Holistic Financial Advice: Why Your Business Might Be Your Best Investment with Duncan Perkins

Holistic financial advice, why your business might be your best investment. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, where we deliver actionable insights to help you grow your business and influence. I’m your host Anthony Perl, and today I’m joined by Duncan Perkins, who is the owner of Tax Time Account.

And home loan essentials. And he brings a rare combination of expertise across banking, finance, broking accounting, and financial planning. And in this episode, Duncan reveals his innovative hub and spoke approach to financial services. Challenges the traditional investment mindsets and explains why your own business might be your best investment opportunity.

You’re going to discover why fitter financially could transform your wealth journey. So as we dive into this episode with Duncan, I want you to understand that here is a man. That owns multiple businesses is challenging the norm and is gonna make you think not just about his business and in terms of the financial side of things, but also the way you think about your business and your business model.

So get ready for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I have. A wonderful guest with me today, Duncan, who is gonna introduce himself in just a moment. But we are going to cover a whole range of topics here today from really from someone who has built multiple businesses and joined them in a unique way.

I’m gonna let Duncan reveal also Duncan, firstly, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. As we’d like to do, why don’t you start off by introducing yourself to everyone. Hello everyone. My name’s Duncan Perkins. I’m the owner of Tax Time Accountants and Home Loan Essentials and part owner of Bit of Financial Services.

And I suppose, how far back do we want to go? I started in this game back in 1984 when I left school and joined the bank and followed in my father’s footsteps. I stayed. A loyal bank officer all the way up until about 2000 when I escaped and was poached into the world of finance broking which I truly loved.

And I ran and set up my own company called Home Loan Essentials. And oh, I suppose one of the early forebearers of financial finance broking. It was fairly new to the industry in 2000, and then I rolled into, being convinced to buy an accounting practice by a mate of mine who was a financial planner.

And we set up an accounting practice. I, we didn’t set up an accounting, we bought an accounting practice and then I thought accounting can’t be that hard. So I then went off to university and turned that into a double degree in accounting and financial planning. And then I went into financial planning.

‘Cause I found finance and doing home loans. Not so challenging. Before the 2008 one of the requirements to get a home loan was you had to spell mortgage. And I think you could basically get yourself a home loan low dock loans and reverse mortgages and other things. I grew a little bit disillusioned and I went more into the financial planning and and the accounting and that’s where it’s leading me today.

So I. I’m one of those rare, I don’t know, rare accountants that have many hats and many degrees. And the, when a client sees me, they, from a simple tax return to a SME client they get the whole, they get the whole pitch. So they get lending, they get financial planning, they get they get taxation advice.

And I’ll probably even give them the future. Horse tips for the weekend as well which probably don’t get them anywhere. So anyway, so yeah that’s how I roll. I’ve got a staff of about four or five, and I’ve got I’ve outsourced some teams overseas. And yeah, just looking for my new challenge now, which is what I call getting fitter financially.

So I’m trying to write a book set up an app and trying to drag a few people along on the way and yeah. Just keep helping people, I that’s the bit I like, so I do everything. So anything to do with I love that. Yeah. I love that. It’s I guess that’s what I wanna ask you about from the start is that you’ve just pointed out a career path that.

Has multiple disciplines to it, because it’s not that common that people sit in. What is three different camps? The the mortgage, the financial management and the accounting side of things. There are three quite different disciplines in many respects. So how does that actually work in terms of keeping that under one umbrella?

Legally. Legally it doesn’t. There’s quite a conflict of interest. So if, and this I believe is one of the big problems with the profession in accounting in financial planning, and also in, in mortgage broking. The rats seem to scurry over to where they can find their most money.

And it seems to be at the moment in the, giving professional advice around property investment because you don’t need a financial planning license to give advice so much in regards to property. And so when I sit down with clients, I try and help them out from a holistic perspective. I’ve got a bit of a saying in that there’s skills, knowledge, and attitude.

Everyone’s got skills. So one plus one equals two. As a financial planner, they will sit there and they’ll try and build the client’s knowledge to understand what they. Feel is best for them to invest in. And so once they’ve got enough knowledge, then they understand that maybe one plus one equals three.

