Bridge Private Wealth is a relatively young firm with big ambitions. Director Jessica Waller explains how the VAN Build for the Future program has made her business goals feel attainable – and how Bridge “achieved more in 12 months than they had in the previous five years.”
Watch now
Loading video...
Jessica Waller was Joel Xuereb’s first employee when he founded Bridge Private Wealth in 2008. Fourteen years later, she’s a director with an equal stake in the business. She and Joel merged with Neelan Sornalingam’s practice in 2018 – and while the three directors had a strong culture of trust, they were finding it hard to come together on big business decisions.
“We have very different personalities and priorities, and before we started the VAN program there was no traction, no momentum on our strategy,” explains Jessica.
“We knew we wanted to acquire more businesses and scale up – but deciding how to do that was a blockage.”
This underlying frustration was a catalyst to commit to Macquarie Bank’s VAN Build for the Future program, an 18-month coaching journey for emerging advice firms. Working in a small collaborative network with other Sydney-based principals, Jessica, Joel and Neelan undertook a series of webinars, workshops, benchmarking exercises and conferences.
Picking a lane
Jessica acknowledges the three directors were collectively great at idea creation.
“My goodness, we were gold medallists for coming up with ideas. But that meant we’d have a thousand doors open, and we needed to close most of those and just focus on three.”
The VAN Build for the Future program works through four proven pillars for business growth – the first of which is how to make better decisions and execute successfully. It was through those initial sessions that Jess and her co-directors worked out how to prioritise and stay accountable for action.
“Now we have a system where we have set, non-negotiable goals for the next 12 months,” she explains.
“If we have a new idea, we check if it meets one of those three goals. If not, we bench it. We store it with all those other great ideas, and once a year we go back to look at those ideas to see if they will support our new goals.”
It sounds simple. But just by having that disciplined focus, Bridge Private Wealth “achieved more in 12 months than it did in five years.”
“We launched a new website, moved into a bigger office in North Sydney, engaged new paraplanning services, and also started working with a recruiter and business brokers to set the wheels in motion for talent and business acquisitions,” says Jessica. All while putting time and energy into the VAN program.
Bridge Private Wealth now has seven staff plus two paraplanners working offshore, and is in the final stages of hiring two more team members. And it was the VAN community’s insights that encouraged the decision to outsource the paraplanning.
“Another practice in our group gave us the phone number of the people they worked with, but also said come into our office and see how we use them. That gave us a lot of trust in the referral,” says Jessica.
Finding new energy to empower clients
Jessica describes her Build for the Future experience as “therapy” in some ways. “It was really nice to join a group of people who felt positive about the future of advice. I’d become jaded by the impact of the Royal Commission and then remote working during COVID – I’m responsible for compliance and operations in the business, all that red tape. I was starting to feel burned out.”
She says that sense of camaraderie was valuable to her personally, as well as to the business.
“People sharing their great stories, as well as where they went wrong. All that anecdotal advice. It reminded me of why we’re here, and the fact we do good work.”
Bridge Private Wealth’s client base tends to be in time-poor executives and high net wealth clients who are approaching retirement, which Jessica says is “a really exciting time."
“I love working with clients who have built their wealth to a point where there are strategies we can utilise to enhance their financial position. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and many of them just need permission to start enjoying themselves as they’ve worked so hard to earn their financial success.”
Macquarie conducts a personalised client propensity survey as part of the program’s pre-work, and Jessica says understanding what clients really thought about the firm provided fascinating insights.
“It was encouraging to know our clients love us. But what surprised us was that the things they wanted to talk about were renovations or cars – what they could do with their money – not necessarily the investments themselves. So we now communicate more regularly – including monthly emails – with clients on the things that matter to them.”
Bridging the personal with the professional
The VAN program also encouraged Jessica, Joel and Neelan to have honest conversations about what they wanted to take out of the business, and what they expected of each other.
“Before, we just talked about the business. Being able to articulate a deeper purpose was great, knowing that we each have a different reason for being in business and how we can get the most out of each other. This meant that we could set our own boundaries for how we like to work.”
Despite these differences, they do share an ambition for significant growth.
“We want to double the size of our business, targeting a billion dollars of funds under management. But we don’t just want to grow for growth’s sake – that was also a learning from VAN. We need that growth to be profitable,” says Jessica.
That means a strong focus on client retention and referrals by improving the client experience – and strategically acquiring more businesses.
“The most important thing VAN has given us is a belief that this is attainable,” says Jessica. “We always thought we were too small to enter this world. But here we are – and VAN Build for the Future’s toolkit is making it possible.”
To learn more about the VAN Build for the Future program, visit macquarie.com.au/advisers/van.
This article has been prepared by the Macquarie Virtual Adviser Network (VAN) which is provided by Macquarie Bank Limited ABN 46 008 583 542 AFSL 237502 (MBL). The provision of VAN, including the contents of this article, do not amount to a financial product or financial service nor does it involve the provision of general or personal financial product advice. The views and opinions expressed by the relevant client in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of MBL.
