AdviceTech Podcast #19 – iComply2 – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the XY advice tech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis and the guest joining me here today to deep dive into the iComply2 or IC2 for call dudes suite of tools has been a practice manager who like me sees loads of repeatable processes that can become otter magic, started the software game back in 2017. And he’s the first head of a licensee that I’ve discovered with a Calendly booking form on their website, so you can make a time to chat to him. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Anthony Lyon.

Anthony Lyon
Thank you. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Peita Diamantidis
Not at all you are most of most welcome. Look, we’ll dive into all things tech in a second. But just to get to know you a little bit better as a user of technology. What is your most used emoji do even use emojis?

Anthony Lyon
I couldn’t lower it down to one because I’m such a big emoji user. Nice. So it can all depend on who I’m talking to. So being a completely remote business, we use Microsoft Teams so nice. It’s quite often that I’ll give a thumbs up for good work in the team. Yep. If I’m talking to friends or family on text, there might be a Hawaiian shuckers or even a perfect hand signal signal. Yes. And then in marketing email, so we’re creating our own marketing emails. I’ve recently used a bomb emoji.

Peita Diamantidis
Nice. You know what the emojis particularly in subject lines even can really catch people’s eyes, can’t they with email? I’ve noticed that with myself, I’ve started doing it with our clients. I’m like, gonna get your attention with an emoji and this subject, I need you to click

Anthony Lyon
Yeah, definitely. It’s actually I, you know, when I’m coming up for marketing ideas, I’ll go and look at other large software’s and try and get ideas of the things that they’re doing. Yeah. And so I definitely sort of steal a lot of those ideas from from the big guys.

Peita Diamantidis
Me too. I’m the I’m a avid watcher of my own behavior. You know, why did I click on that? Exactly? That sort of stuff. All right. So that’s your emojis. If you had to delete everything off your smartphone and just keep three apps, what would you keep?

Anthony Lyon
Yeah, I’ve actually been trying to do this myself. So I’ve got rid of all the socials, getting the screen time down. So if I had to narrow it down to three, the first one I would be keeping would be Microsoft Teams. Again, it’s all that that’s a staple of all communication in the business. Secondly, I would keep Spotify. So sitting here in the office by myself, I need some background music to keep myself entertained. Yeah. And the third one is actually a bit of a shameless self promotion here. But we do have an IC to a projects on a mobile version of the app. So I need I need that app to make sure it’s made sure it’s working, make sure it’s improving. And you know, just to dwell about the product. So I couldn’t delete that one and leave it leave all the users behind.

Peita Diamantidis
All in right, we’re all in together. I love it. So let’s dive in. Let’s dive into the tool. But let’s start a bit higher though and get just a sense of where this tool sits in the advice tech marketplace. You know, so Who does it sort of normally play alongside? And who might you be compared against? In a general sense?

Anthony Lyon
Yeah, I think I’d probably I think it sits in this unique space where we’re focusing on really connecting, connecting teams. So it’s a bit different to your traditional advice. Software, really is trying to connect the teams in the project management and the for sale management space.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. So the project management thing I want to dive into straight up because I could go on a rant at managing pipelines and and, you know, backlogs in pipelines and where it gets stuck, and how much capacity we have all that sort of stuff has invariably been really hard in financial advice. It’s, it’s, we can have tools that will give us the individual list of tasks, you know, so your poor power planner knows they have 85 plants they need to create, but any sense of where things are at for the clients and across the board and the stages, you’ve got to sort of do yourself, you got to use Trello, or something like that. So yeah, because that what prompted you to create that part of the tool? Correct. So

Anthony Lyon
in previously, you know, advice business, I was using Asana, and I absolutely loved it, you know, compared to some of that traditional advice, software’s Asana was just so easy to use, you know, nice, build your advice template, and assign the tasks and you can drag and drop and the functionality was just so much better. Yeah. The limitation I found with Asana and monday.com, and click up and all those sorts of the different apps was I couldn’t really integrate it with my CRM. So if I was working on a project, and it was for, you know, Joe Bloggs client, I couldn’t assign it to a job boards clock. Okay. So that’s where we sort of build out the project management, which is very similar to on Asana on a Monday, but integrated with x plane, so you can pull through your clients and assign it to your CRM.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, nice. So it’s sort of giving that extra layer of oversight, explaining what you’re doing, or it’s giving you that insight, correct.

