Can Advice Finally Go Mainstream? with Stewart Bell

Stewart Bell is a business coach and founder of Audere Consulting & Coaching in Australia. Stewart created The Leveraged Advice Firm, a business coaching program and community for financial advisors, accountants and other advice professionals who are optimistic about the future. 

In this episode of Power Your Advice, Doug Heikkinen and Stewart talk about the evolution of advice in Australia and about why Stewart is bullish on the advisor for a grand future.  

  • How technology is forcing advisors to look at their businesses in a different way
  • How advice may become mainstream
  • What a Leveraged Advice Firm looks like
  • The biggest mistakes advisors are making with technology 
  • The most significant impediments to advisory firm growth

Resources: Audere Consulting and Coaching

Related: Elite Advisors of the Future Will Be Wearing These Two Hats

Transcript:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, advisors, advice, business, technology, validators, workflow management, industry, problem, called, proposition, world, clients, ultimately, systems, managing, tool, realize, point, work

SPEAKERS

Douglas Heikkinen, Stewart Bell

Douglas Heikkinen  00:03

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. Today we have a wonderful guest and brilliant mind from the other side of the world. . .

Stuart Bell, who's a business and advice coach in Sydney, Australia still has some fascinating ideas about the future of the business of advice, and the opportunity for advice to become a mainstream service for the masses. Welcome, Stu.

Stewart Bell  00:24

Thanks very much, Douglas. How are you?

Douglas Heikkinen  00:25

I'm good. I find your background and how you got here. And what influenced you along the way? Fascinating. Can you go into that a bit of for us?

Stewart Bell  00:35

Yeah, I absolutely can. It's been it's been an interesting journey. I actually, um, I've been doing this consulting, coaching, whatever you want to call it for about 20 years, which isn't scary for you. Whenever I say it shocks me. I did it for about 10 years at corporate, but like a lot of people. I had this experience of Actually, it was Tim Ferriss four hour workweek I was walking through an airport, and I picked it up, I read that book. And I just realized, ah, I can't do this anymore. So I ended up taking a year off. I thought I'd fallen out of love with the coaching and the working with advice businesses. But I ended up when I come back from the year I realized it was corporate that I've had enough with rather than the coaching. So at that point, I I set up my business as an independent coach. And when am I doing my sort of thing working with a with a with a broad group of consultants. But I reckon the the journey that I'm on right now probably started in about 2013. And whenever I'm presenting on this, there's kind of a photo that I put up on, on, on on the slide, which is me, my daughter, she's three months old, she's on my, on my knee, she's now seven. And I sort of it's taken a Christmas drinks with friends and all looks pretty happy. But and I shouldn't like that point in time. I just got off a plane, it had been an exhausting year, I've been jumping around the front center. And you know, I was kind of i was i was just miserable, I felt trapped. The way that I was working, wasn't really working. It was it was draining me. And I started to look for ways to sort of change things. And I had a good friend of mine who had spent 10 years over here trying to get this tech startup off the ground. And he sort of tapped me on the shoulder and says to this, there's amazing things happening in the tech scene over here in Sydney, you got to get involved. So I did, I ended up through a strange secret events becoming an investor and a managing partner in an incubator, startup incubator. And I think what really changed for me is I started to learn a lot about the way that tech businesses are started, which is so very different to traditional business models, and particularly advice models. I had some really great sort of teachers, people who are part of, I guess, the alumni, one of the guys who was actually a seed investor and paper, which was a great story. And I honest, on the sly on the sneaky, I started to coach some of the stuff to my, to my practices, or that I was working with. And Funny enough, it started to get really, really significant traction. And that kind of started a process of writing a book about it called innovation. And then started working group, the working group centered coaching program, the coaching program turned into more of an online program and seven years later, it's kind of that's what I've had the opportunity to do come take a lot of this, this thinking that's come out of the tech world, smash it together with traditional advisory business models of various different set shapes and sizes and, and see what comes out of it.

Douglas Heikkinen  03:27

Are advisors looking at their businesses and growing their businesses the wrong way.