But it doesn’t matter. I find how much knowledge a person has. It’s the attitude that they have that doesn’t take them over the precipice to invest. And that was my great frustration from a financial planning perspective, is that I would sit there and work with clients to try and build their knowledge.

But if they had the attitude that property was the best investment, then it was very hard for them to consider anything else, like building up their superannuation or trying to reduce their tax or minimize tax and other things like that. So the frustration that I see at the moment is that financial planners wanna do financial planning.

Mortgage brokers, finance, financial finance brokers, they want to do property and get people in as much debt as they possibly can or arrange their debts and get the clients the best debt deal that they can. And then from an accounting perspective, from the tax agent’s perspective we tend to be, and this is no offense to any account out there, we tend to be very proactive in our.

Efforts and not oh, sorry. Very reactive in our efforts and not so proactive. And unfortunately the the way I see the industry going is that it’s very sec it’s very individualized. So if you want to know about property or lending or debt reduction or debt recycling or any of that type of thing, you’d need to talk to a mortgage broker.

’cause the financial planner. Connor says we don’t do, we don’t do lending, we don’t do finance. And then if you wanna know about I don’t know, negative gearing through, through property, the accountant will tell you how negative gearing works and capital gains tax works, but they won’t then broach the subject of finance.

And and then from finance planning perspective, how do you protect that? How do you ensure that? The financial planner would love to talk to you about all of those things, but then tends not to as well. So it’s, so where I look after the client is I try and help them out in all of those areas.

And then when the specific need arises I then bring in the financial planner or I bring in the accountant, or I bring in someone from my accounting team, or I bring in someone from the mortgage broking team. And a lot of the time I bring in lawyers as well. When you have a situation where you have a, we, we had a situation the other day where we had a gorgeous lady. She’s a client of ours. I’ve actually never met her before because we only ever dealt with her husband, but they’re going through a divorce and he’s 74 and she’s 73 years of age and. When you deal with a client that has multiple investment properties and residential property and superannuation and pension and kids and wills and estates and multi, different marriages and they’re going through a divorce.

So you have to bring in an accountant in regards to the investment properties you have to bring in. Finance a lot of the time. ’cause she wants to help the kids out in regards so when the divorce comes through, there’s a lot of money coming her way. So you gotta bring in finance broking, then you gotta bring in a lawyer, obviously because there’s a divorce there.

And then you’ve got probably two lawyers. One in regards to one in regards to the divorce, and then you’ve got another or family lawyer, and then you’ve got another lawyer a lot of the time involved in regards to the property sale. And then you’ve got a financial planner involved in there because at 73 years of age you’re talking pensions and superannuation and investments.

It really does get very messy and there’s no. Individual person that can rally the troops to to do all that, which that’s the bit I really enjoy. I don’t like getting down, doing singular things. I like to expand out and do it. And I think the industry is really calling out that.

I think one of the big spaces that the a big growth area is anything to do with the the baby boomer age. Anyone over 65 is a huge market. For financial planning, accountants, finance brokers, believe it or not. ‘Cause the bank of mom and dad and lawyers yeah, granny flats and all sorts of arrangements like that.

So it’s a massive space and a lot of people have concern over ai and I do as well. One of my staff, she’s a receptionist, she’s not a, she’s not an accountant, and I said to her, just type into ai, what is my capital gains tax. And AI actually worked out what capital gain tax would be on a, a fake sale of a purchase of a home, et cetera, et cetera.

So AI is a concern to me in the future. If you are a business that concentrates in one of the spokes of what I call the wheel, so if you look at a business like a hub and spoke, and you are the hub. You are the person of influence in the middle, and you’ve got all of your spokes to the side, which is accounting, financial planning fund.

If you concentrate on just that one thing, I think you’re in a bit of trouble from an AI perspective because it’s amazing what you can find out there in ai. So yeah, so I’m trying to change the way that the business operates into more of a holistic approach. So when someone comes in.

They, they have the option to get everything all types of help in regards to finance thrown at them. And I think a lot of practices are or should be looking at that type of model from here on in. Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack there. And I want to get into the shifting mindsets part of it, because you’ve touched on that in a few different areas, but I just wanna ask from the beginning bit, because it’s where we started the conversation.

How do you. Because of those, because those things traditionally and in, in some respects legally, you can’t pass from one to the other. That straightforward. How do you manage that process of having those different areas under, working together? Yeah I mentioned it before of a hub and spoke and it’s a concept that I’m trying to bring into the office.

