were wearing and where they were located generally in the store? So often customers walk up and go, Michael, and I got it is Michael, how did you know? And we were just say, I just knew it was you? Just so we didn’t reveal the secrets but but yeah, the amount of the amount of effort and time and detail in our own go to around that was? Yeah, definitely life lessons for in the role that I’m in now head of operations of a growing business, always kind of having that one eye on how can we do things better? How can we improve? How can we be more efficient? Because it’s definitely easy to get in the day to day of being busy and seeing clients and helping people and, you know, taking that time to step back and think how can we be doing this better? Is it so important?

Fraser Jack
Yep. And I’m going to get into that a little bit more as we go through because I think there’s there’s definitely a clear pathway that if we can draw between what you were doing there and what you’re doing now, I want to just quickly touch on you mentioned being aligned with your values and understanding what your values were, I guess it’s sometimes hard to work out what your values are. Did you do some work with that? Or did you did you have some clear ideas of who you wanted to be?

Daniel Donovan
Officially, I guess razor I mean, I guess through throughout my experience at Apple and other, you know, growing up and the people that I spent time with I guess I kind of learned more about what they were and what they what what is important to me and not just from a personal side of things, but from a work side of things and often those those two things can be very interconnected as well. And you know, it’s it’s you have to be somewhat different at work and put your change who you are it can often be quite challenging to spend 40 hours doing that and then going home a different person. So it’s definitely something I have found that at some of the roles that I’ve done where I’ve had to be a different Daniel at work to who I am at home and that’s what someone that I want it to be somewhat of a place that embrace who I was for all the person I was, you know, all the weirdness that comes with being a person and embracing all of that. So. So yeah, things around the honesty pays the, you know, the integrity, all the key ones that, I guess that, that a lot of people do share. But I guess for me it’s really focusing on people first and making sure that you know, they look after that you go out of your way to help your teammates you go anyway, to be honest and transparent and getting to the truth quickly and accurately reflect a lot of the values that I hold, reflect and a lot of the values that first hold the five key ones that we that we have every day that are not just words on the wall that are very much lived and shared and, and celebrated. You know,

Fraser Jack
this is a really interesting point, because a lot of people don’t understand or get to that bottom of what they stand for. And they get into a job and they just think, Oh, well, it’s work and but they have to be somebody different. As you mentioned the different Daniel at work. When you when you started working in verse was that something that was strong on the conversation when you were talking about studying studying your work? There was a career? Yeah,

Daniel Donovan
absolutely. In terms of how the valleys you know, what they are what was expected of them, you know, and I’ve seen them develop over the journey as well. But it just very much felt it might be sound a little cliche, but very felt like I was I was home in quotation marks, I guess we call it when I was at first it felt like, I didn’t have to be anyone else I could just, you know, the things that were important to them were important to me that like I said earlier, the the focus on transparency, the focus on client, focus on team, the focus on improving, making things really simple. Those are the things I just thought were for me no brainers but to see a company celebrate that, and to focus on that and to live that each day. It just made my integration into the team that much more easy.

Fraser Jack
Yeah. Tell us about that journey. And where did it start for you? And how did you? How did you have a start gonna start with this?

Daniel Donovan
So I actually initially read an article in the money money management magazine, I think it was called at the time, back in mid 2017, where there was an article written on verse. And I remember reading that article thing of this, this business is really impressive. And I thought, well, I don’t, I don’t know anyone in the industry, I just thought I’ll give it a shot, I’ll reach out to a few different people. So versus one, there were a couple of others at the time, purely with the expectation of just getting to know the person getting their experience, similar kind of, of what x y did for me as well. But on a more personal level. And I reached out to the business in Korea was very gracious with his time, we caught up for a coffee at the time, you know, and that was just really easy conversation. Again, lots of synergies across what what was important to both of us. And whilst there was nothing, I didn’t go in with the expectation of a job or anything like that, that was something that I wanted to learn from Cory and and get his advice and mentorship. And over that journey. You know, we kept in touch. And nine months later, the person that was in the role that I started with, versus as a Client Experience Manager looking after implementation, she decided to go on a holiday for the nine months around the world. And Cory offered me the gig and said, the job is yours, if it’s if you’d like it. And I thought I jumped at the opportunity. I really thought hang on this is exactly the type of business I want to work in who do advice the exact way that I wanted to that I think it should be done. And yeah, the rest is history.