Anthony Lyon
It’s an even, you know, every practice is going to be doing their own projects that aren’t quiet, around servicing the client. And especially if you’re writing your own a for sale, you got to compliance managers that cannot use any of those, if we’re talking heads, plan threads, and tasks and things, so they can’t have to go out and find their own separate software anyway. Right. And so what we’ve done is really bring all those components into one, one, project management space.

Peita Diamantidis
Nice. And it’s a it’s something that the potentially the listeners may not become aware of. I know that in a lot, I mean, in our practice, we have as many projects as we do client work, like we’re constantly doing that sort of evolution, you know, it’s something we’ve practiced, but for many they haven’t. And so your your staff being able to look at it, you know, a process or a task list or anything like that, and, and cover both. Yeah, the things to do with clients and the things that aren’t to do with clients is really powerful. Yeah. Because otherwise, they’re going to be looking at different systems, which is just frustrating, correct? Yeah. Okay, exciting. So that’s the project management element, I’m assuming, then there’s going to be some other bits that you guys have added in what else is there in the chat?

Anthony Lyon
Correct. So we started out of the project management. And what we ended up doing was basically building a suite of integrated apps. So the project manager was was great. But then I found that revenue management had a bit of a gap as to what we’re doing with revenue management, and then a facility management and so on. So So we ended up building these integrated apps, think of it along the lines of Microsoft 365, where you’ve got, you’ve got a subscription, you’ve then got the different apps. And so you work with one particular app, as you’re working on that part of the business. Yep. So I kind of like to, you know, expire. But it’s not an all in one advice base that, you know, we’re trying to jam a lot into the interface, right? We’re really breaking it down into two integrated apps that you kind of know what you’re working on. And then each app can be a lot more simple to use, because we’re focusing on that one part, or one segment of the business.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. So it can be uniquely good at what it does, because it’s just for that part of the business as opposed to trying to get that one tool that does everything, which we all know, they don’t do. Well, they do bits badly, anytime.

Anthony Lyon
Advice is just so complex, that there’s there’s too many apps that you need to build.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so in terms of then, so you’re gonna have a lot of different types of users, right. So there’s more clearly the advisor can be part of that workflow or the project management tool, the principal compliance, I use seeing other practices using it all the way through to support like as ever Nobody using the tool?

Anthony Lyon
Correct? Correct, okay. And I always found this a bit of a challenge, because you got one main band, you’re going to want to do everything, you’ve then got multiple advisor practices that would have could have a dedicated team that just work on applications and support, you could have a paraplanning team that only work on the SOPs and say they don’t have anything to do with the rest of the process. Yep. So it’s sort of where we designed it, that it has project management, but it also has modules around applications tracking, and SOA tracking and review, and so on. So yeah, it’s, it’s all it really brings everybody together.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, so really is that whip that work in progress sort of thing, it’s really keeping an eye on all of that. Which as it makes a lot of sense to put some energy into something like this, because as we’re all trying to get a bit more scale a bit more capacity a bit, but like, you know, the ability to see more people, then we’ve got to be monitoring things at that level. Yes. Otherwise, you have no clue, you can’t tell.

Anthony Lyon
And that’s exactly right. And that was one of the recent things we did. Because there is so much going on, that we we basically have built this a news feed. So if someone comments on an application, you know, an SOA your tasks, whatever it may be, it’s like a, like a social news feed. And so it basically pulls out all the activity from the different components. And you can just make a comment from within the newsfeed. So try and make it really easy instead of having to go oh, there was an application for for Joe Bloggs. And now I have to go and navigate and find that task and find that thing and, and then be able to comments and so on. It just brings it all into a newsfeed.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep, it is. It’s hard, I think for the assistants are often very old school is they’re almost used to that old world where we had, you know, folders and sub folders. And you were so used to having to dig down and dig back. And remember those old days like, Oh, my goodness, how did you find anything? And our systems reflected that didn’t know there was this real structure you’d had? I mean, I’m showing my age here, you will be too young for this. But I remember the bad old days of backslash dos rubbish where you had to know every command. Yeah, like adjusting Saturday. It’s not like that anymore, right? We can design these sort of windows for our teams that mean they can get to what they need to get to faster. Yeah, definitely. So why not?