So like a wheel of a push bike you, the center part is the hub and then you’ve got all of your spokes that push out from the side of it. And so the hub and spoke model that we would have at our office is normally kind of me in the middle. And then I’ll talk to a client, find out what their situation is.

So I’ll find out their their income, their alco, their equity in their home, their, how many kids they’ve got, how long they’ve been in the job. And then I’ll find out problems that they have that they don’t even know that they have, and I’ll work out solutions for those problems. Before they even knew that they had those problems.

So for example, I was talking to someone the other day and they don’t have wills, but they’re on their second marriage now and they’ve got two kids to their first marriage and the second marriage that he has, he’s got two kids, but he doesn’t have a will. But he’s got. He’s got a property business worth half a million dollars and he is got a home worth two and a half million and he doesn’t have a will.

So that’s where I then will move along that spoke and pass them on to a lawyer. But then I’ll also move along to the financial planner where that will need to speak to them. Yeah, so I work very much. As the hub and I may do, I’ll, I’ll do nothing to do with the will. I’ll do nothing to do with the financial cleaning, but I’ll direct the traffic.

So the client, I’m tending to find people want to tell their story once, and if there’s one person that they can talk to, that’s great. And then that one person can be the conductor of traffic or the ring master or whatever you wanna call ’em, the puppet master, or. And the shepherd and then they can then control what’s going on.

So we are doing a, we are doing a, we’re looking after a client at the moment. They came in and saw me about setting up a business, but we’ve found out that he’s got a property in joint names and his brother’s got a property in joint names, but one property is supposed to be in his name only, and the other property is supposed to be in his name.

The brothers his name only, and it was absolute mess. So we’re talking about capital gain tax. May actually have to happen. We’ve gotta do a private ruling in regards to tax. We’ve gotta line up a lawyer that sets up transfers to transfer both properties across. And that just came from a simple business conversation in regards to him setting up his business.

And so there’s no one individual that can look after all of that. You need to bring in a team and and AI is not gonna give you the answers for it. I think that there’s great opportunity, great potential out there in the accounting and finance space and financial cleaning and law, but not as, I don’t think as individuals.

So there’ll be some real changes coming in the case and that, so trying to get on, on, on front of it at the start and see where comes from. Yeah. And I think it’s such an interesting approach because building that relationship and then being able to, as you say, coordinate conduct the whole bit, bunch of different services and bring them all in through there, it does make a lot of sense for people and it’s interesting that’s not been a model that traditionally people have.

Built before it was a model. It was a model. It was a model for a very long time. And it was called your bank manager. Yes, of course. So back in the day when you had flowing hair down to your shoulders you had to, when you had to go for a loan, you had to walk into the bank and you saw the bank manager and you may had to make sure you had a shirt and tie on.

Brew cream in the Yeah I remember my dad talking to, talking about, I’m having, lunch with the bank manager, and that was a big deal that you were the one actually going to lunch with the bank manager, this mysterious person that could, make or break you in some respects.

Yeah. And so they they approved the loan. They had their own lending authority. They didn’t have to push it into a computer to get a result. They might have known your dad, and they said we know your dad and you’re a good character, so we’ll write the home loan for you.

And we know your employer and Mary out the front, she’s gonna look after you. She’s gonna prepare all the loan documents for you and John the solicitor down the road, he’s gonna look after the law the settlement software, and there’s an accountant next door. We’re going to introduce you to him.

And then internally we’ve got a financial planner, so he’s gonna look after and make sure that you’ve got insurances and other things like, and it was just like one thing after the other. And so that model was there. And I think everything old is new, so I think it’s actually gonna come back again.

The segregation of roles, but someone needs to take a slack. The bank doesn’t want take up financial business.

Just got a funny feeling that I think that the hub in most of the situation will be the finance person. So it’s the person that wrote your home loan for you or helped you out with your lending. They’re that person throughout the journey of your life. And I’ve got a funny feeling that the person of influence, the main person that people will go to for trust and advice will be the finance person.

If they. And the terminology that you’re using there, which is really interesting, is advice. And it’s, that comes because you can build a relationship with people and offer that. And we had a recent episode of Biz Bites for thought Leaders where we talked about the whole sort of advisory.

