Leading Adviser explains why a group's actions need to speak louder than words

“For me, support means more than telling – it involves doing.”

Tuesday, May 19th 2020, 2:00PM

In the current ASSET magazine, TAP partner Regan Thomas explains why he chose to engage with The Adviser Platform.

“The combination of increased compliance requirements, duties and obligations, and the need for efficiency in our businesses, along with increasing pressure on dealer groups to provide greater transparency around commission structures and costs means the game is changing.

“An observation I made when I was considering joining a group or going it alone was that the overrides and or commission splits were opaque. It seemed that for day to day operations – contacting clients, delivering advice, processing applications, keeping records – all that stuff was pretty much left to the adviser on the ground.

“For me, support means more than telling – it involves doing. I don't just want templates and manuals, flowcharts and checklists. That's just a list of things for me to do. And I don't just want access to a CRM – that's an admin job that I still need to take care of as well. I wanted my CRM to be an essential tool, not an expensive address book.”

He said he had considered hiring a PA. “That would be better because either A) they would do the stuff I was meant to, or B) they could do the stuff I shouldn't be doing. Ideally both. But it's expensive. For me the definitions of value and support changed some years ago. I think more and more advisers over the period leading to, and soon after, the start of the new regime may come to similar conclusions – in fact in the post-Covid economy that may accelerate.

“I wanted a system, workflow and specific deliverables – tangible things that make a business work. And someone to either do them, or help me do them, or to automate them. Because of that, I don't consider the group I am with to be a dealer group. I got a set of systems and automations, compliance advice, a CRM and a virtual PA to run it all, all in one. I got a business partner. That's what I call support. I know exactly how much I'm paying, and what I'm getting for the fees/use of overrides. That's what I call value.”

Click the video below to view another TAP member’s perspective: