The Meeting System Myth: Why Structure Beats Style Every Time
A well-run financial planning business doesn’t just deliver advice – it delivers it predictably. Inconsistency across key meetings – the Initial Appointment, the Statement of Advice Presentation, or the Annual Review – is the hidden weakness in many firms. While owners focus on revenue, it’s often the quiet chaos in how meetings are run and documented that chips away at trust, compliance, and efficiency. If you want to scale with confidence, every high-impact client meeting must become a system. And that system starts with standardisation – not of the advice, but of the structure. Systemise the Conversation – Not Just the Paperwork The core of a great meeting system is a pre-designed checklist or script that aligns with your service model. This doesn’t mean a robotic pitch. It means your practice has decided the key messages, disclosures, and touchpoints every client should hear, and every planner should cover. This script links directly to a tailored presentation deck. Together, they guide the conversation in a way that feels natural but ensures compliance, consistency, and quality across your entire team. Whether it’s super contributions, estate planning, or explaining fees, the same message is heard – regardless of which adviser is in the room. Now the magic happens downstream. Because the file note template has been written with the script and deck in mind, documentation becomes fast, thorough, and audit-proof. No more gaps. No more ambiguity. Instead, you have a meeting system that not only educates clients but protects your business. From Chaos to Coordination – One Meeting at a Time When you treat meetings as repeatable experiences rather than one-off conversations, you unlock operational clarity. Let’s take the Annual Review. If every adviser starts with a discovery script, shares a visual roadmap tailored to the client’s stage, and wraps up with a checklist-driven file note, you’ve created an advice experience that is consistent, scalable, and delegation-friendly. A paraplanner reading the note doesn’t have to guess – they know what happened. An offshore team can pre-fill the review deck or prep documents with confidence. And compliance knows where to look to verify outcomes. Best of all, clients feel the professionalism. They feel seen, heard, and remembered – because the system was built to deliver that. The Real Payoff – Margin, Morale, and Market Value When your meetings are systemised: Capacity scales. Planners spend less time documenting and more time advising. Morale lifts. Admin and support teams stop chasing details and start managing workflow. Compliance risk drops. Your audit trail becomes robust by default. Business value grows. You’re no longer a collection of individual styles. You’re a business with a playbook. Ultimately, your client meetings become an asset – not a risk. Conclusion High-value client interactions are too important to leave to chance or memory. Building a meeting system – anchored in a script, deck, and templated file note - ensures that every adviser delivers a consistent, high-quality experience, every time. This isn’t about removing personality. It’s about removing doubt. And the practicality? Don’t pretend you’ll build this in two weeks. Start small. Test. Tinker. Then each year, when your office shuts down for three days to improve procedures, you’ll make real progress. Within three years, you’ll have busted the myth that this is too hard to start. It’s not. You just did it – one process at a time. Mark Lewin
Form type Checklist in Notes for ongoing use?