Stewart Bell  03:32

It's you know, it's not necessarily the wrong way, it's just the way that the world has moved, particularly the impact that technology and you know, the the online world has had has been significant. And for example, you know, a lot of I know a lot of work with advisors on marketing. And traditionally your advice business model would get would get that most of marketing from client referrals and from centers of influence. But increasingly, what we know is that when you know, when I get recommended to go and see an advisor, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to jump online, I'm going to check them out, I'm going to check out their website, I'm gonna have a look at maybe you know, their presence on one of the advisor rating websites we got over here. And in actual fact, these the message are constantly out there is the digital funnel, the digital marketing services is not about trying to bring in clients, separate from those otherwise it actually accelerates the whole thing and amplifies you. Because we know that the advice the advice journey to get advice, it's quite a slow pipeline. It's quite a slow decision. It's it's something that people take relatively slowly. So that's, that's a really good example of how that's kind of changed. You know, I mean, another one is access to information. Like you have so much information at your fingertips now. Whereas a lot of advice business models traditionally, were about whether you wanted to invest or you wanted to get insurance policy I had to go through this person because there was no other avenues. Now people choose to go through those avenues because The proposition there versus in other areas, a whole bunch of areas, a customer centric product developments been a big one. You know, you want to know why a lot of tech startups are able to grow so quickly and disrupt industries. Because rather than sitting in a boardroom madmen style and trying to work out what product do we get to create now, they go out, and I set up experiments, and they test what the market actually wants. And they're data driven, which means by the time that they're getting a product out there, they've already they've already, you know, validated, iterated and proven that the market makes sense.

Douglas Heikkinen  05:33

Yeah, it does make sense to talk a little bit about the evolution of the advice in Australia, is there a growing demand? And what are some of the differences between Australia and us when it comes to advice?

Stewart Bell  05:45

You know, what, um, I had an opportunity to come into center discussions about four years ago now. And I had previously, I worked with a few advisors in Europe or a couple advisors in, in the UK. And it's interesting, in speaking to a number of speakers who came to talk to the group that we've gone over on the study tour, I felt like as industries, there was so much that was similar. And then there was so much that was just slightly off off off kilter, some slight differences. No classic thing is we've got superannuation over here, which is government mandated 10% of your salary goes to an account, which is there until retirement has a bunch of tax benefits. But essentially, it's, you know, something employees have to pay. Whereas you guys have 401k, which is in many ways a similar sort of retirement vehicle, but it's slight differences in there. So I think the evolution of the advice over here is, has been probably coming from a similar sort of place. But because we've had this mandate, a 10% of everyone's salary is going into retirement investments. And it's sitting there until 65. It's almost given our industry, there's some, you know, it's guaranteed growth burst year after year after year. But I guess, the journey we've been through, particularly over the last 10 years has been just regulation, on regulation, on regulation on regulation. And it's led to, it's led to sort of people looking more and more, or advisors looking more and more technology to solve the problems, which it doesn't. But it's also led to a situation now where the cost of advisors has gone up and up and up, like the average advisor over here, for simple advice, you know, the 10 to 20 hours to see the client issue, the advice documents do the research, which is quite a significant, I mean, if you do numbers on it, but that tells you straight away that the minimum upfront fee that advisors can charge and still be profitable is $3,000. And I mean, I don't I don't know the specifics of you know, people's propensity to pipe fees over over in the US to the to the detail, but I get a feeling that people are more comfortable paying for advice over here, or at least for a good proposition. I don't know what your take on that would be.

Douglas Heikkinen  07:59

I think they're willing to pay for quality and willing to pay for people that are giving them value, and good returns and financial freedom. So I think they're willing to pay.

Stewart Bell  08:12

It's interesting I gave us I got to talk about two months ago before we went back into lockdown. And the one thing that hasn't shifted over here in probably 15 years is the percentage of Australians accessing advice. Every time you see the data, it's like, oh, 15% of people over here or adults are getting advice. Oh, yeah. Next year, it's 15, or 17 is 13. And I think it's interesting that for so long, we've we've, as an industry have said, Oh, we got to get more people involved. And I think we haven't looked at the nature of the offer and why and the way the market responds to the offer. Does that make sense? So for example, I learned this while I was in the US that if you break apart the market, you notice that that you can you can break the market into three kinds of people, delegators, validators, and self directed delegates, people who have just reached that point in life where they're like, I don't want to I don't want to do I want to pay someone else. And interestingly, they're about 15% of the market. Meanwhile, you've got validators who are kind of tempted, often can be younger, they're like, No, no, I've got some of this, I know how to look after my cash flow, I've got my income, I just need some help with this. And then you've got self directed who, you know, potentially, they value information that they like having a bit, they feel like they don't need to pay for help. And I think for so long advice propositions have focused on the delegated market. And in many cases, you know, the promise is just not been there for the validators and and the self directed. But what's evolving now, as we're seeing more and more advice, businesses who are going, Okay, we'll get we're going to work with that kind of market, because the sense and the data is showing that, given the right circumstances, self directed, investors may become validators and validators may become delegated, which is kind of it's kind of interesting that I think it's lucky that Robo advice, one point Zero never got traction, because ultimately, otherwise that was just looking to cut off the whole bottom of the market. But yeah, well thankfully we realize that there's a moment when people are engaging with Robo advice where it says right click here to transfer $10,000 across. And that's the point people want to see a human face.

