The Next Frontier of Value Creation in Wealth Management

(upbeat music) - Today we're joined by industry veteran Matt Lonsdale, alongside our very own Bronswe Cheung, looking at opportunities within the interplay of commercial operating models and technology decisions that our clients in the wealth management sector are focusing on in the UK. We talk about commercial models, we talk about operating models, we talk about technology decisions as advisors, as participants, as fellow travelers in the sector, Matt Lonsdale, why are we talking about this today?

- Oh, I think we all know that the sector is strong and has been growing and has been doing fantastically well. But there's more to give. I think there's a lot more from people who are investing in the sector and there's a lot more for people who are invested in the sector such as the client. And I think the way that you get the most outta both of those is to look at the target operating model of the business.

And that really revolts around the technology that's in use.

- Yeah, I agree with you Matt, and I think, so several things in, that become quite important in the last 18 months, I would say. I think the first thing is, with regulations coming in, especially around consumer duty, I think advise firms, especially the people in what we call the middle and back office. So the paraplanners, admin, the compliance teams are being asked to do a lot more than they were doing. And at the same time, you know, the pool of available talent, so to speak is not regrowing as fast as some people would like, right?

So in effect, you know, we are asking for people, existing people to do more potentially with less. So in that sense, actually looking at operating model again and understanding how you can improve productivity, let's just say, is quite important. And I think the second thing is, when we speak with our clients, a lot of times what you realize is, a lot of them have grown a lot in the past few years through, primarily through acquisitions arguably. And they're sort of getting to a point where the organization is of sufficient scale, where the old ways of managing advisors, paraplanner, admin, all those things become a little more challenging.

It's just a very simple span of control problem. And in order to, for these organizations to get to the next level, they actually do need to look at operating model again and understand, you know, how can they actually create an organization fit for purpose for doubling and tripling, if not quad tripling in size again in the next five, 10 years. So I think that is probably another big motivation for us to do this as well.

- And I think it's a really valuable conversation as well. 'Cause there's a lot of negative connotation with doing more with less. So as soon as you ask people, oh, you've gotta do have 110% more clients, 20% more clients, everybody immediately thinks that's to the detriment of the client or their day to day. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Again, thinking about your operating model, thinking about the technology you use and maximizing those actually make you immeasurably more efficient and can, or should do actually lead to a far more enjoyable kind of role. You are doing less of the things that are tedious to you, or your clients having less of the things that they don't like to do and it should improve over time, which I think is a really key thing to cling onto.

- Absolutely.

- What then would you both describe as being the size of the price? Matt, you mentioned 10%, 20% more. Should we be having the conversation of a 100% more, 200% more? Why are we even focused on this today?

- Yeah, I think, I mean I think the prize is a kind of, is a multiple game. If you look at the kind of amount of assets in the wealth management industry, again, you can take various measures, but maybe kind of 2 trillion pounds. But if you look outside of that into your kind of DC pension schemes and your DB pension schemes, you've got assets that aren't in the industry that could well be in the wealth management industry. So there's a multiplier effect there.

And we're all fully aware of auto enrollment and all of those other bits and pieces which are adding assets to that external wealth management pot. But then you look at many of the businesses and they may be running on a single discipline, so maybe planning, well, they could be doing planning and investment management, they could be taking the money away from a platform and doing their own platform work as well. So for a business with a broad and all encompassing target operate model and the wherewithal to do all these things, they could be looking at not just a multiple of the AUM that they're managing, but also multiple of the revenue they're allowed to command from that AUM and that should be incredibly exciting for anybody investing in the sector.

- And Bronswe, so you compliment that with some perspectives on how a private equity investor shareholder would be thinking about the size of the price, both in terms of the cost structure opportunity as well as the the revenue opportunity.

- Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's obviously very topical, right? Because I think the, from our experience at least, you know, our clients are asking a lot of questions about how well integrated is business A versus business B versus business C. So it's clearly is top of mind for them.

But very often, you know, when they ask this question, they don't actually know how to measure what good integration or efficient organization looks like. And the way we sort of, Matt and I have sort discussed it and the way we think about this, I think are two angles. I think the first angle is what, you know, Matt alluded to is a number of clients per advisor point, which is how can you make your advisor service more clients and increase fee per advisor? And because that's why it's important, right?

