A handful of years ago, I had the privilege of accompanying a small group of Australian advice leaders – including advisors, educators, and a well-known platform CEO – to the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
SXSW – or just ‘South By’ to those familiar – is an annual festival of creativity and innovation in all its forms. It’s a mashup, a jamboree where tech people, entrepreneurs, marketers, film makers, authors, and venture capitalists come together to create, share, connect, share, and pitch. (The total capital raised for all of the SXSW pitch entrants to date has exceeded $14bn.)
As you can imagine it also attracts its fair share of people – from all walks of life – who just want to watch, and be inspired.
SXSW is, famously, where Uber first launched, along with the platform formerly known as Twitter, Pinterest, and Foursquare. It’s where Billie Eilish was discovered as an unsigned 14-year-old, and Mumford & Sons first made their name.
Creatively, it’s the bomb.
And it’s coming down under. To Sydney in fact. In October this year.
Organisers are expecting 60-80,000 people to turn up over the week-long event, which will feature around 70 speakers, each capable of headlining an event on their own. Futurist Amy Webb will be there, as will Coachella co-founder Paul Tollet and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson along with titans of every industry.
According to Colin Daniels, MD of SXSW Sydney, the best way to experience and get value from SXSW (tickets are around $1,000 a pop), is to go outside your industry and outside your comfort zone.
“It’s the convergence that makes the event so special. There’s more than 19 conference tracks from climate and sustainability, health and wellbeing, sport, the music industry, the screen industry, tech and innovation, robotics and AI … There is so much to see. Take a punt – don’t just pick the obvious. When you’ve got a spare moment, go and see something different. Some of the best discoveries I’ve had at South by Southwest and some of the best learnings have been from just randomly popping into something.”
This point about the best ideas coming from the most unexpected sources certainly gels with my experiences, and those of the advisors who came along to Austin a few years ago.
Reading about all this innovation and creativity got me excited, about the event, and about the creative spirit in people. As a long-time marketer and communicator, I am a diehard believer in the role of creativity in advertising. In all the focus on data and retargeting and search, we seem to have overlooked the fact that when you need your message to cut through in the sea of competing messaging, creativity becomes important.
When thinking about SXSW, I also paused to reflect on the importance of innovation and creativity in financial advice, and how it is driving the profession forward.
Just as the client side of advice is changing, with more and more people opening their minds to retail investing, the mindset of advisors is also changing.
No longer constrained by large institutions who were risk averse, inflexible, and reluctant to invest in new technologies, advisors in boutiques or self-licensed practices are enjoying newfound freedom.
Freedom to build contemporary business models, free of legacy thinking and legacy systems. And freedom to be agile, responsive, and to genuinely think ‘outside the square’.
Innovation in advice is not new.
Over the years we have seen innovation across various elements of the advice value chain, much of it focused on driving down costs, through the use of technology, client segmentation, and outsourcing. We’ve seen practices step up their client engagement game too, with online fact finds, videos, podcasts, mobile apps, and social media becoming a common feature of the advice landscape.
Increasingly, this innovation is client focused.
What makes the new breed of advice entrepreneur different is that – empowered by their newfound independence and an appetite for calculated risks – they genuinely start with a clean piece of paper, identifying customer pain points and innovating solutions around those pain points.
Their ‘North Star’ is the client, not the SOA, and they are applying a Design Thinking methodology to their business and their innovation agenda.
Of course, embarking on an agenda of innovation can be trickier when you are in a small licensee, as your source of ideas, inspiration, experiences, and guidance is more limited.
That’s when being part of a community is so important.
As the advice landscape has morphed and fragmented, advisors have had to look to other ways to be part of a community – that they can contribute to and benefit from. And I think that’s what has driven the popularity of the Ensombl community.
Closing in on the 8,000-member mark, and accounting for one in three advisors, the community is a vibrant, progressive collective of advisors from all around Australia, who are collaborative in spirit, progressive in nature, and optimistic in outlook.
We see this in the thousands of conversations that take place across the platform – conversations which reflect the contemporary issues and challenges that advisors are facing. From tech to investments, from pricing advice to client engagement, from life insurance to aged care, the conversations playing out every day represent the heartbeat of advice.
As a channel for sharing innovative ideas among the advice community – and helping to drive the positive evolution of advice – it’s without equal.
It’s a channel that we make accessible to our corporate partners.
Our approach to working with corporate partners reflects the spirit of the community – meaning members will welcome you with open arms if you demonstrate you are there to share, contribute, and solve advisor problems.
Whether it be via podcasts, articles, videos, or research papers, content which is based on advisor insights and clearly solves their problems and challenges is eagerly consumed by community members.
Those who are prepared to give will certainly enjoy the rewards!
More from Richard Dunkerley