Arm, particularly for accountants in being, in, being built up. But what you’re talking about is a bit even more holistic than that because it’s across different disciplines. But it is that advisory thing, which is that human connection, which is completely the opposite of the AI approach, right?

That it is that human element of understanding and being able to manage where people should go because of an understanding of who they are and their situation. Great. Yeah. I said before, one of the big spaces is that 67-year-old and over throughout Australia, there has to be a lot of people in this situation where you have a single lady, 70 years of age, husband died 10 years ago $1.5 million home, 800 square meter property house built in 1975.

It’s now falling down around her. She’s got a full age pension, no money in the bank three kids in different parts of the state or even different parts of Australia. And she’s all alone and all she has is the local bowls club or her bridge club or the next door neighbor, but there’s no one else to help her.

So what, what hap what? How does that help come to that person? Is it a financial planner that helps that 60, 70-year-old lady? Is it the finance broker that helps her? Is it the accountant that helps her? Is it the lawyer that helps her? Or is it a builder that says, I can build a granny flat out the back of your property, but how are you gonna afford it?

Then that’s the finance person. But then the financial planner gets involved and says you can’t do that. So it just it’s a great market and it’s a great area to, to build in. And so yes, there’s no person that, no one person that can really give the advice and give the help there.

But, so if there’s any, if there’s any brokers out there that are listening to this or any accountants out there listening to this, you tell me the answer of who is the best person to look after old barrel that’s sitting in the house. As soon as something bad happens to her, there’s no one there to really help her.

And the kids dunno. Kids dunno how to talk. Yeah. And it’s interesting too because I’ve looked at this in terms of the marketing space. It’s not dissimilar to that sort of concept where you’ve got so many different disciplines and you’re trying to work out which is the right one for a business.

But it’s very similar, I think, in principle to the idea of, oh, medical support. You go to, you build a relationship with your local gp. They’re the people that. Understand your situation, your family history and your history and all of those things, but they’ll refer you to the knee surgeon or to the ear, nose and throat person or to whoever else it needs to be.

And they’ll still be there as a bit of a linchpin, but they’re not the person that’s going to do the surgery on your knee, but. They’ll help you understand perhaps what the implications of it are as part of it. So I think it’s a natural gravitation towards what you’re thinking about, and I think part of it is because of the specialties have grown, even more niched than perhaps they were in the past.

Yeah. So with all of this said and done, I’m gonna come back to this idea of mindset shift because you’ve talked about needing to shift mindsets of firstly. Clients and people that are coming out there to, to what might be possible because you, lots of people have a bias towards a certain thing, depending on how they’ve grown up.

So I’ve gotta invest all my money in property. I’ve or I’ve gotta put all my money in shares. It tends to be coming in, in that way. You’ve gotta a mindset shift in, in in the industry as well, in this whole idea of being able to work together. So how do you actually go about that?

Concept of changing people’s mindsets. Yeah. So it it comes back to skills, knowledge, and attitude. As I said before, one plus one equals two, and then you build your knowledge and then you find out that one plus one equals actually three. But again, if you don’t have the confidence or the skills to then take you to that next step, which is that leap of faith Zig Ziglar, I can’t remember his exact quote, but it, if you build your, there’s no point having attitude if you don’t have the aptitude, but once you have the attitude your income will create altitude or something like that. So too many big words there for me, but I’ve really seen it over the years is that and so what I try and do with people is there’s.

There’s a question that I say to people if I gave you a hundred thousand dollars today, so great Aunt Lords passed away and you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars coming your way, would you invest that based on an informed decision, or would you simply invest it on an educated guess?

Yeah. You know what that’s an interesting thing of even defining what the difference is Yeah. Between those two. So most people say an informed decision. They go an informed decision is that you don’t want to make an educated guess on something because that’s gambling, that’s punting.

Yeah. And my, my, my advice to clients is you’re best off spending that money or using that a hundred thousand dollars from an educated guess. So my my, my frustration, is that an informed decision, you take that a hundred thousand dollars. Think about property. So you go, okay we’ll talk to buyer’s agents from the real estate agents.

