A self-professed “terrible manager” has explained how reconfiguring his leadership role and investing in digital employees, as well as his team, has helped scale his advice practice. 

One of the most attractive features of a career in financial advice is the relatively clear pathway to business ownership. The trouble here is that while there are many excellent financial advisers, the skill set doesn’t directly translate to being an effective manager which can be challenging for those wanting to expand their operations. 

This is something Michael Bova faced after setting up Sydney-based Family Wealth Advisory in 2009. Ten years into its operations, he found that while he was comfortable with the position the business was in, he faced an ongoing staff turnover which was limiting the company’s growth.  

“I kept hiring good people, but they would only last about 18-24 months and then they would leave. I found that I’m just not a good manager. I’m not good at bringing out the best in people in terms of sitting with them in terms of [asking] what’s going on in your day and how can I adjust it?” Bova told the IMAP conference in Sydney. 

“I’m really good at, ‘This is the vision, this is where we’re heading to’. I hire really good people, and I just expect them to do their job. After I’d lost about two or three really good people, I realised it’s not them, it’s me.  

“I said, either I really scale down, or I push through and that was the pivotal moment. I was losing [staff], and also I just didn’t feel that looking after 125 families was it. I always had this goal of getting to 1,000.” 

This led Bova to build up a team that could support the needs of staff while he focused on the future direction for the firm, but as he began to put more capital into building up the business, he was faced with new hurdles. 

“I underestimated how the depths of the valley of death, of how deep that actually goes. Anyone that has invested in growing a business knows that you make these investments and there’s no guarantee that growth is going to show up.” 

The launch of ChatGPT, in particular, triggered an existential crisis where he considered selling his business out of fear that he and financial advisers more generally would be replaced by the technology. But rather than giving in, Bova decided to embrace AI which has now delivered valuable efficiency gains. 

“I hired a CTO six months after ChatGPT launched. I thought, ‘We’ve got to be ahead of this’, and thank goodness we did,” Bova said. “We’ve spent a good two years investing in that, and we’ve now launched four digital employees this year and the savings, the efficiency, and client experience gains from those four digital employees is absolutely enormous.” 

He added: “[After] those first two years where it just flatlines, and I thought, what’s the point of all of this? All of a sudden, now the challenge is scaling from 310 families to 1,000, to make sure that we can onboard and maintain that level of excellence, but with the growth that’s showing up.” 

Essentially, a ‘digital employee’ is simply an AI agent capable to actioning tasks. 

“One of the digital employees, Bindi, helps with the onboarding process, and that’d probably save 900 hours just on onboarding. We’ve got another digital employee that’s going to help with review reports. We’re just finalising that at the moment. The savings on that is going to be enormous. 

“We’re never looking to let any of our existing staff members go. We just want them to keep going up the stack in terms of value proposition back to clients, and then we’ve got a quality review one and we’ve got one that helps with implementation.” 

As a result, Bova said he will be able to hire more in-person advisers, helping him move closer to the ultimate goal of supporting 1,000 families. 

The digital employees are designed specifically to take the admin workload of human staff, he explained, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks instead. 

“Associates used to have to do a lot of that data entry because it was complex. We deal with complexities, family businesses, companies, trusts, self-managed super funds, and multiple versions of them all, and it’s doing it.” 

“Why is that important? Because if we onboarded 60 families last year and they’re complex families, so we’ve onboarded I think five families in July and two to start in September, one of which a $65 million family. There is so much complexity there.  

“It’s allowing us to keep delivering that solution with our existing team, and that’s the importance of getting that digital solution part right.”