Fraser Jack
So where were you working at the time, when you when you had that to inquiry reached out to you Come along, come along and be

Daniel Donovan
I was in a funds management business at the time working in the city in an operations role. We managed money for religious organizations and charities. And yeah, it was they didn’t have as much of a focus on the customer and didn’t really see the the end result as much working in operations. Which is which is kind of what sparked my interest in in maybe doing something more for the, for retail style customers that you know, that would really value the advice and, and get a lot out of it.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, I always relate this back to human being that some of human beings just don’t want to be you know, in front of a customer or client or another human being and get their reaction and we’re quite happy to work in that, in that that back office or that area where they you know, administration, you know, like doing funds management or or picking stocks whatever might be, and then other people just really love that. Being able to see the client’s face when you they achieve goals or whatever it might be and, and being part of that story. Which is also you know, I love seeing that too. So tell me about that start then you started with the client experience, their birth tell us about the first day and he got in, you know coming into that business.

Daniel Donovan
Finally a funny you say that phrase because my first verse was eerily similar to my first day apple. We were working at the Old World Trade Center building down in the city, and I was waiting the way Gary and I heard Justin Timberlake playing. So that’s that’s quite strange. And they knew one of my favorite artists is Justin Timberlake. And I walked into the office and all the teammates are on zoom back in Michael Beck for those that you know him, Cory was there. Back, he was on a zoom in a cafe, I think in Brisbane, just grooving and jam. And like, nobody was watching, you know, that stuck up, you know, pictures on the wall and got my desk already. And all these other small things, all but all put together just made me feel like I was part of the team already. So yeah, absolutely nailed the first day. And, yeah, it’s I guess from there, that’s, that’s cemented for me the the decision to work with us and, and to know that I made the right decision on that side. And for me, it’s always been trying to then give back to as our teams grown at the time, it was myself, Cory, and Doreen, who is one of our teammates in the Philippines. And now we’re a team of I think 16 or 16. Now, four and a bit years later, so yeah, that focus on people and culture. And you know, being a great teammate, is something that that’s, that’s always been deeply within me to give back to those as as the team grows.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, mazing first day, amazing experience to be welcomed in the new, they instantly feel like you’re part of the part of the team. Tell, tell me a little bit about your journey throughout those last four and a half years, what you know, as your roles progressed, as things have changed?

Daniel Donovan
Absolutely. So I started in that implementation role. That was my first role and advice. So I took a lot of time at the start really, learning how the advice process works about the industry about the way verse do it. Spent a lot of time in meetings with Corey, learning from him and learning the way that he delivers advice. He’s a wonderful adviser. And all his clients would say so, and just a great a great mentor and teacher as well. And a great, great person all around, really. But it’s it’s been a lot of time with him in those meetings, to develop my advisor skills of being an advisor was always a goal of mine, to see my own clients, I did really enjoy the back of house and the operations and doing that side of things. But being able to see the impact of the advice was also really appealing to me as well. So it was about a year later that I actually ended up seeing my first client was on. I remember specifically a Navy guy. They say you never forget your first client. Absolutely lovely, did a bit of advice on his military super room, setting him up with a personal investment account. And yeah, it was it was it was a shock, to be honest, and being a year into advice and being able to see my first client but Corey had amazing trust and faith in me, again, really shows that the values of the business and you know, never settling and always trying to improve and be better and, and you know, the most of your growth occurs outside of your comfort zone as well. So and that just that was a wonderful experience. And since then, my time has been split, I guess, between seeing clients and working on the operation of a business as the head of ops. You know, I mentioned earlier that I’ve got a couple of hats, I guess the operations hat has about 843 other hats within it as as does a couple of other roles we have at verse so you know, whether it’s it or systems or processes or compliance or payroll, you name it, I probably do some of it. But funnily enough, you know, working in Apple has its has its perks. Absolutely. But as soon as someone finds that used to work in Apple, you become the default IT guy. And all the iPhone and iPad issues all come out of the woodwork and which you’ve got to be careful who you tell Fraser, if you worked at Apple,