Because let's face it, first of all, there is a, if I might say so a public duty angle to this, which is the FCA knows there is a huge advice gap. We all know there's a huge advice gap, but there's a huge shortage of financial advisors as well. So actually improving advisor productivity has an impact of improving financial access for a lot of people in the UK and that ought to count for something. So I think that's the first angle.

And then the second angle, if you're a CFO and you look at the P&L of a typical advice business, what you typically find is, depending there's variability, but normally financial advice firms spend around 20 or 30% of their revenue on front office staff. Now that's quite difficult to move, right? Because if you try, you know, playing around with paying ration too much with your sales force, there's all sorts of problems. So can find you that is largest speaking, you might leave it in (indistinct).

And then there's a, then what's the next biggest bucket, right? So when we, Matt and I did the work, when we looked at the numbers, typically the next biggest bucket is the middle office staff, which takes up anywhere between 15 to 20% of revenue. And that cost base actually increasing very rapidly because there's a huge shortage of good paraplanners. There's also a huge shortage of admin people.

And so how do you manage the cost pressure there when you're still trying to grow as a business? Is a big issue for CFO that we've spoken with, right? So actually how can you make sure that cost base is increasing, you know, for the sake of argument, 5% per year as opposed to 10% per year has a big difference on your bottom line. So this is why we think there's actually, it's important to talk about these things at this point in time.

- Okay. Matt, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think again, often if you look at certainly a lot of the higher growth businesses in the industry have been consolidated businesses. And when you look at the smaller businesses, there's maybe a closer alignment, kind of one admin person, one paraplanner person, one advice person.

And as firms get larger, people try to clinging onto that because they think that's the norm. Now it could be the norm for a smaller business, but it's not the norm or shouldn't be the norm for a bigger business. And so it's, I think at the moment the industry's struggling to think about how it looks when it's a different size. And so again, it needs to learn some lessons from other industries and it needs to critically evaluate itself and say, how can I be a better business?

I find this a really interesting thing because I've kind of worked with colleagues previously in the US where the kind of RIA space are incredibly proud of their commercial acumen of their businesses, they kind of love bragging about how commercially successful they are. Whereas over here in wealth management, we're still a bit bashful if the business is doing well. And that's interesting because every other industry, business owners are proud of how successful their business is.

- Indeed.

- And so I think we've got to get around that hurdle as well. And then it helps us think forward.

- Now, this is not a new phenomena deploying technology. Thinking about operating models has been a much talked about topic for the last decade, if not longer, Matt, and you've been in the thick of this in that period, what's held back progress, why hasn't more change happened? Why are we still talking about advisor to paraplanner, to admin ratios of one to two, one to three instead of a more streamlined model?

- That's a great question, Ashish. I think there's several things, right? So I think the first thing is, I mean, in some sense you only talk about these things because you are big enough to think about these things. And if, you know, to be fair to the industry is really only in the last five to six years where we've seen the emergence of sort of these big national advise firms or consolidators, aggregators, whatever you better call them.

So, you know, in a way it is still a new issue and is really in big, these big organizations where meaningfully changing these ratios, the paraplanner admin to advisor ratio, can you actually make a big cost difference, right? So I think to be fair to the industry, it is sort of a new problem. And you know, again, to be fair to the industry, a lot of times when we speak to CEOs and CFOs and COOs, they recognize these problems, but a lot of times they feel a bit hostage if that's where we're putting it to the firms and operating model they inherit. So very often what we find is, we speak with CEO, he would say, we don't, he or she would say, they would say, we don't like the ratio keeps going up.

Every time we buy a new advice firm, we have to actually put cost in in order to professionalize what we bought. They don't like it, they think it is, it has an impact on their bottom line, but they also don't feel like they can change it because, whenever they change anything the advisors would push back. And in this business, obviously advisors is the lifeline and you don't want to disturb them. But I think, you know, honestly standing where we are at at this point in time, it's kind of inevitable now because a lot of advisor firms are struggling with recruitment of paraplanners admin people.

So this model of every time you buy something you wanna put extra cost in to uplift the commercial operational sophistication at some point just doesn't work anymore because you run out of people you can put in. So I think that's one angle. Matt, what do you think?