Douglas Heikkinen  10:19

If so few people are seeking advice. ... You have this idea about advice is going to become mainstream. Yeah. How did you get to this thinking? And what would that look like?

Stewart Bell  10:31

One of the things I made a decision really early on as a business coach, which was although I, I work only with advice specialist, and my clients are advisors, I worked with some accountants, I worked some mortgage brokers. And that's it. That's my specialization. But every year I make a decision, I'm going to work with a business that's so far outside of my my niche as a learning experience. That's how corporate freedom the incubator came about. I've worked with music schools, I work with property developers, but one of the experience I worked with was, I worked with a fitness group over here called the original boot camp, who was a military style boot camp, I learned a lot about motivation, peer group management, but um, it stopped, I started to look at the evolution in the fitness industry. And if you think back 30 years, the fitness industry was like muscle gyms, it was probably some rusty equipment on the side of a tennis club, and maybe a bunch of you know, ultra wealthy people who had personal trainers. And you look at the evolution 30 years later, if you look at the data, the participation rates, amongst all age groups and fitness based activities, is incredible. The average spent over here in Australia, of the average Australian a month is $80 a month on fitness stuff that rises to about 100 bucks when you're in your 40s, which, you know, is a fairly significant amount. When you compare it to you know, 15% of Australians getting advice, and I didn't Well, the numbers in the US. Now, it's interesting that they you managed to get this this industry that is basically based upon you accepting the fact that you're out of shape, going out working really hard, you know, sweating, being in pain muscle, and suddenly it's become a sort of essential thing. And it's essential, because ultimately, it managed to reinvent the narrative of fitness about being longevity, looking good, feeling good well being. Now, if you flip back at where we're from, in terms of financial advice, increasingly, what we're starting to see is not financial stability is showing twined. With personal health and well being it's it's, I mean, it's always been there, but the data is starting to show it, you've got a situation where I think more and more people are realizing that with the amount of data coming through now, inflammation and the pace of life, maybe they haven't got control of their money the way they think they do. As well as the fact. As well as the fact beyond beyond that, I think you've just got more of an acceptance that, you know, in a services based environment that people are willing to sort of get help for things. And I think this kind of convergence of Okay, maybe financial, I mean, personally, my parents divorced because of financial issues, that wasn't the only issue. But it was definitely one of them. And if you look at, you know that a lot of the problems that people have in life, I recommend big portion have something to do with finances. So it's a major cause of misery, right. So what's stopping people from from getting help with that is essentially that the advice proposition isn't at a point where the fitness industry is now you know, fitness industry, 30 years later, personal training as a commodity, having a personal trainer is not a luxury, it's just one thing that you can invest in. We've got technology, that's just, it's going nuts now. I mean, I use a tool called got gyroscope, which monitors my activity, my sleep, my stress, my like a whole bunch of stuff and puts it together and say, Hi, Sue. If you sleep more and exercise every day, you're on form, shock, horror. And I think we're at the beginning of this opportunity to say, you know, advice previously has been very isolated to a certain group of people, much like fitness was, but there's a growing demand. And if we can just sort the offer out if we can sort the way it's supplied, and we can align what we do more closely, we have an opportunity to go mainstream. One additional example I gave is we've got to change our language. Like we were talking when we caught up last week I said there's not many industries that use language as the weapon the way we do. Like in any other world premium, which insurance premium right premium to any ordinary person means luxury. capital is the largest city in a in a country and returns is what you do when your clothes don't fit and you want to get a refund. And basis points. I've got no idea. I mean, I was I've been I was a tech geek from way back right. Back in the day when computers they had motherboards. scuzzy boards and peripherals and even they worked out sort of about the turn of the turn of the century that if you talk about stuff like that, you're never gonna get traction. And so they started talking about plug and play and mouse and look what's happened. Now. Everybody's got to computer in their pocket.

Douglas Heikkinen  15:01

So what do you think is going to be the peloton for financial services? financial advice? What's that going to be?