Fraser Jack
I want to know what we’ve told everyone. I want to know, the Genius Bar set up in the office.

Daniel Donovan
I should I should should

Fraser Jack
get people to make appointment. All right. Yeah, you’re absolutely right, that split that that working with your split hairs. Tell me about that role is that you’ve sort of evolved into that role? Yeah, again, people, you know, when you get to work somewhere for a long busy people think, Oh, you’ve got strengths in that area, you got great organizational strengths, you’ve got great, you know, taken it strengths and that customer service overlay of, you know, making sure the clients are getting a great experience. How does that work with your advisor? How does it 5050? Or what like, what sort of a timeframe is?

Daniel Donovan
It? That’s an interesting question for me. So I guess it’s depending on the nature of the business, I guess, and more and more that the operation of businesses is taking more and more of my time at this at this point. You know, I got into the operations role based on the business not being as kind of well operationalize as I thought maybe needed to be at the time and had a great client experience. It just could have been done a lot better, more efficiently with better systems and better technology. We always try and, you know, we want to have a technology driven system, but advisor lead, it’s really technology enabled, that’s that’s a better way to put it, I’d say technology enabled advisor driven. And, you know, given given the expansion of technology over the last, you know, even five years, even 10 years, even last year, depending on on what area you’re talking about, but really, you know, focusing on that client experience and making sure the business is well operationalized, to grow. So it’s just something that kind of came naturally to me or is naturally of interest to me. It’s something that naturally that I enjoy doing. And Cory saw that as well and is more of a higher level person, whereas I’m more of a detail person in that side of things. So we worked well together in that sense, to really well operate, operationalize the business at that time. So over the journey, it’s kind of ebb and flow. But I’d say at this point, it’s definitely more ops than then advising at this point, just given, given how quickly a team is growing and all the different, new and exciting things that we’re we’re coming across.

Fraser Jack
How important is it is for someone like Corey that to give you the space and the budget to go and put these systems in place, because often there’s, you know, there’s time and budget or two considerations to introducing new technology or new systems. Every time there’s change, it’s like, you know, you mentioned before, you know, always improving as part of one of the mantras within the business. But that often means that there’s, you know, we’ve just got something settled in, it’s working in there, we’re going to, we’re going to blow it up and change it again. How important is that, from a management point of view for what Cory does, to be able to say, you’ve got some space and some budget to go and put this in place or to make changes,

Daniel Donovan
he has the utmost faith in all teammates, within verse, and that’s one of his true strengths, I guess, I guess, if the way that he thinks about it is if you hire great people, you let them do their thing, that they’ll they’ll get the job done, I guess. So. That’s always been our mantra. And that’s something that really, as a teammate, you really want to do your best for people like that, and give back and even go above and beyond most of the time to, to kind of repay that trust. Even when you instinctively think Hang on, I’ve only been here six months, should you really be giving me this much power and leeway and broke to to make all these changes. So absolutely, I think that’s a fundamental part of of have a business that wants to change and wants to be better wants to grow, is that that type of leadership that does embrace change that does, you know, doesn’t tie themselves to any piece of software or system or, you know, and it’s also about making sure you give yourself space to do that, it’s easy to just be so busy that, you know, if it’s working, we’ll just, we’ll just get to it at some point, you know, at first we ritualize the the improving on working on the business, not just in the business, you know, it’s a full day month, most times for, at least Cory and I on, on how we can improve things, and focus on what the initiatives we need to be focusing on through it through the objectives and key results. System OKRs that I’m sure Cory has mentioned on this podcast before. So yeah, enables us to stay focused and keep making those improvements and keep keep finding ways to do things better, even though we think we still have a fantastic learning experience, we just think we can always be doing it better. And you know, it’s important not to rest on your laurels in in, in this ever changing ever growing business.