Hi All, Has anyone set up or created a form type document in Xplan notes. I have used Note Templates before and am aware I can use a table. Or a merge output however we don't want to re-tick options each time, just review and make any changes. We have a checklist that we want advisors to use in meetings. This covers all advice areas and there are boxes to be ticked. We are thinking that this could be saved and edited in notes. I.e. saved last answers and then just updated again at a meeting. Does anyone use something like this and can offer ideas for a solution The answers being o Yes o No o N/A o Not Interested o Already in place Thanks in Advance!The Offshoring Blind Spot: How Poor Systems Cripple Profitability
Australia is experiencing a unique mismatch: adviser head-count has fallen by roughly 40 % since 2019, yet the pool of advice-seeking households keeps growing as 3.6 million baby-boomers move deeper into retirement. For practice owners this means clients are not merely available; they are queuing. The opportunity, however, is only profitable if new business is screened and processed efficiently. Chasing every enquiry dilutes margin and culture, so the first discipline is a strict Ideal Client definition. A prospect must fit your revenue model, complexity sweet spot and advice philosophy before you invest expensive planner hours. Done well, qualification guards scarce resources and sets a high bar for future profitability. The Real Offshoring Problem: Process, Not People Many principals blame disappointing offshore results on “quality control”, yet the real culprit is almost always the firm’s internal machinery. When workflows partially live in someone’s head and data standards vary by adviser, exported tasks return riddled with rework. Offshoring magnifies the system already in place: strong SOPs, digital checklists and automated task queues thrive; verbal instructions collapse. The cost is steep - duplicated labour, owner time sunk into fixes and EBIT margins trapped below 20 %. Practices that invest six months documenting processes, training an overseas team leader and embedding secure tech may lift margins to 30 %-plus within the second year. Rather than abandon global talent, firms must treat the offshore partner as the execution arm of a clearly engineered assembly line. Once instructions are unambiguous and repeatable, offshore staff excel at time-critical admin such as data entry, product research and SoA implementation, freeing onshore advisers for strategy and client coaching. Marry Ideal Clients with a World-Class Onboarding Machine After you have filtered prospects, the true leverage appears during onboarding. A well-built procedure locks in client confidence, accelerates fee capture and frees adviser capacity. Offshoring slots perfectly here because the steps are data-heavy but rules-based. For example, document collection, fact-find validation and platform form preparation follow the same sequence every time. When these tasks move offshore, a local paraplanner can oversee multiple files concurrently instead of chasing signatures. Your onboarding blueprint should incorporate the five qualification checkpoints that signal a client worth serving: A clear problem they want solved. Authority (and willingness) for both decision-makers to engage. A genuine sense of urgency. Estimated annual advice fees above your minimum threshold. Openness to your recommendations. With those criteria met, hand the file to an offshore “implementation pod” that follows a digitised, automated playbook: e-sign engagement letter → trigger SharePoint workflow → schedule discovery meeting via Calendly → pre-populate fact-find and risk-profile forms → load data into your CRM. Each click is logged, timestamped and reported back to the adviser dashboard, giving local staff visibility without the drudgery. The payoff is two-fold. First, capacity scales: one adviser supported by a disciplined offshore cell can service 150 + households at consistent service levels. Second, culture improves: local staff shift from firefighting to high-value conversations, and offshore colleagues enjoy clear KPIs and career pathways instead of ad-hoc requests. Conclusion Client demand is surging, and the firms that will capture profitable growth are those that (1) know exactly whom they want to serve, (2) codify every repeatable step, and (3) deploy offshore talent as the engine room of a seamless onboarding experience. The bottleneck is no longer lead flow; it is the owner’s resolve to replace tribal knowledge with procedure. Get that right and offshoring stops being a quality-control headache and becomes the accelerator that turns plentiful prospects into ideal, high-margin clients - efficiently, consistently and at scale. Mark Lewin May 2025🤓Xplan Hint: When your file notes need a new home
Did you know that you can move file notes between entities? We still hear (to our collective horror) about users moving file notes between entities by copying and pasting. But there’s a much quicker way! In the file note’s ‘Related’ tab, just click on the Add button to add other entities, and use the chain link button to link/unlink the note from any entity.Want to know exactly what your client has updated in their digital fact find? Now you can!
Fact find comparison report is now available to all users Background Client Portal allows users to provide their clients with a digital fact find to complete for new and existing clients. The data is updated immediately in Xplan and allows advisers to capture data more efficiently. However, even though all changes are logged in the audit trail, getting a clear picture of what is updated wasn't always easy. What's new? Upon completion of a fact find in Client Portal, a comparison report is generated and saved as a file note against the client. All data from the fact find is displayed and any changes are clearly highlighted. How do I activate it? No extra steps are required to configure or activate the comparison report, it is already live in Client Portal and available now. Simply follow the existing fact find process by setting the fact find status to 'Unlocked' and when the client submits their fact find, a file note is created with the comparison report attached. Got questions or feedback? We always welcome feedback on our products and if you wish to let us know your thoughts, or if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to post them below.