- Yeah, I think there's is one of the challenges that the industry faces is that classic, this is how we've always done it conundrum where you speak to the, you know, the CEO, you speak to the experts in your business and they say is how we've always done it. I go, okay, and a lot of the time again, the CEO in a wealth business and the COO might have been front office practitioners as well. So they hear that and it resonates and they say yes, and they say that's an immovable object and it's not, yes, it's how you always done it, but there is a fresh way of doing it. So I've seen plenty of times people buying systems, whether it back office outsource or front office and trying to get the new system to work in the old way and then you just end up with a really cumbersome process that you are trying to get new technology to work in old ways and it slows things down.

So I think there has to be that kind of overcoming that mental hurdle. I think sometimes this is how we've always done it is shrouded in a, it's the compliant way of doing it. And again, I don't think that's often the case. I think there's maybe an over-engineering of some compliant processes, especially as firms get bigger because they're worried rightly so about getting it wrong.

But again, if you think about trying to get your business to be optimal and kinda streamlined, and faster, and more efficient, then actually you can start to reimagine those processes and start to think about doing them better and leaning on the technology. What happens kind of over the shoulder of the advisor, client doesn't really care about, the client cares about the conversation with them and the advisor and everything else is really up for scalability and kind of reimagination and kind of efficiency drivers because end of the day that's the benefit of the client in the long term.

- Is it fair to say, Matt, given your experience in the technology domain in the sector that the last decade has been characterized by an increased standardization of tools, back office systems, front office systems to some extent happening at a time where these businesses have come of age and scale as Bronswe described, which creates almost a, an ideal staging post really for the next wave of sophistication to come into the sector?

- Yes. I think there's an increased standardization across tools but not an increased consolidation of the use of tools.

- Sure.

- So you might go into a firm and see six different cash flow tools being used, they all do the same thing. We've all got the same inputs and the outputs are almost exactly the same. So that standardization, standardization of tool hasn't created a standardization of process and an efficiency. And so yeah, you've ended up with lots and lots of complex target operating models, which should be much simpler and could be, and then that again would then lead to what's next, which I think is an exciting topic as well.

- Yeah, man. And I think you and I would talk about this before we came in, right? And it is interesting how in most firms today, how do think about target operating models. So the way that I think we describe it is most firms are trying to solve sort of three, right?

The the first, at least in, when it comes to target operating model. The objective one is, we want to largely leave advisors alone and let them do whatever they want because they're impossible to change. You then have the compliance back office function, which tries to define rightly to your point, the standard output required from the advice process. And then you have overarching, which are the business objectives, right?

Some of those things we talked about, which is efficiency, cost ratios and all the rest of it. And largely speaking, how things have worked these days is, you've got the paraplanners, admin, the middle office essentially trying to balance the competing objective sometimes of the compliance backend and the financial advisor front end. So i.e. financial advisors would write suitability reports in whatever way they want and it is down to the paraplanners to standardize to make sure they pass the compliance test. If not then send back and redo, send back and redo.

So you manage those two objectives, but what you lose as a result is the overarching business objective of efficiency and cost effectiveness. Now you can sort of run with that for while. I think we're coming up against a few things. So to your point Ashish, why now?

So the first thing is the resource constrain point. I think the second thing is there's just way too much complexity right now to Matt's point around if there are five to six different cash modeling tools, what's going on, right? You'd sort of lose control of the tech narrative. And I think interestingly the third one, it was a tech related point I think, which is, I was at a conference a couple of days ago and they were talking about a use cases of AI and one of those really exciting use cases was actually you can now use gen AI to look at historical client writeups and what the advice result was.

And you can say, well actually I can match those things. So for the new client suitability reports that come in, you don't need a paraplanner or an advisor to grow, go and write a report. You can just put it through the machine and it will generate what the advice recommendation is. And that would, I think it was quoted as saying you can reduce the timing to write a report from an hour to like two minutes.

That's great. But it underlying all of this is an assumption that the advisors in the past 10 years were putting in the client notes in the right way into the system and there's no guarantee of that unless you impose a standard target operating model in the front office as well. And I think that that sort of is, where the turning point is, is it's actually some of the AI technology that is coming through. It's a classic garbage and garbage out problem, right?

Which is, unless you control the input, the output is not usable, then the whole gen AI utility falls apart.

- Yeah, and I think you said, you said interesting, you say yeah, put it in the system if there's one system, but if there's multiple CRMs and a platform on this, and the other, you know, what am I looking at? What am I looking at? And we were discussing previously that if you think about kind of how would you build it today if you had the kind of blockchain idea, well I've got one single client record that everybody can take from an input into, just imagine how much dual keying that would reduce. Now you could do that simply in a firm, or one version of the truth of the clients kind of one system to kind of, to conquer them all would reduce time kind of immeasurably and then you add in then that AI usage and suddenly you really are kind of moving quickly and that's exciting.

