The Trusted Adviser

The Trusted Adviser podcast features in-depth conversations with leading financial planners who share their insights, experiences, and strategies for building successful businesses. Each episode dives into the challenges and triumphs of running a financial planning practice, offering listeners practical advice and inspiration from industry experts.

The Trusted Adviser is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 54 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts The Trusted Adviser, a business show with 54 episodes published.

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  Episode #51

  $3m to $30m, on the way to $100m: Lisa Fuentes on Scaling Alteris Financial Group

  Sep 24, 20261h 10mS1

  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.

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  Episode #50

  Stephen Handley, Fin365: Building the Advice Tech Stack From the Ground Up

  Sep 10, 20261h 3mS1

  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.

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  Episode #48

  100 Referrals a Month - Inside Everest Wealth's AI-Powered Growth Engine

  Aug 13, 202650 minS1

  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.

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  Episode #47

  New-World Tech with Andrew Gardner and Ivon Gower from RetireMap

  Jul 30, 202646 minS1

  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: Why familiarity bias keeps advisers locked into tools they've already mastered, even once better ones exist The client who walked into a meeting armed with an AI-generated report already showing what he should be paying What a well-run advice practice's technology stack could look like five years from now, once modular, MCP connected tools become the norm rather than the exception Andrew's message for anyone still fully embedded in the old system: embrace it now, because there's no going back.

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  Episode #46

  Cyber and the AI Threat with Michael Connory of Aphore Technology

  Jul 16, 202657 minS1

  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: What Aphore does day to day, and how the Cyber Assurance Risk Rating process works Why credential compromise, not unpatched software, causes the vast majority of breaches Inside the first 48 hours of a real incident, and the exact order of calls a firm should make How AI is already reshaping both the threat landscape and the defences available to us The one thing Michael says every AFSL should do right now 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.

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