Fraser Jack
Yeah. And into my point as well, the thing I noticed that you guys, as you are prepared to take that time, once a month to do that, you are also prepared to put some money behind those changes. Because obviously, anytime you do something like that, bring on new software, there’s changes, but there’s also no cost. And I made I sort of feel, I don’t know that the numbers, but I feel like you’re one of these businesses that are prepared to invest over and above some of what some of the others do to, to into that technology.

Daniel Donovan
Absolutely. And the money side of things is important, but also just the team impact as well getting you know, when are 1516 teammates, and getting them across all the change management, hey, we used to do it this way. And now we do it this way. And these are the reasons why. And this is how it’s gonna impact you and you what you do on a day to day basis. And this is the new system you need to log into. And you got to stop doing that. No, we make so many changes to the client experience for the better over the course of 12 months, I’d say more than most do in you know, in years. And that’s just because we’re not tied to anything and we have a fantastic team that embrace those changes and and all one you know, whilst their main role might be an advisor or it might be a power plan or whatever that might be. They still have a really a never settle is the value that we haven’t never settle mindset around around getting better as a business and, you know, those changes are we seek feedback and an input from team. You know, where it’s needed and necessary and where it’s going to be valuable to make sure that you know it’s not just our opinion, my opinion or Korea’s opinion. It really is a team effort. To make sure they’re all really on the same page and embracing the changes as, as they see quite moving forward.

Fraser Jack
Yeah, a lot of advisors might be worried about changes, because it requires retraining clients as well. Like, you know, you’ve got a client experience, and then you go and change it until the clients deliver sort of, is that something that you can? Obviously we consider it but you do talk to clients about the changes and what they’re doing and, and how it’s improving? And do you use that client feedback to make those tweaks?

Daniel Donovan
Yeah, definitely. We’re constantly seeking client feedback, you know, with each, what we call them journey sessions, or review sessions that we have with clients, whether it be annually by annually, try annually, we’re always asking, as part of our pre meeting survey, how we could be doing things better, or asking the Net Promoter Score question, you know, so they know, so we know how they’re feeling about our service. Really make sure that’s more proactive than reactive? And absolutely, you know, we have different levels of technical expertise, technical expertise in our client base. Some are fantastic. Some, some are not as, as with most practices, so, you know, when you’re thinking about, Oh, we might launch, you know, for example, a client portal, you know, that’s how’s that going to impact the, you know, the 30, or 40 year old versus a 50 6070 year old client. And really thinking about, well, it’s got to make sure that, you know, it’s an enhancement to the entire client experience, not just how we do it, and how it’s gonna make our lives easier, quicker and more efficient, but how it’s actually going to benefit the client and make it easy for them to do business with us. You know, for example, we always try and use phones as much as possible where, you know, try to try to get on the client’s phone, not into their email or not onto their computer, we get so many emails, so many, you know, so much clutter, we really want to meet clients where they are and where clients are, is on their phone. So if we can text clients a document or get them to sign it there, or you know, a quick text message and say, Hey, are you still good for this meeting, rather than email, it just just was one of the many examples where we think well, we that’s a conscious decision that we made to shift towards that. And feedback from clients has been been very well received to say, thank you for getting out of my clutter inbox. You know, it’s just easy to get in touch with you guys, knowing that that’s an option.

Fraser Jack
It’s a fantastic option. I love it. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the NPS net promoter score around the work that you do just on that feedback from clients, but then you turn it into, you know, reviews, good reviews, NPs net, Promoter Score referrals off the back of that, tell us a little bit how that part of you their business and how that all works.

