The Adviser Who Stayed When Half the Profession Left: Brendan on High-Touch Advice, AI and the Best Decade Yet

In 2018, after the Banking Royal Commission, something close to half of Australia's financial advisers left the profession. New education standards, a heavier compliance load, and a hard reset on how advice was delivered proved to be too steep a hill. Brendan from Access Wealth Group climbed it anyway.

Seventeen years in, he runs a boutique firm in the south of Canberra where clients still drive in to sign forms and get, in his words, a cuddle at the door, and where AI now quietly takes the notes so he can leave on time. This is a conversation about what actually keeps clients for decades, and why he thinks the best years of the industry are still ahead. Press play above to hear it in full.

Falling into advice

Brendan didn't set out to be a financial adviser. He thought he'd be an accountant. "When I joined a local accounting firm, the financial advisor soon after that left, I was the youngest, and therefore I was going to be the new financial advisor," he said. He calls it "a real blessing in disguise."

What made it stick was a piece of framing he got early on, and still repeats: financial advice is a vocation, not a job. "You do really have to enjoy it. You have to enjoy the advice, you have to enjoy the interactions with the clients." He also happens to like the puzzle of it. "I don't mind solving puzzles, and realistically that's sort of what we do all day."

Why he stayed through the exodus

When we asked what kept him in while so many left, he was honest about how brutal the period was. "At the time it did really feel like there was this huge hill that we had to climb," he said, pointing to a wave of extra education requirements and a much larger compliance burden landing at once.

The industry had been easy to enter for decades, a diploma and a background often in insurance broking, with comparatively light compliance. The Royal Commission ended that. "Like any change, people are going to either enjoy it and embrace it and improve what they were doing, or they were going to decide that it wasn't for them." He understands why people left. He also believes the profession needed exactly this to evolve.

It was an incredibly difficult period, but I think it was one of those things that the profession needed to evolve.

The firm he'd send his parents to

Before Access Wealth, Brendan spent years inside banks, and it's the thing he reacts against most strongly. Institutional advice, he felt, treated people as an account number or a sale. So when he started his own firm, he had a simple benchmark.

I really wanted to build something that I'd be happy to send my own parents to. Somewhere where you weren't treated as an account number, or just a sale.

The design goals followed from that: clients should know who their adviser is, and know they can call, for anything, for decades to come. It wasn't just a change in service style, he said, but a change in the kind of service he believed he could actually provide, and something he didn't feel he could do where he was.

What high-touch actually means

"High touch" gets said a lot. Brendan defines it concretely: high access. When clients call the office, they get him, not a layer in front of him. There's no cap on how often they can come in. "If there's the need, our expectation is that they can come in, and we'll solve the problems, we'll take away the stress, and we'll alleviate any concerns."

That access, inside a boutique firm, is the point of difference, and it compounds. "Money is pretty stressful for most people. If you can help people take away that stress, that burden, they talk. And when people talk, they've mentioned us." On the granular side, the rule is a cadence: no fortnight should pass without a client hearing from the firm, usually through genuinely educational email content, alongside the ability to book in any time.

Why 90% is still in person

Access Wealth sits in the south of Canberra, where there aren't many planning offices, so most clients come to them. Brendan kept it that way on purpose. When COVID lifted, the firm didn't carry on with virtual meetings. "As soon as we could get out, we were back in the office."

His reasoning is unfashionable and refreshingly plain. "I've never been able to form fantastic relationships with people just via the screen. I've always preferred to see them in person, see the emotion, give them a cuddle when they come in." Canberra suits it, he says, a big country town with three degrees of separation, where clients, many of them 50-plus and less confident online, still value walking in, talking face to face and signing forms in the room.

He's clear-eyed that this is a demographic choice, not a universal law. A firm built around younger clients, he acknowledges, will need the virtual office to matter far more. "But for us, we'll be in the office for a little while to come."

The free consult and fee-for-service

Access Wealth offers a free consult up front, and Brendan has no intention of removing it. "I want to know that I can do something for someone before we start charging." His view is that accessing advice is hard enough already; adding barriers just stops people saying hi.

Often the people who book in "have just got a couple of really quick questions that have been really stressing them out." If he can answer them, not charge, and send them on their way, that's a win for the client and, he says, a good feeling for the firm. The firm itself is fee-for-service, charging hourly much like an accountant, because they know how many hours a piece of advice, initial or ongoing, actually takes.

How AI gave him his evenings back

The biggest operational shift of Brendan's career is recent, the last 12 to 24 months, and it's AI. The industry, he admits, was historically slow to adopt tech "probably because they didn't need to." Now a wave of AI-driven tools has arrived, and the one that changed his week is a review tool called Marlu.

It works quietly in the background of an in-person meeting, no video required. As he and a client talk across the desk about their situation, family, and goals, the software takes detailed notes, turns the transcript into a proper file note, and then extracts the actions: Brendan needs to do this, the client needs to send that, the back-office team needs to organise A, B and C. Those items flow straight into the firm's workflow and downstream advice documents.

