Poole Group moves faster across advisers, support and ops, saving 250 to 300 hours a month with Marloo

Poole Group is a Sunshine Coast-based integrated services firm, combining accounting, wealth management and financial advisory. Its clients carry complexity in their structures, with company owners, business owners, retirees with multiple entities and a large self-managed super fund cohort, so the advice the team produces is rarely simple. Operations Manager Belinda Nord came to the role from the adviser's seat, with 15 years in the financial planning industry behind her.

The change Belinda noticed first was how fast the whole team was moving.

"Marloo feels very sharp. Our pace feels very efficient. It doesn't feel like a lot of the AI being rolled out within the industry, which can make you feel like you're on a treadmill that's going one click too fast. With Marloo everything feels very organic, and it feels like it steps forward as we do."

That speed starts with file notes. Advisers used to type them into a Microsoft Word template, or voice record the meeting and send it offshore to be written up into a file note, then returned and approved before any workflow could begin.

"What would have taken two hours with our file noting may now take only half an hour."

Poole Group's advisers each sit around 10 client appointments a week, spanning first meetings, statement of advice presentations, strategy meetings and annual reviews. Belinda's conservative estimate is one hour saved per file note.

"One hour per file note per meeting across three advisers, that's immediately 30 hours of working time back into the business each week, just in terms of file noting itself."

Marloo cuts out the post-meeting bottleneck, with the support team no longer waiting on anyone.

"Now, as soon as there's a Marloo transcript available, our support team is able to go into Marloo and extract that transcript, so they can start to get a general idea of how the meeting went and what the next steps might be, even before the adviser has returned from the client meeting."

Those file notes are the starting point rather than the destination. Poole Group now uses Marloo to build strategy documents, records of advice and statements of advice, with the strategy document acting as the practice's key client engagement tool before a full statement of advice is produced. Marloo pulls context from previous file notes, interprets the strategy and does extra research, which it drops straight into the practice's own template.

"We do use multiple systems in order for accuracy, but we can rely on Marloo as a backup to catch anything we have not caught in terms of our research needs, and to put all of our ideas into one template that we designed with Marloo."

The gains on statements of advice are the largest in the business, and with the practice aiming to produce six a week, the gains compound quickly.

"We currently have three paraplanners working for us offshore. What would take them a day to write a full statement of advice takes Marloo only a matter of minutes."

Advisers review what Marloo produces, add the cash flow modelling and any tables, check the compliance items and finalise. Belinda estimates that halving a full-day statement of advice saves around four hours per document. Records of advice save around two and a half hours each, strategy documents around two.

"Altogether, between just file noting and document generation, it's around 250 to 300 hours across all advice types and all file note types back into our business. Say we have $400 per hour for our advisers. If we're saving 10 of those hours per week just in terms of file noting, that's $4,000 per week per adviser. That's $12,000 a week there, just in billable costs."

With Marloo handling document generation, Belinda also expects the practice to need less paraplanning capacity. The firm currently has three offshore paraplanners (two part-time and one full-time) at an annual cost of $72,000.

"At the moment, if we shifted all SOA production to Marloo we would probably be able to manage with one part time paraplanner, with potential to increase that to a full time role, and saving around $36k per annum."

Rolling Marloo out across the practice, though, turned out to be the easy part. Belinda had expected to manage a change process across a team that spans advisers with more than 20 years in the industry and advisers who came through the new pathway and have never known anything but digital tools. Both groups took to it for different reasons: the long-timers liked being memory-independent and having the transcript there; the newer advisers simply expected the automation to exist.

"Everything with Marloo was intuitive. You're not left guessing. It's super easy to understand, super easy to use. It was instant buy-in across the team. There was no pushback."

As the wider team saw what Marloo was doing for advisers and support staff, other roles started using it for their own work. In her operations role, Belinda has built internal meeting templates so Marloo captures the practice's regroup meetings and distributes the action items. Poole Group's implementation manager has taken it in a different direction again, connecting the firm's email system so that Marloo creates a client file, then adds to it with every review agenda and client email until it holds a picture of that client's assets, liabilities and recent communications.

"It's almost like its own little CRM dashboard. The more we discuss Marloo in our meetings, the more our team gets excited about it, the more solutions we're finding. Really, my foot's been off the pedal. Marloo's done all the hard work in terms of being able to roll itself out throughout the business."

The next question is what the practice does with the capacity. Belinda estimates Marloo has freed up something like two days of work per adviser. Two extra client sign-ups from those two days, at a notional $10,000 of revenue per client file, would be another $20,000 a week of new business.

"That's building in capacity across an adviser's working weeks within a year. We're looking at almost a million dollars in terms of revenue per adviser, if they were to sign up just two additional clients from those two additional days that Marloo has been able to produce for us."