Anthony Lyon
Definitely. I think it’s definitely about trying to bring the advice space into new, you know, new modern technology. And, and it kind of needs a tool to sort of shake that up and change things a bit.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. So, in terms of then, the types of practices that you’re interacting with, then are you finding there’s any particular one that this really resonates? Or vice versa? Ones that like, Oh, dude, no, that’s not going to work for us? Is there sort of a sweet spot for the tool?

Anthony Lyon
No, not necessarily. I don’t really find that there’s a unique practice that, that it works for. I think one, probably, if anything, sort of less likely the one man band or a lot, a lot of the one man bands probably, you know, it’s all up in their head. They know where they’re at. They don’t right. They weren’t necessarily adopted tool that’s going to connect and communicate like this. Yeah. So yeah, less than one man band more more, the more the team approach, and especially if they’re, if they’re outsourcing. So you got you got remote teams that is very hard to communicate,

Peita Diamantidis
and manage it is. And it’s the one thing that often those remote teams in terms of providers even don’t do well either, like they don’t sort of try and facilitate that either. So you can have these bodies doing work for you in, you know, offshoring or anything or anything like that. And it’s just not integrated. It’s not, they’re not really part of the team. And you’ve got to use tech to try and fold them in. Yeah, correct. Correct. Yeah, I agree. I mean, like your software virtual as well. And the hardest part is making handover as seamless as possible. And it sounds like that’s the thing we’re focusing on here. It’s making that just squeaky easy, no problem. You don’t have to then call a person or can you just update me on or, you know, that sort of stuff? It’s really trying to make it blindingly obvious one is awesome. So then the things that it doesn’t have then clearly will be like analysis tools, or you know, that sort of stuff. This is not your you guys are trying to play in that space is

Anthony Lyon
no, the tools not your advice, Doc, it’s not producing an advice document, you know, it’s not, it’s not going to be comparing products, you know, super funds and investments and doing projections and risk codes and all that sort of stuff. It’s not really producing an SLA. I would, I would say that’s your sort of primary advice, tool advice, document generation. This is really the more operates, you know, around that and doing the things that the advice tool doesn’t.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, okay. Okay. And so you mentioned integrations and clearly explained is one of them. Do you have others other tools that you integrate with?

Anthony Lyon
Yeah. So integrating with with x plan, product RX is we started product RX Fazeli. So for revenue management, there’s Fazeli or rev x. So you pull through the feeds from all your revenue management perspective. And we’re currently working on integration with fourth one.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, fantastic. So I guess it’s then just a, you know, I mean, that covers a broad number of people, particularly with explain, but I can see value there even so if somebody couldn’t integrate with their core system, if it’s not on that list, do you still see, do you see them still being able to use the tool?

Anthony Lyon
Yes. Oh, okay. Yes. So you’re definitely Excellent. So majority of you have come from explain, but the other one I’m sort of finding is that the advice practices that don’t have any software at the moment, so don’t have a primary, traditional advice software, okay. And so it’s really just a little, you know, a little basic CRM tool that they can write, to manage their clients without having to go to the big guys.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, okay. So it gives them that little hub that at least gets them that far, you can track progress,

Anthony Lyon
they can still create a client, there’s a client CRM app in there. It’s not like it has, you know, it’s not like an X plan that has the complete CRM and the document generation, all that sort of stuff. But I can still create a client and assign tasks, so in some projects, and manage everything that they need to do.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, fantastic. But I really liked the idea that if they, you know, have any more than really themselves, listeners plus one, then this will help them keep on top of things, which is one of the challenges, the minute you try to handle more than a handful of clients, is just wear things out, and what are we doing, you know, which is exciting. So then in terms of client interface, I’m betting that there, isn’t there? Is there any element that’s engaging with the client directly? Or is it really behind the scenes

Anthony Lyon
so that there’s a, there’s a fact find, so there’s an, there’s an online fact find, an advisor can create an online fact find, send the link to their client, that factfinder can be from the client can be accessed on the desktop, or mobile. So I kind of like to picture that the client might have a wine in hand on a on a, after a long day or a Friday night, whatever it may be, and sitting there on their mobile, completing the completing the fact find. And the advisor can even create custom question sets in there. So okay, so an example might be around, you know, what are the clients ethical investment preferences, if any? And so they can ask those sorts of questions you need to the way they want to ask. So collect the data, how they want to collect it.