We’ll have a look at REIQ. We’ll find out what’s going on in the market. We’ll have a look at the local sales. We’ll go to a few options, we’ll see what’s going on. You’ll speak to a real estate agent, you’ll speak to a finance broker, and what they’ll do is they will give you a heap of information for you to make a decision.

So there’s your informed decision there, and that decision or the information that they give you is for them. A lot of the time for them. So they’re not going you go to real estate and they’re gonna tell you about equity markets. They’re not gonna tell you about dollar cost averaging into ETFs.

They’re not gonna tell you any of that. Then you go, I got a hundred thousand here. Now I’m gonna go and talk to a financial planner. They’re not gonna tell you about real estate. They’re not gonna tell you about negative gearing into property and other things like that. Investing in mining towns or self-managed super fund invest, they’re not gonna tell you any of that, right?

They’re going to give you information for you to make a decision based on what they think is best for you, but what’s best for you. Go out and build your own education. So there’s a lot of people that are self-employed that I’ve dealt with over the years, and they wanna buy investment properties.

And I say, you put a hundred thousand dollars down as a deposit into an investment property, but what for? You’ve got a great business here, but it’s struggling. You don’t have a tax problem, so you don’t need negative viewing. You don’t need an investment. You’ve still got a home loan and you want to go and take equity outta your home loan and put it in.

Why? Fomo, probably fear of missing out. So I say to them, if you put $50,000 into your business. What would that return for you? So a big question is that it’s return on investment. People don’t understand a return on investment. So once you can start getting them thinking differently it’s changing that mindset.

It’s getting the, to look at things differently and it’s then they can make an educated guess on what they can do with them. And there’s so many, look, there’s so many small business people. It was the young fellow I spoke to the other day. He came in and he said, what do I need to do? Do I need to do a business plan?

How much money should I put into the business? And I said, stop. He said, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to tell me what you need to live off on a monthly basis. I need you to tell me how much you need to take outta your business on a monthly basis. Then we can work on how much money your business needs to earn until we do that.

And so many people. They go into their bank, they go into their lenders. They go for a loan and they all talk about what your business earns, but they never ask you what do you need to earn? And so we keep doing things as a society as a whole based on people tell us that we should do, and a lot of the times that they need to look at things differently.

So there’s a saying in the. In the buyer’s agent world, I suppose you might call it, or the real estate world positive gearing. You’ve heard of that saying, obviously that property is positively geared. It’s actually not even a, it’s not even an investment term. It’s not something that we use in the accounting world.

It’s in financial management, we use the term, what’s the return on investment. We don’t care if it’s positive geared or negative geared. If it’s negative geared fantastic, we still wanna know what the return on the investment is. And you know that most of the return on investment in property investment is 5% gross per rent.

It’s no better. And it’s a lot of people might be sitting there saying, oh no, mate, you’re an idiot Duncan. I bought a property for a hundred thousand dollars and it’s giving me $10,000 a year rent now. So that’s a 10% returnable money. That’s not true. You’re actually only getting a 5% return on your investment because the value of that asset has increased so much that if you sold it today, you would get enough money to basically say, oh, it’s giving me a 5% return on investment.

And so this positive and negative and avoiding tax, it’s it’s like I wanna change the mindset of people. And it’s so damn, remember the saying years ago about, there’s a guy walking along the beach and there’s all of these starfish laying there dying because the tide cat went out so fast.

Remember that one and the guy’s walking along? Yes. Yes. And he’s picking up these starfish and he’s throwing ’em back into the water and someone goes, said, you’re an idiot mate. He said, why are you doing what? There’s so many, there’s millions of starfish here. What are you doing? He said it made a difference to that one.

And all I’m trying to do is get the message out there to people, to, stop making your investments based on an informed decision and start making an educated guess. And then that changes your attitude as well. Yeah, once you build enough confidence in yourself, you can actually go out there and do a few things, but yeah look at things differently.

And that’s what I’m trying to do. And, I’ve got that saying fitter. Because getting fitter financially is the same as getting fitter. Physically I think I might’ve mentioned that to you once before, is that fitter stands for Finance, insurance, taxation, trusts, estate and Retirement Planning.

A bit of an acronym in there, but that’s all of the things that we have in our life and we are not very fitting financially. One of these days I’ll get a book out and that’s what it’s gonna be called, getting Fitter Financially. But it talks about all of those things in it.