- So we've established, I guess that there's a commercial opportunity here as well as a client servicing opportunity that improves naturally at the end of this. What are your perspectives guys, on what it would take to move along on this journey? How should leaders think about the next steps to be taken on this path forward?

- I think it's one of those things that there's been so much excitement in the market with kind of M&A and deals and all of these things that the target operator model, and it's one of my favorite phrases hasn't been a crocodile near the boat. So people have been able to ignore it because it's not nearby and it's not a threat. And I don't think it's a threat right now. I think it would if people neglected it for a number of years and made a hundred acquisitions with a hundred businesses.

But it's an opportunity and it's a good time. If you leave yourself to the till you are finished by size, so you've made a hundred acquisitions and then you want to think about reimagining that target operator model. You are so far down the track and you've got so much work to do. But if you can start to imagine it now when you are kind of at scale and at size and you start to test and adjust as you go along, you really have that ability to start to make incremental gains on the businesses that you are buying as well and start to chip away at those kind of costs and those duplications and so I think it's a case of saying, do you know what?

Let's just do it. Let's just go for it. And I think that's the thing that's kind of emboldened step that some people have got to start thinking about making.

- No, I completely agree with you man. And I think in a funny way, consumer duty is sort of forcing those conversations as well because one of the requirements of consumer duty is client segmentation. And once you segment your client base, you realize actually at a very simplest level, even if you define them by wealth band, they've got very different cost to serve, right? So, you know, how do you create the operating model that is optimized for the client segment that justifies the fee you charge.

I think it's, yeah, if anything I think that's what the FC would be pushing us towards.

- And I think you can add in another piece of break is the operational resilience and the fact for kind of, again, declaring your critical third party. So who am I working with if they went bang, would have a negative impact on my business? Well, it's quite easy if you are one business, you can see everybody. But if you are one entity with a hundred businesses underneath, it's often difficult to work out who's actually there.

Well that's a big risk as well. And you don't want to be building yourself a commercially successful business to then only be under, kind of have that undermined by kind of a risk that you'd overlooked - Any views on where leaders should look first? You said, you know, it's time to get going, but to some extent leaders would probably be phased with the complete, with the number of choices to be made where are in our opinions, I guess collectively the lowest hanging fruit to establish early successes?

- No, I mean that's a great point Ashish. I mean some of those things, you know, Matt has already alluded to, right? So there's a lot of duplication going on right now and duplication system, duplication in platform usage, duplication in investment products. Our argument would be actually all that duplication is generally just duplication and for the vast majority advise clients where the objective is preserving retirement income, the product and platform and technology needs are quite straightforward.

So actually taking a review of all of those things and making sure you are asking yourselves critical questions around, do we really need this as an organization is a good place to start.

- Yeah, I think if you, sometimes it's that interesting exercise to say, well what would you look like if you built it from scratch today? And that's often quite a good way of doing it. 'Cause let's say you've got 15 different platforms and 20 different cash flow tools, you're not using your commercial size to get the best rates on any of those anyway. So you say, well if we are of this size, could we get a better rate?

Well, I've got some money I could save here, or some savings here, or some revenue generations. And then you can start to prioritize those. Well again, moving us all to one risk profile in tool, that's a quick win. Do that, save a few hundred pounds, fine, it's a few hundred pounds.

And you might go on that kind of snowball effect where you're just making the small increments and trying to build and build, or you might say, do you know what? I want to go from the back to the front and we're gonna do a full kind of outsource and consolidate our platforms and use that new wave of interest to people. Whether am I a white label platform as a custodian? There's those things.

So there's never, I don't think a right, you must do it this way, but there's kind of loads of different angles that you could pursue to get to the optimal business shape at the end of it.

- And this is a great change management experiment that needs to happen amongst all of our respective clients. Any guiding principles around that change management journey, this is not an easy one for particularly the front office staff and who deal with clients on a day-to-day basis. This is about empowering them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

- So I've used to some success, quite a simple mantra before of keep allocate and automate. And that's quite a good way of starting that on. So if you're looking at the front office for example, what tasks do you need to keep? Well if you are the advisor, you need to keep the client service element communication to keep that.