Peita Diamantidis
Great. And so that then sits in the CRM, that’s where that data goes,

Anthony Lyon
yes. They can push that they can push that to explain. Yeah, okay. Any, any of the any of the unique, you know, custom created questions, obviously wouldn’t go back in. But yeah, your assets, liabilities, income expenses, all those sorts of pretty standard question sets or go look into x. Fine.

Peita Diamantidis
Cool. Okay. So, and I’m interested because you know, a lot of the tools now have these fact find things. What was the trigger for you guys to do that, given? What you’re doing is sort of more operational than it is client engagement? What was the trigger for you to go? Look, we need to add this, this is a feature that’s necessary.

Anthony Lyon
Probably there’s, there’s, I thought it was it was a bit of a gap in our software. So yep. When I’m talking about going around the advice document creation piece, we we weren’t really engaging the client to start with. So that was one piece, right? We could engage the client, collect the data, push it into x plan, x plan would then feed into the project management space and feed into your client CRM. So it was just a bit of a missing piece to actually get all the data and get the process started.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, okay. Okay, perfect. And so in terms of then, your current users, you’ve got people and Practices using it, then what is, you know, some of the features that just don’t get used as much as you think they might in the future? Like, what’s the stuff that people shouldn’t be looking at? bit harder at?

Anthony Lyon
Yeah, I find the, there’s a knife. So the AFSL compliance, that is one that doesn’t really get adopted. And I kind of, I kind of feel that a lot of a lot of practices or a lot of, you know, smaller AF hustles tend to leave that to the compliance consultant. Okay, so they might not have the confidence to be able to, you know, use the hairy, scary C word that the people try to, you know, try to find hard to tackle a bit. So, yeah, this tool is really making that as simple as possible. So giving you a tool to manage the AFSL on a day to day basis, which still, you know, still works in tandem with the compliance consultant. Okay. You may have a senior paraplanner who is quite experienced in all things compliance, but doesn’t quite have the tools to to They wrap their head around what that job actually involves.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so what type of on a day to day basis? What type of things would they be doing in that that apple that section?

Anthony Lyon
Say it’s managing all your AFSL registers? So policy registers, complaints breaches, yeah. There’s even if you look at it from an AFSL point of view, the advisors themselves are the clients, right? So we’re taking fall notes and hairy scary conversations, we may we may have had with advisors, so yep, anything that’s really, you know, demonstrating to ASIC, the advice, monitoring is happening and keeping records of it in a in a, in an easy to use software,

Peita Diamantidis
which is really important, because it’s one of those things that isn’t focused on your right, it’s just not, even if it’s not your own AFSL to have some place where those things can go on the team can be trained to know how to, like, you know, you can make that even more thorough than it might otherwise be. The more process driven and automatic that stuff is, the better, you know that it’s just, it’s all there, it’s easy. I just entered here, and I update it there and I tick that box. And like, we’ve got to normalize these things, because it’s it is just part of the business, right, it’s just part of what we do. It shouldn’t be this other thing.

Anthony Lyon
Traditionally, for, for example, in all the advice registers, we seem to just have an Excel spreadsheet. And we’re just using Excel spreadsheets for everything when it comes to compliance. And we don’t do that when servicing the client. We’re good at looking for technology solutions to service the client. But then when it comes to managing the AFSL, we’re seeing the operating knots of excellence rates.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And it’s like, you’re absolutely right. And it’s, it creates another sort of mental friction to as well, you know, kind of to go over there and do that thing. If it can be wherever you are close to it, that it means you just get it done. Right, we’ll just have to register that, you know, he didn’t like the fact we call him at 9pm. Very good, whatever, like whatever it is, you just get it done, right, you just sort of put it in the system and proceed accordingly. And I think you’re right, the normalizing of compliance behaviors can make such a difference to a practice. And it’s sort of, you know, rips out some of the fee about that sort of thing. Yeah. So aside from that, are there any other elements of the app then that so we’ve got the compliance with the AFSL element? We’ve got the pipeline or the project management, what else? Is there a CRM that can sort of be the what’s it like a basic CRM basics? For people?