Daniel Donovan
That’s a very good question phrase that I get, and something that we spent a lot of time and effort and, and thought into systematizing and making a process out of all of those things. So as you said that the Net Promoter Score, we measure that at every before every review session, that’s a client must do the type home survey in order to get to the booking system. And those two are linked. So there’s just one link to play fills out the survey, it automatically redirects them to currently they book in a session. So in the past, we had clients do we have two links, and clients would do one or the other. So finding ways to encourage or in this case force clients to get that feedback to ask that question means that we know where we stand with them. That then links into the Google review side of things as well, that was a big focus for us to really enhance our presence on Google. I think we’re up to 134, or five star reviews now. And you know, we’re very much proud of the all those reviews and the lovely words that clients say not just about the advisor, but also you know, the teammate that’s implementing their advice, or the power planner, or whoever it might be, it’s a it is a real team experience. But that’s all built into agendas. And you know, we have email templates to get people to take them directly to the Google review landing page, where they all they have to start doing is type the email, sorry, type the review straight into it. Again, if you just say, Hey, can you leave us a Google review clients got to searchers then find ways to Google review button and what’s my login details. And if you just think of all the different steps the client has to get to, they’ll just put it into the too hard basket. But if you just make it so it’s, it’s almost too easy, or, you know, remove all obstacles for the clients to do something for you. It just means that there’s really leaving them no reason not to do it. So, you know, we get a fantastic net promoter score that then leads into the Google review. And off the back of that we have a fantastic client referral system as well, where again, technology enabled where we introduce, or clients may introduce friends or family through a landing page that to an email that comes from verse that. That then they learn more about us and if they feel like they’d like to book in they can rather than, hey, here’s my number of a friend can you reach out to them and you call them and they say to you and I didn’t know you were calling and so there’s all these different different parts to it, Fraser That you know, a lot of time and effort goes into and this is what I hope Our system comes back to the objectives and key results. One of our key results for one of our objectives objective is provide a world class CX, the key result is increase our MPs, from x to x. And then the actions for the back of that, to actually, you know, to drive the increase in those numbers. So keeps us targeted, it keeps us focused on what’s actually driving the change there, to make sure that we stay on track and focus on the right things, because a lot of businesses get into the trap of trying to start or try to finish 100 things and finishing one and a half starting eight, where we’ll start at six and finish five, because we’re just hyper focused on on what’s important to us. Rather than starting off the different things where we might get a 10% increase in efficiency or client experience.

Fraser Jack
When the final of the world class cloud experience, by the way, I’m imagining imagining all those, I love the review idea to rather than a testimonial, I think I think reviews are better when they’re a better word, because testimonial just means it’s going to be nice, whereas a view review, there’s this charge, it could be getting a one star, you know, like, obviously, you’ve done. So you’re pretty confident they’re going to be giving you good reviews, but the review from a, from a consumer purchasing point of view of all I’ll look at reviews, because they’ll it’s not just testimonials, at no point, you’re looking at testimonials, they’re all going to be good. But reviews are great, because you get, you know, somebody might not have had a great experience. And they’ll say it. Now, obviously all of that, that great system that review that referral, that offering an introduction to friends, etc, has led to a huge amount of growth in the business. And obviously, you mentioned that when he came on, there was a couple of people there and now your day and tell us about that growth in the people coming on. And how that and how that referral system know that new clients coming in and they’re getting good reviews on Google has led to such a such a high uplift in the business business where you need to grow to 15.

Daniel Donovan
So yeah, that’s it. Yeah, it’s just been another four years now since I’ve been in the business. So it’s, it’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time as as, as you’ve mentioned around the reviews piece, we spend a lot of time on our marketing as well to make sure we we get the right strategy there around getting our names out there and making sure we’re available to be searched for and appear high on Google rankings. And there’s various different strategies that we implement, that has led to us being able to more comfortably rely on our leads each month and how many we get and where they’re coming from. Again, we have great systems and processes in place to track where they come from, where our best ROI is, where it’s not where we need to focus on because I think we have 11 or 12, different Calendly links where people can book in, and which are all different sources. And then we can track where those those leads come from, to know where to focus on. And if that obviously leads to needing more people. And you know, what Cory was saying a lot of the clients when I started all them, he needs to focus more being on the business rather than in the business. So bringing on a couple more advisors. By the time COVID hit, we went back to three, I think we had a couple more at the time, and then went back to back to a team of three. And it’s kind of since the end of I say the end of COVID, or end of this first lockdown in the second half of 2020. Where I think for some people that pandemic is heighten their awareness around their money and made that made them want to seek out advice to maybe get a better understanding of where they where they sit, you know, are they on track. So from that side of things, we focus a lot on on finding great people. And that’s a lot harder than I think we thought it was going to be finding great people that are really aligned, that are high performers that can kind of step into day one and hit the ground running. So you know, it’s been wonderful to see over the time, you know, we we used to just have advisors and we had some teammates in the Philippines that I heavily integrated into the team who had a lot of their implementation and paraplanning work. And you know, to now having a couple of associates we’ve now got three main advisors in the business plus Corey myself are also part time I guess, advisors, plus a couple of associates plus a plus eight, we have now eight in the Philippines. So it’s it’s been wonderful to see the team grow, especially, for example Fritzie our she’s our Client Experience Manager now the role that I was doing when I started she joined the team nearly three years ago, having never done advice before whatsoever. didn’t really even know what superannuation was. So she started and from there, she’s now learned all the implementation, the technical side of advice to the point now where she’s leading a team of three other implementation teammates, and mentoring and training them on how to on how to implement advice. So if that kind of thing that really that fills my cup and fulfills me, you know, whilst I don’t see as many clients, I guess from a team side of things, that’s, that’s where I can still get the same sort of fulfillment, I guess from that from those people, people developing and growing and, you know, being a small part of their journey over over the time.

Fraser Jack
Yeah. Now, tell me about these teammates, because you, you know, when you walked into the office, the first day, you, you were here in the local Melbourne, Melbourne office, and it was very much around and then getting some teammates in the Philippines. And then tell us about that, having teammates, I guess, around the world and around different parts of Australia, and how that sort of, you know, works for you guys and how it’s developed. And, obviously, you know, there’s a lot of businesses now that do it. But I guess back in when you started doing it, there was a lot of people that were before COVID, everybody was wanting to be in the same same location.

Daniel Donovan
Absolutely. I think for us, it’s always been normal. So if we didn’t really have to adapt to it, I mean, we would jurien was our first teammate in the Philippines, she was there on my first day, so and, you know, we would catch up with her daily at that time. And as I mentioned, she was heavily integrated with a team as much as anyone. And I think for us, that, that, that being able to do things on Zoom, and, you know, still have those cultural experiences over, over different locations. You know, whether it’s, you know, a virtual mystery murder, the zoom session, or you know, whether it’s a catch up on a Friday, you know, on Zoom for a drink or two, whatever that might be, in a way also benefited us to a degree in in when COVID hit when the first lock had happened in Melbourne. For us, it was very much business as usual. Most of our meetings were already on zoom with clients clients prefer to meet that way, we always gave them the option of coming into the office or not. But most of them chose to do it on Zoom, it was more convenient for them. And that meant that during COVID, it just meant a few of our clients that would always come into the office, we would just need to teach someone how to use Zoom and, and that process. So from a teammate point of view, we still have the cultural rituals that we do with people that meet in the office, it’s just virtual, we definitely value the face to face don’t get me wrong. And as an example, we just had our first Philippine teammate retreat a couple of weeks ago, where the eight of them all met up in Cebu there’s, they’re across three different locations, the Philippines, but you know, some of these people have been working multiple years together, but never seen each other face to face. And they all met in person for two and a half day retreat. And that was super valuable for those team members to be able to have that face to face interaction, because it’s definitely part of over the COVID experience, we’ve noticed that you lose some of that, to a degree, you can’t keep all the cultural side of things virtual all the time. When we we can so yeah, don’t get me wrong, we recognize the value of the face to face side of things, we still make an effort as a team to go into the office a couple of days a week all together on the same days to to have those those water cooler moments, as you might call them or things like that. They just don’t get it home. And you know, that’s that was evidenced is that the Philippines retreat a couple of weeks ago, but But you know, now we’ve got women advisor in Brisbane le so you know, we’re really wanting to be a national business with, you know, teammates overseas as well helping us and you know, doing that virtually is has many more benefits than it would on the con side of things.

Fraser Jack
Yep. Fantastic. And you mentioned that three advisors, three full time advisors to working on in the business we sell from Korea and Associates as well. Did you say associated advisors coming through as in professional years? Student?

Daniel Donovan
Absolutely. Yeah. So we’ve got Josh and Stu Josh’s just finished his professional, you actually just doing the the final checks now before we officially appoint him and Stu is, I believe next year is going to start his professional year, or the year after. So you know, they’re wonderful resources for the advisors in the team. And they’re off just fantastic teammates we didn’t add associates in. And that was one of the other rituals we have in place called capacity planning, where we look at the team’s capacity and and where is it stretched? Where we fit spending our time? Where can we be better spending our time. And she was a first associate that we brought on January last year. And it was off the back of their capacity planning where Ash one of our other advisors was spending about 20 hours a week taking the introductory chats and doing his own strategy work. And we thought, well, if we could get someone who would just take those introductory chats to the business and do all of the strategy work for the advisors, and that would free up ashes time. When we talked about it, we thought actually that’s that’s a no brainer. So that having those kinds of good rituals and systems in place, it’s like it As the planning has led to just you being here adverse and off the back of that now there’s, we have Josh, and there’ll be more associated before before too long. But yeah, being able to bring a social into the business and really grow and nurture them as advisors and have them be able to sit in meetings where available and learn from more senior advisors to really develop them as as advisors, I think is is very rewarding. And a great thing for both the advisor and the associate.

Fraser Jack
Yep. tell you more about the capacity train and the capacity planning process that you go through planning that you go through, but also, how that looks for you over the over the short term. Is it, you know, plenty more growth on its way?

Daniel Donovan
Yes, we hope so. I mean, I say we hope so there’s definitely a plan in place around that. So yeah, it’s it is an hour session we spend all together, we all fill out an online Excel spreadsheet that goes to the different areas of time that you could spend, whether it’s with new clients, existing clients, implementation, power planning, we break it down quite substantially to be able to really narrow down to where that time is going. And also just gives a good chance for teammates to check in with each other. It’s not often your how you’re going busy. Most people say busy, but how busy is busy? Are you drowning in work? You actually, you know, more of a seven out of 10, you can kind of pick up some slack. And to be able to know, you know, which advisors are overwhelmed, you know, which associates are overwhelmed, you know, what part of the business do we need to get more slack to or give more assistance to perhaps it just is really beneficial, though, as as team to know who do we need to look out for or, or the like, so, as with most businesses, we go through really busy times, and then not so busy time. So it’s really in those busy times where we can really focus and go Well, okay, things are really getting busy at the moment. We don’t want to let the water boil over the outside of the pipe. So what are the things we need to focus on? Where do we need to take from what do we just need to do to make sure that we don’t blow up the team? Because we’ll always focus on team first. Rather than growth? We don’t want to grow with the expensive of team that’s that would be counterintuitive. So but yes, absolutely. Growth is on the agenda. We want to be, you know, across other cities in Australia, we want to have more advisors in Melbourne and be able to support the team around them with with more associates and more teammates in the Philippines helping us from a power planning and implementation perspective. So yeah, the FY 20 to 23 is gonna be a big year for us. But having brought on Anna and Ellie, in the first half of this year, the last half of 2122. The plan is would be to bring more of those more more wonderful advisors to the team. But you know how long that takes hopefully not too, not too long down the track. But we really want to make sure we get the right people. First that you know, there can be really high performance and as I mentioned earlier, hit the ground running on on day one.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. And with that always improvement attitude, what are the things that you’re working on within the business now for sort of the short term future.

