Advisers seeing the rise of so-called robo advice as a threat may be missing the bigger opportunity, namely to solve the core problems holding their businesses back, says Audere Coaching & Consulting Founder and Business Coach Stewart Bell.
“It’s been a tough 12 months for many advice firms”, says Bell, “and the reasons that come up time and time again are that it’s harder to represent the value of advice to clients, more difficult to deliver and challenging to attract, motivate and retain great staff”
“Then you’ve got robo advice on everyone’s lips, potentially offering cheaper, faster and more accessible advice. You can understand why there is concern”
However, Bell believes that rather being a threat to one and all, it’s technology and the thinking behind the way tech startups are launched that could be the saviour of many firms.
In 2013, whilst continuing to work with advice firms around the country, Bell was involved in the launch of the startup incubator Corporate to Freedom. It was that insight into how Silicon Valley turned the launch of multi-million dollar firms on a shoestring into a science that led him to create a manual to enable advice firms to do the same, Finnovation.
Of all of the philosophies underpinning the methods, it was one that stood out.
“If you look at one of the core things startups are advised to do, it’s to get close to the customer, and really seek to understand the existing real world problems, unmet wants and unfulfilled needs they have”
“To do that, you need to be able to have that direct relationship, and for all the resources of large institutions, that’s something they are challenged to do. Advisers on the other hand can do it freely, which is why the future is theirs to create.”
Bell believes that the issue stopping it from happening isn’t resources; it’s knowledge and time.
“Most firms have business opportunities they don’t even realise are there. The challenge is firstly freeing up time to look for them and, secondly, having a simple method they can follow to go from finding the “idea” to launching without spending a fortune. That’s what Finnovation is about. It’s about making that information available in a context that makes sense to advice firms”
Bell is hopeful that it’s just one part of bigger revolution going on within SME advice firms.
“So far we’ve seen so much innovation coming from others areas of the industry, but good advice firms are genuinely challenged. If some of those challenges can be removed, and we have hundreds of advisory businesses who are genuine about putting the client at the centre of innovation efforts, finding ways to create more and more value with less and less manual effort, suddenly you create huge capacity to positively impact more Australians”.
“For me, that’s where our industry can start to regain some of the trust that’s been chipped away, rightly or wrongly, over the past few years.”