But what could you reallocate? Well, if you are the most costly resource in the business, you shouldn't be going and doing kind of low cost tasks like getting an insurance quote. So you could reallocate that to admin. Now what should you be able to do?

Well you should be able to automate that, because if you've gathered information in a fact find and it's gone into a central point, AI should be able to recognize that there's insurance products in place and renew those quotes and get you something quicker. So if you follow that, keep reallocate, automate, you can go from the advisors to the paraplanners to the admin to all parts of your business and start to look at what you can kind of push downstream. And I mean that from a kind of cost basis. What can you push to a lower cost resource in your business?

And then once you've done that, you can then look at how can you make that even faster with the use of technology.

- Yeah, I completely agree with you Matt. I think it's a great way of basically asking you, challenging yourself to answer the question, what is the lowest possible cost of delivering a particular activity? And it is almost certainly not asking the advisors to do it because the advisors is the most expensive way of discharging that function, right? So it's continued to pushing down the cost curve.

I think the second thing I just is one of the topic of advisors is, funny enough, if you answer paraplanner one in person, like what's the one thing that could really save you time? The answer is getting the advisors to put in things the right way and get it right the first time. And preferably they can just, if they can put things in whilst they're having a client meeting, the better. And you know, just bringing a few threats together.

I think, you know, to your point Matt, some of those things we talked about, it's increasingly we see the role of a financial advisor not as a executor of advice, but actually just a client, you know, the client servicing part of that relationship is really where we think the financial advice should spend most of the time on. And as a result, anything else that is a distraction should be taken away, right? So say for instance, a lot of financial advisors still show up to client meetings, write things down on notepad, and then go back to the office, type everything out into a form, and then the paraplanner has to input that form into the CRM, that's how you create activity that doesn't add value because it's the same piece of content being input into the system three times in effect, right?

So how about a different scenario where a situation where actually as a financial advisor, your goal is to provide lifetime financial planning, you're like a financial coach, right? So you should really show up with an iPad, with a life cashflow modeling tool, for example, where you can input and write down all the client's needs, questions, you know, trade offs, everything in that life system and in effect that is your fact find and that automatically gets pulled through to the paraplanner and admin. So you get the sort of straight through processing, you are less likely to make mistakes, you save time.

You get happier paraplanners and admin and you're more likely to meet the requirements of the compliance team because actually the client can sign that particular piece of fact find and say this is right.

- Yeah, right?

- So it's almost reimagining exactly the role of the different people in the value chain as well.

- Yeah. And I think sometimes there's a bit of a bold step to take on that. So I've seen beforehand people putting a portal out there for the client to fill in a fact find and everyone's sort of nervous what if the client gets it wrong? Well that's fine because you can check it.

Now, often kind of clients of a certain age won't fill in much on the first fact find because they still dunno the advisor and they haven't built up that rapport and that trust. But the second meeting and the third meeting, they've more and more willing to add more information. So that advisor then becomes a checker of the fact find to make sure there hasn't been a fat finger, an extra zero added on by mistake. Well that's a huge increase in efficiency and actually what you're doing then is checking almost live in the system.

But if you think then the generation that's coming through there will be far more tech savvy and far more tech literate and probably more willing to add more. So you're on that curve anyway of people who will be willing to add information in the system. So if you then become checker rather than an inputter and it's a check input once, check once, then that's huge efficiency again. So I think there's lots to be taken there.

- Absolutely. And I suppose is my takeaway actually from the exercise we've just been through, I think we always first start off, we always thinking, well how can we make the paraplanner is that many people work a bit harder and be more efficient, right? And I think what we are actually coming out the other end thinking is actually, there's a lot to be had from helping strapping how financial advisors work. You know, so the front end of your organization actually is genuinely the, that organization shapes the rest of the organization.

So if financial advisors behave a certain way, if you can get them there, actually the rest of the organization would then work in that way as well.

- Yeah, right?

- So they set the tone and tenure for that. So actually, you know, to your point, going back to your question Ashish, you know, what are the one things that as we think the C-suites in all clients should do is actually how to, you know, whilst treating with advisors with all the respect and deference as you should, but actually how do you influence them to adopt the operating model that you actually want them to use?

- Right.

- So, you know, incentives could be one, say for instance or, you know, again, to Matt's point it's, every time you find some improvement in whether it's savings or whether it is process that makes people happy, use those as teaching materials, right? This is great. It makes everyone happier and by the way, saves us cost. It makes you as an advisor happy as well because there's less work, you should use it.

