"I use Ask Marloo every 10 minutes": The new workflow behind sole operator Josh Coligan's plan to take on 280 new clients

As a sole adviser at RDA Wealth Advisory in Adelaide, Josh Coligan is used to running a highly optimised operation for his 120 clients. For the past 14 years he's run his back office through outsourced administrators. More recently he'd been using a competitor's financial advice AI notetaker to cut down on admin, but when he saw Marloo being demonstrated at an industry event, he switched.

"The reason I went to Marloo was because of its chat feature, Ask Marloo. The chat function is gold."

When he saw how natural having conversations with Marloo was, he went all in: notetaker, document generation, tasks, and Ask Marloo. As a sole adviser who has managed a remote team for over a decade, he says the mental model was already there.

"I've basically had Marloo for the last 14 years, in a way. My team and I have one meeting a week and other than that, we don't talk. I'm used to communicating via task. With Marloo, you don't even have to wait. It gets done instantly, in front of your eyes."

Simply speaking to Ask Marloo when he has a question or wants to refine a document fits perfectly with his working style. He uses it to draft and refine client emails, answer technical questions about super contributions and Centrelink entitlements, pull client details mid-workflow, and prepare for upcoming appointments by asking what was last discussed.

"You still need to know what you're talking about. But when you use it right, it's quite incredible."

Before Marloo, a Statement of Advice covering superannuation and insurance was taking five to six hours across the full cycle; it now takes under an hour. His old process involved pulling together a super analysis, then an insurance analysis, then a separate document production step that generated an uneditable document.

"You'd have to click around, get all the right things in, then get out of the system and spend half an hour editing it. And if a mistake went through, you had to produce the whole document again."

Josh can now speak directly into the document via Ask Marloo and get it sorted instantly.

"Oh, the admin fee's wrong. Can you please change it from 0.1 to 0.2% throughout the document. Done."

With Marloo making it so easy to produce an SOA, Josh doesn't need to hold off until he's certain a client will proceed.

"The barrier to doing these documents is now zero. It's not a massive cost anymore. You do the analysis, put it in there, it produces it, and off you go. After the meeting they say yes, and all I do is hit send. Instead of, 'We'll get that to you in two weeks.'"

He thinks their quality is better too.

"The SOAs that come out of Marloo are the best I've ever produced. Because they refer directly to what the client said, their wants and needs, put directly into the document. Nobody, unless they want to spend 15 hours on an SOA, is getting it that personalised."

The feature Josh uses most heavily is the sub-task checklist. It reflects the logic he's been using over the years with his remote team, breaking work into tasks and instructions: a task carries the client name and job description, and the sub-tasks beneath it are the step-by-step checklist to complete the work. For an insurance change, that might run to seven steps from preparing the paperwork through to emailing the client once lodgement is confirmed.

"You can set up a whole task with sub-tasks just by talking into Ask Marloo."

He's built templates for the most common workflows: new client setup, annual reviews, super rollovers, insurance changes, SOA production. His outsourced administrator joined Marloo and needed almost no training. "I said, 'Any questions?' They said, 'Not really.'"

Another small change he suggested, that makes a big difference in how he can share information with his clients, was taken up by the Marloo team immediately. When Josh flagged that slide numbers weren't visible during editing in the presentation tool, they appeared the next day. Then a new overview and insights section arrived one Monday morning that he hadn't expected.

"I've never seen anything like it. They say they're going to make changes. They make the changes. And they make them in the timeframe they say, which in software, just doesn't happen."

With his workflow fully optimised Josh is now planning to almost double his client numbers without adding an adviser and without a paraplanner, by compounding what Marloo has already made possible.