The benefit, he says without hesitation, is time. "Once upon a time I'd be finishing everything for the day and then you'd start your admin." Now the notes and action items are prepared in real time and sent to staff before he's even left the room.

As opposed to me staying in the office late, I can go and pick my kids up from jiu-jitsu. You're producing more detailed, more accurate work, at scale.

He notes it's now everywhere in service professions, his own GP uses near-identical software, and that advice was simply "starved of this type of improvement" for too long.

The newsletter he writes himself

The firm's main nurture engine isn't a call script, it's a newsletter, sent every week or two, and Brendan writes it personally. He tried the alternative in his head and rejected it: "If I gave it to someone else to do, it wouldn't be as authentic." He sits down in the morning and pieces together the briefs and updates that crossed his desk and struck him as genuinely interesting.

The most common feedback he gets isn't just that clients appreciate receiving it, it's that they can actually understand it. "It's written to us like you would write an email to us." The advice industry, he says, is heavy with acronyms and bogged-down detail; most people just want a complex concept explained simply enough to digest and get instant value from. Since the year's budget and tax changes, he's leaned into plain-English "change blasts" rather than making clients decode the news themselves.

On AI and writing, he's balanced. It's great for a grammar check, "just make sure this makes sense," and the firm uses it, especially via Marlu. But go too AI-heavy on client comms and it shows. "If you're going to use it, just make sure you're putting your own flavour onto it, and give it a red-hot crack yourself to start off with." Growth of the list is mostly word of mouth, helped by a simple refer-a-friend button at the foot of each send.

Tech, scale and the cost of advice

Brendan connects the technology story to the biggest problem in his industry: advice isn't cheap, and much of that cost is the sheer time compliance demands, onboarding, documentation, and the back-end support legally required to serve someone properly.

His thesis is a virtuous circle. If technology reduces the time it takes to produce compliant advice, the cost of advice falls; as advice becomes more accessible, more people seek it. "The more people you can assist, the more people want assistance," he said, calling it a self-fulfilling prophecy. He sees a near future where advisers can serve more clients, more efficiently and compliantly, while still spending the time each relationship needs.

He's candid about his own bottleneck, too. His Achilles heel, he says, is that adopting new tech takes real time and effort to bed in, and if he had his time again he'd have invested earlier and empowered his staff to be more adventurous with it. The one thing he'd still love to automate further is compliance, where he admits he likes to be the last set of eyes on everything, the 3, 4, 5, 6 documents he reviews before every meeting.

His advice to newcomers (and his younger self)

Brendan is unusually bullish for someone who lived through the hard decade. "I truly think we're going to go through the best 10, 15, 20 years that the industry has ever seen," he said, driven by advances that let advisers serve people better and more efficiently.

For anyone entering the field, his guidance is specific: if you like solving puzzles and you like finance, it's a genuinely rewarding career, but grab hold of a couple of great mentors, because it's a very technical business and knowing your craft is critical. Join a firm that's ethical, has a great culture and a clear path to advancement. And remember the balance his own mentors drilled into him.

Technical knowledge will get people through the door, but being a great person with the ability to hold a great relationship will keep them.

The one thing he'd tell his 17-years-younger self? Start the firm earlier and back yourself. "A little bit of fear kept me back." The first couple of years are hard, he says, but once you're through, "it's a fantastic life," and one he expects only gets better as the tech matures.

The Finance Operator's playbook

If you want to model how Brendan built and defended Access Wealth Group, here's the distilled version:

1. 1Treat advice as a vocation. The clients, the puzzles and the relationships have to genuinely energise you, or the hard periods will end you.
2. 2Set a values benchmark you can feel. 'Would I send my own parents here?' is a sharper filter than any mission statement.
3. 3Compete on access, not size. In a boutique, letting clients reach the actual adviser directly is the differentiator big firms can't copy.
4. 4Keep a maximum gap between touchpoints. No fortnight without genuinely useful contact keeps money-anxious clients calm and loyal.
5. 5Default to in person if your demographic wants it, but know it's a demographic choice, not a law, younger client bases will need the virtual office.
6. 6Offer a free first consult. Removing the barrier to say hi builds goodwill that comes back over years, sometimes 15 of them.
7. 7Use AI to buy back time, not to replace your voice. Let it handle notes, actions and grammar; keep client comms in your own hand.
8. 8Write your nurture content yourself, in plain English. Understandable beats impressive; authenticity can't be delegated.
9. 9Push tech at compliance to lower the cost of advice, then let accessibility compound into word-of-mouth growth.
10. 10If you're starting out, get great mentors and back yourself early. Fear of starting is the cost most founders regret.

Brendan expects to be doing this for another 15 to 20 years, and he wants Access Wealth to grow incrementally into the preferred retirement-advice firm in Canberra, not the biggest firm in the world, one of the best. You can learn more about the firm at Access Wealth Group.