Stewart Bell  15:08

Hopefully, it's not gonna be the peloton, advert because that caused a lot of issues. It's interesting when I was over there, one of the, the business models, I really liked to hear about what's personal capital. And I had a really interesting approach, which was so aligned with what what sort of the tech world tends to do, because, for example, if you like an app or a, you know, something you want to use, the easiest thing to do is you sign up for a free trial, right? And you start using it and you get a sense of it's, it's great. And then you sign up for another plan and other plan. And next thing, you know, you're you're embedded, and this is kind of a, it's an adoption model, which is well known in Silicon Valley, I think, no, no, I also wrote a book called hooked all about it, the way that they're getting involved. And I think what's great about personal capital is they lead with technology, which is scalable, and exponential. And also, technology is not as frightening as having to go and sit opposite an advisor and tell him everything about your financial circumstances. So they leave with technology they used to, you can go to the site, you get access to free financial planning a sort of personal finance tool, then you start to play with some of those financial modeling tools, and maybe you start to come to this realization about what you're missing out on. And at that point, there's a point at which you get the opportunity to reach out, because you've decided that you want to have a conversation rather than its traditional, you know, sales conversion thing. And then you're engaging with an individual. And I think, I personally think, you know, we could talk about client portals all day long, we could talk about the way that plans are created and provided. But I think the front end for me, is going to be giving people tools to come to their own conclusions about what they need and what they don't need. So by the time they put up their hand and say, Alright, I want to talk to an advisor. It's coming because they recognize the need, rather than having to sit in the meeting and be converted to buy a financial product or whatever it might be.

Douglas Heikkinen  17:04

I think it's also the media coming forward. And teaching people about financial literature in a good way, that it's a good thing that they should adopt, that they should not be afraid to talk to somebody about advice, that they should use these tools you're talking about. So the media has a big responsibility here.

Stewart Bell  17:24

I think I think it does. And it's what's been really interesting this past years is that is the complete flip proliferation. That's the wrong word, but keep going with of personal finance bloggers, none of them are advisors, which is interesting. And that I think it's a real shame. So people are interested in it. But I, I've been asked in the past to come and talk and give talks on financial literacy, why it's really important. And I always take a step back, and I go, can we talk about this call for financial literacy? Because one of the things that we've got to be really mindful of is something called the Dunning Kruger effect. Have you ever heard of it? No. Okay. It's named after endoscopy professional professors, I think, I can't remember what it was an English University, it might not have been. But they, they did a bunch of studies based on the idea that, on the assumption that if people don't know much about something, they'd be cautious, nervous, they'd lack confidence. And what they discovered in these studies was the opposite is true. People who know very little about a topic are very confident in their own ability. You know, these politicians, I could do a better job, these part, this pilots doing a terrible job flying the plane getting out there. And it's kind of a bell curve, the less you know, the more you think, you know, and then you kind of you realized how much you don't, and then you sort of go further on. So the problem is, I think as an industry, again, it's down to the language thing, when we go out, and particularly classic, classic example is lawyers and doctors. Try talking to doctors and lawyers about their lack of financial literacy. And you're banging up against this, this self idea that I'm a smart person, how hard can it be? So I think, um, I think, you know, one of the reasons I want to see us simplify our language is because I think, ultimately, our world only exists because of their world, right? And the more and more we try and represent expertise as being about you know, terminology and all this rest of it, I think the more we distance ourselves, I don't think that's, I think that's cutting it in the internet world where languages has tends to be more accessible. And more if you like, potentially more Democrat, democratic, would you say?

Douglas Heikkinen  19:28

Yeah, my son does exactly that. If he knows 5% of something. He's an expert on it. So I'm, I always tell him "don't 5% me".

Stewart Bell  19:37

I tell my daughter, you should get out there and conquer the world what you still know everything. Exactly.

Douglas Heikkinen  19:42

You've spoken many places and impress that advisors have to build a leveraged business. What do you mean by that?

