The most common question I get from advisers, after they’ve vented about timelines or compliance, is “what are other practices doing well?” They want to know what’s working elsewhere, what they could pinch and what’s worth trying. It’s a fair question because the practices running smoothly have usually figured something out that the rest of them could borrow.
Working across such a varying range of practices at TNT Group, I see a lot of the same problems. But the practices that handle them well tend to do small specific things differently. None of these are revolutionary. They’re considered, consistently applied and they protect the things that matter. Adviser time, client experience and the team’s energy.
Here are five things I’d be stealing if I worked in an advice practice.
1. The 20-minute strategy chat before any plan starts
One practice we work with has a non-negotiable rule. No file goes to the paraplanner until the adviser has had a short strategy chat with whoever will be working on it. The paraplanner, the senior strategist, sometimes even the CSO. Basically anyone who will be touching the file. The chat covers what the adviser believes the strategy should be, the client’s appetite for change, anything unusual about the situation and the rough cashflow picture. It isn’t a fact-find walk through. It’s a sense check before time is invested.
It sounds basic but the time saved at the back-end is significant. Plans don’t get reworked because the cashflow doesn’t support the strategy. Modelling doesn’t have to start over because the adviser remembered the clients actually planned to spend part of that inheritance we used in the advice. Two heads in a twenty-minute conversation catch problems that take hours to fix once a plan is half created.
The bigger the practice, the more this matters. When you have multiple advisers and multiple paraplanners working in parallel, a short strategy chat keeps everyone on the same page before any time is invested. The practices that resist this usually argue they don’t have time. The practices that adopt it find they have more time because they aren’t redoing work.
2. The CRM cheat sheet
Another practice has a one-page summary at the front of every client’s CRM record. Kids’ names and birthdays, hobbies, dog’s name, drink of choice, last completed advice task, current strategy in flight and next review due. Nothing complicated, but when the client calls, whoever picks up the phone can have a real conversation with them.
This shifts something important. The client stops calling only for the adviser and they start trusting the whole team. The adviser gets fewer “quick question” calls and the team feels more empowered to answer them. The client experience improves at the same time because they feel known by more than just one person.
The discipline is in keeping it updated. The practices that get this right have a quick handover at the end of every meeting where the adviser or CSO updates the cheat sheet with anything new. New grandchild, new pet, change of work situation, upcoming holiday. Five minutes after the meeting, never later. The ones that don’t keep it current end up with stale notes that are worse than no notes at all.
3. Tiered pricing that reflects complexity
The practices doing this best have stopped pretending every plan costs the same to produce. They've sat down, often with external support, looked at what their typical plan types actually require in terms of time, expertise and risk and built a tiered fee structure around it.
A simple super consolidation sits at one fee. A retirement strategy with SMSF, transition to retirement and aged care planning sits higher. A blended family matter with testamentary trusts, business interests and Centrelink optimisation sits higher again. The bands are clear, the client knows which one they fall into and the practice quotes accordingly.
Clients respond better than advisers expect because the fee feels fair for what is involved. The practice also stops losing money on the difficult files. When every plan is priced the same regardless of how hard it is to produce, the simple ones quietly subsidise the complex ones and the margin disappears. Tiered pricing fixes that.
The advisers I see do this well also use the same complexity conversation to set the client's expectations on how long the advice will take and how often it should be reviewed. One conversation, three things set straight at once. Fee, timeframe and review cadence.
4. The quarterly tech review
Most practices buy software, use it for a while and then forget they’re paying for it. The practices doing this well sit down once a quarter and run through every subscription. Are we still using it? Is it doing what we thought it would? Is the team trained on it? Can we replace three tools with one?
I’ve seen practices shave thousands off their software stack with one of these sessions, but the bigger win is workflow clarity. Everyone knows which tool does what, training gaps get spotted and new hires onboard faster. The team also stops working around limitations they could have flagged six months earlier if anyone had asked.
The practices that get this right run it as a short workshop with the people actually using the tools, not just the principal looking at a credit card statement. The CSO will know that the e-signing tool is clunky for joint clients. The paraplanner will know that the modelling software is doing 80% of what they need and the rest is being done in spreadsheets. That conversation, four times a year, prevents a lot of slow rot.
5. The post-mortem without the blame
When a plan takes far too long or a client complains, the best practices stop and ask why. Not in a finger-pointing way but rather to walk back through what happened. Where the brief was unclear, where information was missing, who was waiting on whom and what the team would do differently next time.
These conversations take fifteen minutes but help prevent the same problem week after week. Most importantly, they signal to the team that the process is the problem when something goes wrong, not the person. Having a team that feels safe to raise problems means that team will catch them early.
The practices doing this well also write the lesson down somewhere the team can find it. A shared document, a section in the CRM, a one-page “we don’t do this anymore” sheet. The lesson is only worth the cost of learning it if you can apply it next time. Without a record, the same problem comes back six months later with new people in the room.
What ties these together
None of these are big strategic plays but rather small deliberate habits that compound. The common thread is that the practice has stopped treating their own business like it’s nobody’s job to design and started running it with the same rigour they apply to their clients’ financial lives.
You don’t need to do all five. Pick one. Try it for a quarter. If it sticks, add another. The practices I see running smoothly didn’t get there in a single transformation project. They got there by quietly borrowing the good ideas from everyone else, one habit at a time.
Dela is Director & Advice Manager at TNT Group.