Anthony Lyon
Yeah, right. So your basic CRM, if you’re integrated with x plan, it still pulls through assets, liabilities, income, all those sorts of details. If you have an IPS license, you can view portfolios. Okay, so it’s quite heavily embedded. As far as that you know, the data that pulls through from explain. Yep. Another one is managing service agreements. So managing managing offerings and service agreements. So you can set all your templates for generating the service agreements. Yep, if you use Rev x, so it’s quite common to use Rev X. And you can pull through the rev x data linked with your x plan. So it sort of creates a seamless connection between x plan and rev X to then pull the existing fees that the client has paid. And we can send them a link to then click the opt in

Peita Diamantidis
fantastic because that’s just horribilis that stuff. It’s, it’s the layers of manual stuff. If you don’t have it, you know, all coordinated and set up is truly horrible. I mean, it’s bad enough that there’s a level of provider then, you know, challenges that we’ve all got to go through as well. But just getting that first step streamlined. Yeah. I mean, for some practices, it’s a whole person

Anthony Lyon
that’s dressed. Absolutely, absolutely. It’s, it’s

Peita Diamantidis
just crazy. So Oh, awesome. Okay, so working with Rev x, in terms of down the track. Are there any? Do you have any plans? What on the integration front? Like, is there? I know you mentioned product RX. Now there’s so is there any more that you’re sort of thinking of down the track that you’re starting to grading with? No, not

Anthony Lyon
necessarily. It’s if if users come in, you know, suggesting integration, then we’re definitely going to look at it. I’m, I’m probably not really looking or actively looking to go and integrate with, you know, some of the advisor logic or advice, intelligence and those sorts of things yet, mainly because it is it is such a big job. Integrating with those CRMs is horrible is a huge task, like Yeah. And to do that across multiple, multiple draw software’s.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Huge. It is. It’s horrible.

Anthony Lyon
I’m, it’s probably more building out the capabilities of of the apps and growing that app suite. So The one I’m working on at the moment is a marketing. Okay, and so for advice practices that would be sending out their newsletters to clients. So think think along the lines of a MailChimp, where you can build your build your marketing emails integrated with explane. So pulsar all your your CRM, list of list of email addresses from all your clients. But it also, you know, you can, it also manages all those activities. So LinkedIn, you can post on LinkedIn, we can manage all our blogs, on our website, and all that sort of content creation and mapping out the calendar. So real marketing, marketing content calendar, and then sending out newsletters to clients. So just try to bring that I think there’s there’s not really much in the advice space, as far as marketing goes for quite not anything at all. So not for

Peita Diamantidis
No, certainly, I mean, these are the general ones that are outside of advice, but certainly not. Not many within advice. The only ones I’m aware of here in the US, you know, they’re Yeah, they’re not here for sure. So yeah, it’s definitely ahead of us on the marketing front. There’s a lot of things. Definitely, there was on marketing.

Anthony Lyon
It’s actually majority of advisors, you know, that, you know, there are some really good advisors that you see on LinkedIn, and I’ve got some great content. I think generally, though, advisors being a probably aren’t great at that whole marketing piece. And thinking, well, understandably, where, where do I, where do I start? And how am I? Where am I? Where do I start? How am I going to do this? And now my game to? How do I make this all happen? It’s just overwhelming. And it’s almost like, we’re worried about that another day? You know, that’s, that’s not today’s problem.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. And I think even though we’re in a world now, I mean, I don’t know about what you’re hearing from advisors, but I’m certainly hearing you know, there’s more clients, and there are, you know, days in the week sort of thing. So there’s loads of new business, what I think their marketing is going to be about now is that will making making sure your marketing attracts the clients you want. Yeah, correct. Right. So it’s niching it rather than the general whoodles open, which has been the old school marketing advice, I think that’s where it’ll get clever, you know, is when people can really tailor their messaging so that it attracts the right people and almost repels the wrong ones. Yeah. You know, it’s like, oh, no, I don’t want to do that. Yeah. Good. You and me time. Awesome. So looking further down the development path, because I mean, like myself, you have particularly operational lens on this stuff. So you sort of coming at it from really the granular how we do it day to day, do you have anything way down the track? That’s like, the ultimate unicorn wish item? You know, ah, if I could just fix this thing? You know, that’d be fantastic. Yeah.