Yeah, I’ll try and get that out there. One, one of these days. We look forward to that. And but I think that there’s so much in what you are saying and there’s this difference between, informed and educated guests. And a part of that is a bias that we all have because of the way we’ve been brought up.

It’s, we are influenced by the people around us. And some people, as I said before, some people will be saying property is the way to go. And they’ve got that bias built into them, and so getting them to actually shift and go, is there another opportunity here?

Because part of the interesting thing about the loan stuff that you talked about as well is that the questions you get asked are about what’s happening historically, but they don’t really look at what are the possibilities and the possibilities of what can drive a business is where the game changing stuff happens and being able to invest, as you say, potentially in your own business because of the possibilities is a different way of thinking.

Yeah. So one of, one of the things that frustrates me is, and it’s a great sales tip, so if you hear it out there, it’ll be around about self-managed super funds. So the easiest way to sell a self-managed super fund is easiest way to sell anything is sell on fear. So if you are trying to sell a car to someone and you wanna sell the more expensive car you sell on fear.

If you wanna sell insurance, you sell on fear. If you want to set up a very complex accounting structure, now a company is trustee for a trust and beneficiaries and you’re rolling back to a corporate, if you wanna sell that, you sell on fear, which is sad, but. That’s a sales tip 1 0 1 for all you people out there.

It’s taught by so many business coaches, by the way. There’s this, the fear of missing out of that. If you wait to in to do this, whatever it is that is being sold to you, then you are going to be further behind. Yeah. Fear of missing out in six months time. So again, so you still on fear?

Yeah. So the, one of the, one of the big ones that I’ve seen is in the superannuation. So you go along to a SP Bruker seminar. They tell you about your superannuation and they say you’ve got your superannuation. It’s in a dirty old industry fund. It’s not doing any good for you. And again, you’ve got no control.

Now control is an awesome word, right? So once you are told that you have no control over your money, you then go right. And they go, you shouldn’t have you. You want control over your money, you now need a self-managed super fund. Do you know how complex it is to look after a self-managed super fund and to be the trustee of a self-managed super fund?

It’s flaming hard. And but what they do is they say to you, now you’ve got control over your money. Now you can take it out of there, which was earning you 8% or doing quite well for you, and now you’re gonna put it in a self-manage super fund and you’re gonna put it in property. You’re gonna get a loan against that.

So you’ve gotta set up a bear trust and it’s very complex. And it doesn’t ever work out very well. And now you’ve gone down to a 5% return and there’s all sorts of arguments for and against it, but you’ve now got 100% of your money and you’ve got control over it. Congratulations. The problem is you don’t have control over the market that money is in.

So to give you an example, if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares and you don’t like what Commonwealth Bank are doing in China, good luck. What’s the point of your a hundred thousand dollars? Where is your power to make change? You’ve got no control over the market that your money is in.

Whereas a large super industry super fund that has, I don’t know, a billion dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares, they actually do have a little bit of control over the market. They have a little bit of control over what Commonwealth Bank does in China. So don’t be fooled that you have control over your money.

It’s the control over the market that you invest in. And so if you’re self-employed, Anthony, how much. Control do you have over the money that’s invested in your own business? A hell of a lot. Yeah so if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares, ideally having that through a big industry fund is simpler and easier to do.

If you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in the property market, it’s an investment. How much control do you have over the property market? Little to none. But how much control do you have over what you do with your property that you live in? Probably a fair bit. So and how much control do you have over your own business?

Oh a lot. You make the decisions of how many staff you’ve put on, which, what more capital that you need to inject into it and other things like that. Yeah, changing that mindset is very important. But people don’t, and people don’t do it because. Where’s the money in it for the accountant to tell you that?

Where’s the money in it for a financial planner to tell you to invest in your own business? Where’s the money in it? For a finance broker to tell you to not buy an investment property, but to invest money into your own business? There is no money in it for those businesses to tell you to invest in yourself.

Where’s the money? Where’s the money in it? For a financial planner to tell you to go out and educate yourself or spend, I don’t know, educate yourself more so that you can get that promotion within the job that you’re doing at work. There’s no money in it for the financial planner to tell you that.

