The Trusted Adviser

What if your next hire wasn't a person at all? Michael Bova, founder of Family Wealth Advisory in Sydney, has built digital employees named Bindi, Roxy, Iggy and Quinn, and one of them recently caught a misspelt name in a client's will that the lawyer, the adviser and the associate all missed.

In this episode, Michael speaks about scaling a high-net-worth family practice from a comfortable sole adviser to around 320 families, with a goal of 1,000. He also shares the "valley of death" he went through along the way, what his AI build is really costing, and how he brought his team with him rather than leaving them fearful.

A practical conversation for any planner thinking about scale, culture or AI.

When Alteris was a $3 million business, founder Keith Jones stood up in front of his team and told them they would be a $30 million business. Nobody in the room could see how. They're now 75 people across five offices in three states, and Keith is talking about $100 to $200 million inside three to five years.

Lisa Fuentes is the person who has had to make those numbers real. She joined Alteris in 2003 when there were four of them sharing an office in Parramatta. She's now Chief Operating Officer, and she puts it better than I could: Keith is an entrepreneur at heart, he will never stop, and her job has never been to stop him. Her job has been to figure it out.

This conversation is about the figuring out.

Every advice firm is making technology decisions right now, and most are being pitched more options than they can sensibly assess. This conversation is about how to think through that.

Stephen Handley came out of technology, joined his father's advice business as part of a succession plan, and then built his own practice serving mums and dads. When he couldn't find software that solved his back-office problem, he built it himself on Microsoft Dynamics. Ten years on, Fin365 is in more than 170 firms with around 2,000 users.

In this episode we cover why Stephen took the hard road on data feeds instead of using an aggregator, the data ownership question every firm should be asking its software vendor, why the advice production market has become so crowded and where the real efficiency gains are actually hiding.

His closing advice for anyone being pitched by fifteen vendors right now is worth the listen on its own.

For episode 50 of The Trusted Adviser, the tables are turned. Pat Gardner from Collins SBA and technology provider Rubica takes the host chair and puts the questions to Rob Pyne, Founder and CEO of HPH Solutions.

Rob traces the full arc of the business, from founding HPH in 2002, rebuilding the investment philosophy in the middle of the GFC, why the firm went self-licensed in 2009, and what changed when he stepped out of client work and into the managing director role.

The conversation covers the decisions that moved the needle: the Dimensional relationship, the HPH Life joint venture with MBS Insurance, and the HPH Team Equity Trust that now sees the team hold around 27 percent of the business.

Pat and Rob also dig into:

Thanks to everyone who has listened across the first 50 episodes.

Rob sits down with Scott Taylor and Ashley Pickett from Everest Wealth, a Perth-based advice business that's grown from a golf course conversation eight years ago into a team of 62 across Australia and the Philippines.

Scott shares how the business bootstrapped from zero with free seminars for paramedics, before building a referral engine through partnerships with finance podcasts including She's on the Money, My Millennial Money, Equity Mates, Rask Media and Ladies Finance Club, now delivering more than 100 warm referrals a month.

Ashley then takes us inside Everest's tech stack, from a bespoke cash flow tool that categorises a year of client transactions in minutes, to a custom client data collection portal built with Claude Code and Claude Design and hosted on AWS. They talk through the privacy and cyber security audit that followed, and how a culture of hands-on experimentation, including a three-month graduate building his own tools, is freeing advisers to spend more time with clients.

The conversation also covers the data behind matching referral sources to adviser experience, the deliberate shift to offering ongoing advice rather than assuming clients don't want it, and why curiosity, not expertise, is the real starting point for adopting AI in an advice business.

For years, advice technology has defaulted to one model, a single all-in-one platform trying to handle everything from CRM to modelling to SoA production. Andrew Gardner and Ivon Gower join Rob to explain why that default is starting to look more like a liability than a convenience, and what's actually made a different approach possible.

Andrew is the founder and managing director of RetireMap, a cash flow modelling platform for financial advisers. Ivon is RetireMap's operations manager and works day to day with advisers as they adopt the platform.