Anthony Lyon
Look, I would like to be able to produce an advice document from here. Under the current, you know, under the current regulation scheme, that’s, you know, that’s a big job to have a union super new investment comparisons, and yet more you different modules and things like that. Fingers crossed in the not too distant future in the new world of advice and where we land with that. Hopefully, that might be a bit easier that we could be able to produce a simple, easy to read advice documents from from the software.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s so interesting, when you talk to people outside of our industry, and you talk about those frustrations, and they just look at you so blankly like, What do you mean, it’s hard to produce documents? And they sort of write in that? Yes, there’s 1000s of permutations. So without a doubt there are, but honestly, that’s all they are. It’s just that our tech hasn’t kept kept up, you know, like, it’s, it’s just that it’s still clunky and difficult to do those things. Yeah,

Anthony Lyon
it’s, it’s having all the attachments having all those comparison tools on those modules. And yeah, how much detail the adviser wants to go into all those sorts of things?

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. And I’ve got to say, That’s what to me. You know, one off really good tools, like the product RX, I think are really powerful, because they just do that thing. Well.

Anthony Lyon
Yeah, product RX is great. Yeah. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Like, quick to understand, easy to use, and it does the thing really well. Yeah. So yeah. So it’s powerful them and the more we get to those, I think probably the easier for people like yourself to just go Alright, do I need to develop that? Or do I need to plug it in or partner with, you know, those sort of things? Whereas currently, you’re right, it sort of all or nothing for some of this stuff. It’s just all a bit clunky and complicated and difficult. Is there any of the elements we’ve missed? Have we missed? An app or a section of the talk?

Anthony Lyon
No, we’ve covered we’ve covered it all.

Peita Diamantidis
Well done team. All right. Advice explorers. If you’d like to find Find out more about the I comply to or I see two system then the website link is going to be in the episode shownotes along with the gentleman’s LinkedIn details, so I’m so sorry, that you may get people reaching out on LinkedIn. But that’s a good thing. Oh, when they can find your Calendly link on the website, which I’ve got to say, I’ve just got to go back to that. I love it when people are that open about being able to chat to you about things. So I think more advisors should be doing that. I know we’re all weary because we just don’t want people to make appointments. But honestly, they don’t. I doubt you’ve ever had a willy nilly strange appointment set through the website links. So

Anthony Lyon
anytime you get an appointment, he’s ready to send the link and say he’ll literally click here and book in my calendar.

Peita Diamantidis
Right. So I think it just shows an openness that’s really positive that we could all do do with a bit more of so thank you so much for joining us on the show. And kudos for diving into the adventure that is software development, because it’s something sometimes a little shark infested, but you’re fighting the good fight. And I look forward to seeing where the tool goes in the future.

Anthony Lyon
Thank you so much for having me.