Stewart Bell  19:49

So one of the, okay, if you look at what makes tech businesses capable of growing so quickly, once they get the model, it's because ultimately They have. They're not constrained by traditional resources. I think Peter Diamandis writes about this in his book, bold, like if you're a product manufacturer, so let's say you make widgets, right, and your widgets go really well, ultimately, the ability of you to produce those widgets is going to be held back by the part, how quickly you can get the parts. If you build a tech platform, you don't have that problem. As long as you've got enough storage space, as long as you have data, as long as you own sort of Google or Amazon or whatever it is, you know, you can sell as much as you want to many people same with ebooks, when you're looking at advice business, the constraint is usually human time is the your capacity to see certain people and in Australia, what we've seen in these past years is, the amount of legislation has grown, the amount of work that's required has grown the times growing, which means it makes sense, the price has to rise, if you're doing double the work, then you need to charge double the fees in order to continue to maintain your profit, or find efficiency here and there. But that's another story. So um, one of the problems that many of my businesses have is they go through this journey towards, okay, I want to build a business where it's not dependent on me as the founder for growth or operational. But the problem is to get there, there's kind of six phases that go through. And the constraint you're always going to be battling up against, particularly if you're the expert, you're the adviser who very good at managing relationships, you do all the advice, you know, the stuff is, there's only one of you, which means you've got a ceiling. Now you've got two options. If you if you comfortable with this, this sort of paradigm. And you want to get to a point where you've got a business that generates really good income, maybe it'll be worth a bit. But ultimately, it's mainly an income source, then ultimately, you scale up business through profitability bringing on more profitable clients. Yeah, building enough processes, so you can manage twice as many clients beat stick to the number. But if you want to go further, then the way you've got to try and leverage your business to get through, you know, what we spoke about called the dangerous middle is systems, you've got to sort of make sure you build it, but bringing the right people, your proposition is going to move away being tied to your expertise and being tied to the system that you apply to people's situations to achieve a certain financial outcome. Brand IP, all this sort of stuff, automation, when it comes into there until ideally, if you get to the right place, you get to that point where the business isn't dependent on you, you can be the guy in or girl in jeans and T shirts coming in that half the staff have no idea who you are, because after all, you're the founder. So that's when I talk about leverage, it's really about three things, create more time for yourself, as the leader of a business, so you can focus on the things you need to build a system that enables you to service and have a positive impact on clients without you necessarily having to be at the center of it. And the final area is make sure it's profitable. Because ultimately, you know, profit is oxygen, it's it's for me, a lot of people talk about profitable businesses and good advices being opposite. They're not the two sides of the same coin. Like most businesses, I've seen a got themselves in trouble with the quality of advice had resource issues.

Douglas Heikkinen  23:08

With technology being so much of the future. And advisors having a significantly hard time with technology. What are the biggest mistakes are making?

Stewart Bell  23:20

You know what, when I first started, sort of down this path, I used to get on get on stages by going by by putting in front artists, five things I could talk about, and one of those things would be I'll talk about the 10 best steps advisors should know about and I look back on it, I kind of regret that I did it. Because the problem is a lot of advisors, what they do is they see a problem and efficiency problem or you know, they can't get things out first quickly. And often the first thing they do is they look for technology. workflow is a classic example of something I would work with. Most time the first time that advisors look to sort out their workflow management is once they've identified a tool that they want to they want to use. So they go around trying to get all this information in the How to out of their heads and into the workflow management tool. And they find out pretty quickly that you if you have to train somebody, and all your processes are in the workflow management tool, guess what they have to use that to learn how to use the workflow management tool before they actually learn how to do their job. And by the way, if you change workflow management tools, and all your systems and processes are in that tool, you've got to get it out. And if you ever tried to get data out of a software system, it's they're not designed, most of them are designed to do it. So I think whilst people look for technology as a solution, technology, I think Bill Gates said it, technology will generally only amplify the efficiency of the what you're doing. If you've got an efficient process, and you introduce technology at a point that does something Yeah, eat more easily or in an automated way. Then you're going to get your increase but if you if you're going on it and you've got no process, you've got no systems you don't know how to do it. You haven't thought through the efficiency base. You just dump technology in there. Gates said, you know, if you add technology to an already inefficient process, it magnifies the problem. So I think, for me, the biggest mistake that advisors make is looking to technology to solve the problem, instead of realizing technology just enables more efficient delivery of what you're already doing.

Douglas Heikkinen  25:18

This is an unfair question, because it really matters on the size of the advisor. But what are some of the biggest growth impediments for advisors?