The conversation centres on the Model Context Protocol, MCP, and why it's succeeding where API integrations have long fallen short. Instead of connections that might land anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the data on a good day, MCP moves it across as a complete bundle every time. Andrew and Ivon walk through a real-world example of what that makes possible, modelling a complex retirement village decision for an elderly client, three entry options, different fee structures, a five-year exit fee, using Claude and RetireMap side by side. What would once have taken days of paraplanning work was produced, reviewed and ready to present in minutes, including a set of questions to help the client weigh the financial decision against the personal one.

We also get into:

Andrew's message for anyone still fully embedded in the old system: embrace it now, because there's no going back.

Cybersecurity has moved from an IT problem to a boardroom problem, and most AFSLs haven't caught up yet.

In this episode, I sit down with Michael Connory, CEO of Aphore Technology, who has spent over a decade helping some of the largest licensees in Australia, including RI Advice in the wake of their well-publicised incident, build genuine cyber resilience. Aphore now supports around 250 AFSLs through its Cyber Assurance Risk Rating program, and Michael brings a rare view into what actually happens when advice firms get hacked, what ASIC expects when they come knocking, and why the old Essential 8 framework is being retired in favour of something better suited to businesses like ours.

We talk through:

This is a timely, occasionally confronting, and ultimately reassuring conversation for any adviser or licensee who has been meaning to get on top of cyber risk but hasn't quite gotten there yet.

Drew Burden is the co-founder and CEO of MBS Insurance, an insurance specialist advice firm celebrating its twentieth year in business. In that time, MBS has grown from $8 million in premium and 1,500 clients to $250 million in premium and 25,000 clients, without ever deviating from a single specialist discipline.

In this conversation, Drew shares the three deliberate choices behind that growth: hiring above the role, building a genuine flywheel, and quarterly focus on what matters most. We go deep on the technology MBS built when the market wouldn't, the JV model they've developed with 40 to 50 firms nationally, and the newer minority investment model they're now using to help quality risk practices grow with the tools and insurer relationships MBS has spent two decades building.

Drew also reflects honestly on the acquisitions that didn't go to plan, and what keeping going actually looks like in practice.

A conversation with plenty of lessons for advice firms of any kind.

Most advice firms know the under-40 client exists. Few have built their entire business around them.

Rebecca Tai is the co-founder of Game Plan Wealth Advisers in Melbourne, a practice she built from scratch with her business partner Alicia specifically to serve the millennial client — a cohort that the traditional advice model has largely left behind. In this episode, Rob sits down with Rebecca to unpack what it actually takes to design an advice business for a generation that thinks, engages, and makes decisions differently.

They cover the origin story behind Game Plan — born not from a business plan but from a genuine personal need — and the deliberate choices Rebecca and Alicia have made to keep their service model tight, their boundaries clear, and their long-term vision intact. From a three-tiered service structure to a project-based advice model that lowers the barrier to entry for new clients, the conversation is a masterclass in business design and the discipline required to say no to the wrong opportunities.

Rebecca also shares how she has built a highly engaged Instagram following using nothing more than a phone and a tissue box — and why that low-fi approach is far more effective for her audience than any polished production could be. She talks pricing evolution, onboarding, technology, the decision to refer insurance work rather than take it in-house, and what has surprised her most about running her own firm.

And stay tuned to the end. After the episode wrapped, Rebecca and Rob kept talking — and there was too much to leave on the cutting room floor. The bonus conversation includes the story behind a quote Rebecca has had on her bedroom wall since childhood, one that gets to the very heart of why she does what she does and how she thinks about money, values, and the kind of advice that actually changes lives.

Rod Bertino has spent 26 years inside hundreds of Australian advice practices through Business Health, and his message is clear: the biggest threat to your firm right now isn't technology or client acquisition — it's the war for talent, and most practices aren't ready for it. In this episode, Rod and Rob cover the findings from Business Health's latest remuneration research, what independent practice valuations really look at, and — saved for the very end — the question every self-licensed principal needs to sit with about what their business is actually worth if they're no longer in it.