So these advisors and these trusted advisors that are out there. Including myself, you’ve gotta remember there’s no money in it for them to tell you the right thing that might be right for you. A lot of the time they’re telling you the right thing. That’s probably right. More so for them. So ask any financial planner what their largest investment is.

Ask any accountant what their LA owner of a business, what their largest investment is, and I guarantee. It won’t be in the share market, it won’t be in property. If it’s a real estate agent, it won’t be in property. If it’s a finance broker, it will be in their own businesses every time. And you can’t invest in your own business without investing in your own education.

So there’s my tip. Boy the Beast. The best investment you can ever make is in your own business. And you can’t invest, or you shouldn’t invest in your own business without investing in your own education. So we come back to that full circle, educated guess and just keep building your education in whatever you’re doing.

If you wanna be, if you wanna be a great landscaper, that’s great, but keep educating yourself and some of the best education you’ll ever have to invest in yourself. And you would be agreeing with this. I would say a hundred percent is invest in understanding how to sell, because I think 80% of what I do is having to sell to, to move them from that knowledge point to the attitude and changing the attitude.

And that’s a lot of that is selling. It’s getting them to take the lead. Absolutely. And yeah, and it starts with, as you say, starts with the education side of things and and building the relationship with people over a period of time as well. And that. That period of time might be, days, it might be months, it might be years in some cases.

But being able to invest in that and keep educating your audience on a consistent basis is such an intrinsic part of business and indeed why you stand out as well. Why they should come to you versus. Why they should go to the next person. All of those things Yeah. Are so important. And it is, as you say, it’s a, it’s the, it’s part of a marketing, sales environment that you need to create for your business, regardless of what industry you’re in.

Yeah. And look, every industry that you’re in, doesn’t matter if you you’re a landscaper or you’re a lawyer you, you have to sell it. You have to understand your client and, yeah, marketing, selling it’s very important. But to do that, you have to keep educating yourself as well.

One of the some some of the best lessons that I’ve learned in life are from failure. One of the, one of the things that I learned years ago from a mate of mine, and I didn’t end up writing a loan for him, but he did ring me and he said, don’t. A tip for you all, every person that ever wants to talk to you, all they want to hear is yes.

They don’t wanna hear no, they don’t wanna hear about all of the different products out there. They just wanna hear. Yes. And once you say yes to them then it’s on, right? Then they’ll listen to you. So that was, even though I never wrote the business for him, I’ve written a lot of business just from that one little tip.

And that was a great piece of education. I never got that outta a textbook or anything. I got that from him. I put lending and taxation and anything to do with finance. I put it down to that good looking girl at school that you want to have a dance with or you want to take to the school formal.

Why don’t, or why didn’t you ask that girl to dance with you, Anthony? Why didn’t you, why didn’t you? Yeah. It’s because the fear of no, the fear of rejection, the fear of being made with the fool. Yeah. And so the same thing happens in regards to taxation and finance and financial planning. People don’t like to be made to look silly.

They don’t like rejection. So the first thing you’ve gotta do if you are in this space or any business really is understand that the person that you are talking to doesn’t know what you know. And if you make them feel inferior or uneducated you’ve lost them. And so if.

Don’t feel that a no is the best thing to say to a person. It’s never the best thing. It’s maybe not now, maybe one day, but yes is always the first. That’s yes, is what people want to hear. Take me to the dance. Yeah. I’ve enjoyed this dance that’s for sure, Duncan. And it’s been a lot. It’s been very revealing and there’s so many great takeaways from all of this, but I, we need to wrap things up and I want to ask you, the question that I do ask all of my guests on the podcast is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

It’s when they, the aha moment for me is not when I know that they’re listening and they’re going to take to the next step is when they they stop having, they stop. They start off sitting there with their arms folded and it’s when they unfold their arms and they lean forward, that’s when I know the aha moment for them.

We’re gonna take this further and yeah. And I just tell ’em what the journey is and then I just stay on the journey with them, so whichever, which way that goes. Yeah, keep them on the path. For people that are listening into this podcast, I’ve been leaning in the majority of this time, that’s for sure.

But. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Duncan, thank you so much for being a part of the Biz Bytes for thought leaders program. I really appreciate you coming onto the show. No problems. Happy to be here. Happy to be here. And of course, we will include all the information on how to get in contact with Duncan in the show notes.

Thank you everyone for listening in. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave your comments and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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