Stewart Bell  25:26

I remember sitting sitting down with a mentor of mine A while back, and we were talking about some of the challenges of being a coach in this space. And there's one thing we came up with called the experts conundrum. And it's the problem that a lot of a lot I see a lot of knowledge businesses fall into, which is when you're so used to being the expert, or presenting yourself as the expert. And particularly when, you know, you look at something, and it's got financial planning on the front of it, like financial planning and marketing or financial planning software systems, you make the assumption, and I can work this out, or I'm an expert in financial planning. So it's sort of extends, and the truth is that the most I've learned about improving what I've done has come from looking outside, looking at other industries in particular, and going What have I got to learn from from that what I've got to learn from that, and I think are certainly over here. Traditionally, we've kind of been, as an industry, we've often been really insular and looked internally for solutions, I think that's probably a big impediment. The other one is not simply starting to build systems and thinking about how you're going to train people way too late in the game. Because the systems are a bit like, they're a bit like that Chinese proverb about planting a tree, the best time to start building them, is right now it was 20 years ago, or when you open the second best time to do it is today. But the problem is, a lot of businesses, once they reach that point where they realize I might need to document some processes work out how I'm going to train next people, they're so busy managing that growth and managing everything, they never get time. And it just becomes this this thing that just gets them stuck in this horrible midpoint between, you know, small business and scalable business.

Douglas Heikkinen  27:15

Are you bullish on the advisor for a grand future?

Stewart Bell  27:19

I'm absolutely bullish on it, I kind of think that we're on the edge of a real Golden Age, for all of the stuff that I've spoken about with regard to, you know, the evolution. What we're seeing over here in Australia is that the demand for advice has consistently grown. And it's growing more and more each year, the last couple of years with a lot of the I got a lot of the media coverage. And we had a bunch of royal commissions, which government inquiries into advice, which sort of brought out a whole bunch of issues. That kind of like put a lot of people off. But I'm all every single client I work with has been absolutely overloaded this year with leads coming in either people who are looking for new advisors. They're sort of they've been reminded maybe by the media coverage that need to do something. But on top of that, what we've got over here is we've got an absolute Exodus out of the industry. So you've got this rising demand, you've got this falling supply of advisors. But on top of that, I just. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to look at the demographics, not a lot of people realize how outnumbered the baby boomers are when it comes to numbers in terms of the generations underneath. And those generations I kind of feel are much more willing to look for leadership look for advice and take it when they when they get the financial resources, I guess.

Douglas Heikkinen  28:39

And what about the people who don't get advice? Are they forever chasing where the media and the crowd send them? Or how do we find a better way to connect them with the people who can give them advice?

Stewart Bell  28:51

Was it the whole GameSpot thing? Yeah, I mean, they're out there, and they're connected. And I guess this this boils down to, you know, there's going to be groups of people who genuinely, they're good at doing it. They don't need advice, and not everybody should get advice. But there are people out there who for a whole bunch of Dunning Kruger reasons and confirmation bias. You know, they think they're experts at it, and they think they know what they're doing. I run workshops, where sometimes we do value proposition work, and I'll ask the room of Put your hand up if you think you do a better job managing my financial affairs better than me. And occasionally, some people don't put their hands up. I say everyone should put their hands up. Because it's not about expertise. It's not about knowledge. It's about time. It's about focus. It's about the fact that you have a team behind you that does it. There's no way me doing what I'm doing and living my life can match the eight hours a day that you're going to spend doing this professionally. So I think I think the best opportunity that we as an industry can do to reach all those people out there is, is sort of make that change in language. Look at the proposition we're putting out there. Start To understand that technology is not going to solve the problem immediately, but it will help over the long term. And most importantly, most importantly, if you're going through challenges right now, realize that this is kind of the growing pains of an industry, particularly over here with the legislation. But for those who can hold the line, focus on building a business that's going to work and constantly evolve, what's going to happen is, you're going to hit the top of this ridge, and it's and you're going to end up realizing that all the work you've put in so far still stood you in really good stead. And I'm very lucky, I could split the industry over here in down the middle with those who are optimistic about the future. really optimistic and those who are pessimistic and I it's weird that every single business I work with are coming up from the optimistic point of view. So whether that's just a optimistic people are more likely to go, I'm gonna invest in coaching or something else. I don't know.

Douglas Heikkinen  30:53

If people want to reach out to you, and I suggest they do, how do they connect?

Stewart Bell  30:57

Drop me an email. I mean, you can visit the website with the terror honestly, the one one choice I go back and make is it has changed the name of my business because it's terrible, but it's a U d, e r e.com. That that's out there, feel free to check out. You know, the site tells you a bit about what we do. But if you if you want to reach out and say hi and let me know where you're at and, and give me a bit of feedback on on your thoughts. You can reach me at Stuart, which is s te w AR t at our dairy Comdata You and I, if anybody emails me, I'll respond personally.

Douglas Heikkinen  31:29

Great. Let's do thank you so much. We appreciate you joining with us today. Thank you very much. For everybody at advisor pedia our producer Jakie Beard and the Power Your Advice podcast team. This is Doug Heikkinen