Scaling with confidence: Jem Wealth’s move to intelliflo

Customer profile

Purpose-driven financial planning group Jem Wealth began close to a decade ago in Queensland’s Toowomba. The vision of its founder, Ben McHugh, has been to “grow old with our clients”, with the approach helping to differentiate Jem Wealth in the market.

In the past few years, the business has scaled up its operations, opening practices in Brisbane after initially starting in Toowoomba, while servicing clients in several parts of Australia. It now employs 13 staff and has $400m in funds under advice.

Jem Wealth’s journey with intelliflo began close to two years ago, after the group had left its previous licensee to become self-licensed. Through the process, management decided the group had outgrown its previous customer relationship management(CRM) and needed something new to support the next phase of growth.

 

Business challenges and needs

  • Pursuing sustainable business growth across multiple locations

 

  • Desire to centralise admin, while maintaining high service standards and a consistent customer experience

 

  • Existing CRM lacked flexibility and scalability to support goals
  • Need for a system that could handle replication across future practices.

 

intelliflo delivered

  • A scalable CRM backbone to support future growth

 

  • A responsive support team to manage the transition
  • Greater process visibility
  • Tools to enable adviser collaboration and workflow efficiency
  • Cashflow modelling and client portal tools for a richer customer experience
  • The power to enable a centralised hub for admin, improving consistency across teams and practice locations

 

Drivers for moving to a new system

When Jem Wealth made the decision to expand its footprint, it needed a centralised system to deliver a consistent customer service and administrative experience across each of its different locations. It was important to us that we would be able to replicate the same service standards.

We had been using Xplan through our previous licensee, but when we became self-licensed, we were looking for a provider who could help us to scale up. Before we could centralise though, we needed the right backbone. We asked ourselves “which CRM will fit with our plans to grow and replicate the experience?” We had heard of intelliflo from a consultant who had experienced it in the US and were initially concerned about being an early adopter in the local market. However, we were impressed by its flexible architecture and potential to help us to add scale.

Onboarding and support

The onboarding and data migration process wasn’t as daunting as I had expected, but you do have to put some time into data migration. Thankfully, the support experience from the intelliflo side was excellent. Generally, with a new system, there’s someone in the team who is an expert in it already.

However, with a whole new system, no-one internally had that kind of experience, so a lot of the time, we would have to go back to intelliflo for help and answers. We always found the team were willing to help and quick to answer our questions.

 

Upgrading the way we work

While we previously had some experience using similar tools, the intelliflo offering is sharper. We particularly value the workflows, tasks and processes, especially as our team continues to grow. We’ve recently brought on some new advisers, and they’ve really enjoyed the visual representation the cashflow modelling offers.

We are currently in the process of tackling the client portal and it will be an important part of helping us to achieve one of our business goals. One of our big objectives this year is to ensure our clients know several different faces within the business. We have separated out our reviews and new business and through the review process, we intend to have the admin staff take the clients through the portal. It means the clients will have meaningful interactions with a number of people within the business – not just the adviser – and the portal will be key to that engagement.

In the near future, we also plan to adopt the business intelligence dashboards to give us better oversight into how our business is performing, which client segments are delivering and where we can add additional value and where we can grow or add scale. We are particularly interested in the funds under management dashboard.

 

Enabling future growth

Looking at the big picture, intelliflo is allowing us to grow and build our business and to achieve scale. A fundamental part is having a centralised hub for administration, which we can add to over time. Without that, our practices risk operating as siloed businesses.

With intelliflo, we can deliver a consistent experience to our clients with the same service standards, whether they are in Sydney or the Sunshine Coast. We can also continue to expand by adding new client service officers.