Daniel Donovan
So for the for the next 12 months phrase, it’s for us is really about simplifying our process, we feel like our clients do so many different things from when they reach out to when they finish their implementation. We just think that could be so much better. People spend way too long with us, we think, you know, it can be anywhere from 90 days to 180 days, depending on how complex I guess your implementation is. And I think, for any professional service, I think that’s just too that’s just way too long. So a really big focus for us over the next 12 months is, is really simplifying that process. And don’t get me wrong, I think I talk about it a bit in the sense that I’m a bit hard on on ourselves and how we do it, I think we have a fantastic current way of doing things and quite an experienced and clients love it. I just think we that never settle mindset just has me thinking that it could be at least 50% better. And if it would be 50% Better than then you know, the sky’s the limit from where we could take it from there. So really just focusing on better opera opera operationalizing I heard that word earlier operationalizing the client experience to improve it even more, and really not having anything not being tied down to anything. You know, at this point, I think we’ve been improving things where we can around the edges. But it might be things we might need to make more wholesale changes to areas of the business in terms of the way we do things in order to really to achieve those efficiency, but with the same view of always having, you know, how does it impact the client has an impact on the value we deliver to clients and making sure that is is always improving. But at the same time, it’s just how do we better deliver that at more scale with less manual intervention, more automation more, you know, systems and processes that are that are valuable. I think a lot of businesses get caught up in the new shiny piece of technology and go oh, that looks great. I’ll do that and then it just adds 30 minutes to them every client but it only adds 2% have, you know, have an overall value? So that’s that never, I guess, two of the main pillars for us growing the team, and really, really simplifying the way that we do things to make it easier for clients to interact with us.

Fraser Jack
I think there’ll be a lot of people reaching out here afterwards, exactly how you’re doing that, because I think they might be on the agenda of quite a few, quite a few people over the next sort of six to 12 months. That push it out long term, what is the business look like? Do you have any long term strategy plans to be you know, something in the future?

Daniel Donovan
Oh, that’s a good question. Fraser. I think for us, you know, where, if you’d said, Where said, where if you said, we were here, where we are now, five years ago, I mean, I think we’d be pleasantly surprised. I think maybe we would maybe would have thought we’d be maybe a bit further ahead than we thought we weren’t just given how we think how wonderful our client experiences. So I think things have taken a little longer, perhaps than we thought. But at the same time, I think we’re at the point now, where we have a really fantastic client experience. And being able to put the right people into that means that we can kind of scale very easily with a marketing strategy that we have in place. So those two key pillars, it’s just about finding the right people. That’ll be the focus for us moving forward. So yeah, longer term. Could could we see this across all capital cities? Absolutely. You know, beyond that, at this point, I don’t think there’s much more definitive plans in place, but I think we’re just focusing on you know, getting these next, you know, 1224 36 months, right. Getting those those people on board and, and growing from there.

Fraser Jack
Fantastic. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your journey through to date. Of course, there’s TVA as this goes through. If someone wants to continue this conversation with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out and find you?

Daniel Donovan
The best way will probably be either my email, Daniel at verse wealth got Comdata you I am on LinkedIn as well. Feel free to reach out to me there. And yeah, happy to have a chat to anyone who’s keen to learn more.

Fraser Jack
Thank you so much for sharing your journey. It’s been really you’ve been really generous and we really appreciate it.

Daniel Donovan
Thank you, Fraser. Appreciate your time.