- Yeah. And I think there's, I know we've been talking a lot about financial planning, but if you broaden that out into the investment side of the industry, I think there's all often a, people always used to ask the fund managers, do you kind of invest in your own portfolio and this and the other. And great question, would you buy stock in your own company? And everyone would say, oh, I already own stock in my own company.

I mean, I fine, but would you genuinely buy stock? So if you were an investor and you were looking at a retail business and you're looking at supply chain and how efficient it was and how good it's point of sale, that's why you are making a selection on that business. So if you self-reflect on your business and you think, well, our supply chain's a bit rubbish, or our point of sale's a bit inefficient, you probably wouldn't buy those shares. Well that self-reflection, I think is a really powerful thing that gets people to think about how do we become a better business that makes that our share price better.

And again, I think it's important to state that's something that you should be able to brag about because you've created a great business and that's nothing in detriment to the end investor that you are trying to create a successful business. In fact, it's the opposite. So clients like working with successful businesses.

- Just to extend that point that you made, Matt, probably to over to Bronswe. Bronswe, we often talk about with our clients to become buyer of means in the context of a higher interest rate environment and more competition effectively for consolidation activity in general in the UK. Why is this important?

- Yeah, it is an interesting question, Ashish. I think there are a few dimension to this, right? I think the first and most mechanical one is, with interest rates higher, I think a lot of our clients including in particular, their investors are finding the, essentially they're paying more of their profit into cover the interest rate that the expense of the debt they have. So, you know, they naturally ask themselves the question were to offset that, where can I create cash flow?

Right? And obviously, you know, we talk, you know, in a lot of clients some of that would come from safer and doing more vertical integration, but that doesn't offset the fact that your cost base is increasing by a 10% per year just because of inflation, right? So actually how do you manage that in order to offset the impact of interest rate to make sure you retain earnings are still keeping up with where you like them to be. I think it's one angle.

And then I think the second angle is also, I'd really like to challenge the assumption that financial advisors just want to do things their own way and not open to any change at all. Because I like to believe, and this might be just me being naive, but I like to believe that there's actually a segment of financial advisor out there who would be open to being told, if you join us as an organization, we can give you better tools and better ways of working. That means that A, you're more productive, or for that matter, you do have to do less work. And B, the rest of your staff, your paraplanner, your admin and all your back office people can also be less frustrated with having to support for the paperwork and whatnot, right?

So I think there's also a point which is, you know, go back to your question thats just with more competition for acquisitions, can this actually be a way for acquirers to differentiate in effect by providing better tools and support for the firms they buy?

- Great.

- Yeah.

- Matt, I'm afraid this has been a fascinating conversation that we're trying to draw it to a close. Any summary thoughts and observations you'd like to throw into the mix?

- I look, I think there's a, hopefully we've kind of alluded to, I think there's a huge potential for firms to capture more value out their operating model. I think that will give them kind of more ability to grow, more ability to kind to scale with the same amount resource and inevitably kind of make more money for themselves, but also kinda reinvest in technology that improves the life of the client and just be better businesses. So I think that fantastic opportunity, kind of really excited for the industry and kind of hopefully it kind of grasps opportunity with both hands.

- Bronswe, any final thoughts?

- I think, I mean, to be honest, we've covered a lot of things already today, right? And I think the, I suppose my parting thought would be pretty much anyone can do consolidation. Well, anyone can do aggregation, anyone can do buy and build. Not everyone can do consolidation.

And the question is I think genuinely, for those people who do consolidation well, I just cannot see a future where operating model is not important for them. And I think time and time and again, you know, Ashish and I both know this, whenever we talk about transactions, we talk about valuation, we talk about what valuable business looks like, the businesses that command high multiples, the business that high valuation, the business that command respect are the ones that are not just commercially focused but operationally focused as well. So whatever goal they set themselves, they deliver.

Whatever's division, the CEO sets, the organization moves towards that and none of those things are doable without a good operating model. So I would say, you know, to Matt's point, yeah. Can the industry set itself a challenge of becoming that?

- Yeah.

- Great. Well, thank you very much to the audience for listening in. Thank you Matt. Thank you, Bronswe.

This has been a delightful conversation. This is the beginning of our conversation with clients outside of this particular video. We look forward to continuing the narrative and conversations outside. Please do get in touch.

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