Peita Diamantidis
So folks, a bit of a new one there, right? Are you a current user of ice to? What a cool nine? Do you agree or disagree with what we’re chatting about as it caught your eye or you’re interested in more? No matter what, please share your insights in the XY community platform? Because I think, you know, we’re all a bit curious, and we’d love to share everybody’s experiences. In terms of what I think, you know, I’ve got to say it’s, it’s really refreshing actually, to see a tool for advisors and advice practices, that is actually putting some energy into pipeline management. This is one of those things that’s always seen as solely, you know, a practice manager job or, you know, a business owner job. And it’s sort of rarely done in a really snapshot visual, easy to use way. And it’s why, you know, many businesses use tools like Monday, or Trello, or Asana, you know, as we were chatting about, but it can actually be invaluable, you know, for more than that, it doesn’t just need to be the practice manager looking at things it can be for every role to be able to see where their clients are in the pipeline, you know, quickly identify any files that may be a stuck, you know, when there’s something’s just needs a nudge or, you know, hasn’t progressed, or those sort of things, you know, it can be also be a really great overwhelm, lead indicator to write when you can look at the pipeline, versus the individual’s capacity and go, Oh, no, wait a minute, this is about to go pear shaped. You can even plan for leave, you know, office shutdowns over Christmas, all sorts of things become more manageable when you have this sort of type of insight or lens. So you know, I really high five, the efforts here for helping us start to see things this way, and really getting that whip or working progress sort of view of what we’re doing. Because if we’re all going to get more effective, we are going to need to look at things this way, and not just granularly on an individual task basis. Now, sort of along these lines, actually, it’s interesting for this week’s episode, but you know, we cover the curiosity corner, what’s the app? Peter, tell me? What’s the new thing that you, you know, caught your eye? The Well, this this week, the app that caught my eye is called motion. Now you can find it at us motion.com. Now, their tagline is there are now 13 months in the year. That’s almost horrifying, right? No, no. What they’re saying is they’re getting you back an extra month, you can feel like you can get more done. And I came across this tool, because I had at a particular point in time, I had a specific challenge, right? I was actually covering the workload of another team member who went on extended leave, right. And so rather than just running a practice and other sort of, you know, doing this other sort of things that I was working on, I was also on the tools constantly dealing with clients. And so I was juggling a lot more tasks than normal, and basically just felt like I was constantly making to do lists, bumping things, and couldn’t ever get a real handle on if I was making progress as the more I did the more tasks that seem to get created. Yeah. So I actually ended up using motion with my calendar app. So that sort of event embedded in Google Calendar. I think it does it with others also. And what happens is, client works. So you might have just had a meeting and you know, based on that meeting, there’s a certain amount of work that needs to get done. Then let’s say it’s, you know, review collation and production, or new advices. Why whatever it is, the trick is that we all know that it’s about X hours for review, whereas 12 hours for an SOA. So as soon as I become aware that that’s going to be down the track that there’s a point at which I’m going to have to do that work, then it gets entered into motion for that, you know, just with the clients name, the amount of time and a date. Ideally, I want to get it done by and motion and you do that just as you come across them. So it’s sort of like looking at your future workload and more motion then uses AI to assign that workload into all the gaps in your calendar between meetings between conferences get done before your exercise you defined when you are working, you know the definition of that or when you’re available, and it fits them in. And what’s cool is you don’t then have to bump the TAs. You know, just because a day gets blown out by something that’s out of left field, you don’t have to bump them motion does it for you, and and it optimizes it for you. So what this ended up doing is I really rapidly got a good handle on how far ahead my workload efforts were booked out. Right? So how far ahead was I going to need to make sure I had the time to get all get all this done. And I could then determine if say, I could take on an extra opportunity that came up or a new project, I wanted to kick off based on how far out the client work was sheduled by motion. So to be honest, for that window of time, it truly saved my sanity. And it actually also really empowered me to knock more things off in bite sized pieces. As I you know, when I did this small section of it, maybe it was only a portion of that work and ticked it off in the app, then I could see the impact it had on the scheduling of all the other work that got shuffled around. So it’s sort of quite empowering in that sense. So you feel like you’re really making progress. So check it out. Let me know what you think. Or if you think it adds adds value. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like a speaker, to run your audience through client portals as the next big thing and advice check, along with a step by step process to work out if you know they even need one and how to implement it in the practice. Then I’ve actually got an upcoming either initial webinar on the topic or even a full blown in person masterclass. So feel free to reach out if that’s of interest. We’re also going to be covering that as part of our niche down and scale up workshop in February. So after we help you work out exactly who you want to serve in 2023, you can then work out if a client portal is the right way to add that value. If any of that is of interest, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn forward slash Peita M D. That’s PEITAMD. Otherwise, I’m going to look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explores Stay curious.