Trish Gregory: 00:01 I was talking about my experience. As the advice community, we talk about, we want more women in advice, we need to have more women in advice, blah, blah, blah. All that jazz. I’m part of the Inspire Committee and we’re always looking at ways to attract women to advice, and then this response from both men and women to me bringing a three month old baby, like it was just the end of the world.
Fraser Jack: 00:25 Hello, and welcome to the Goals Based Advice Podcast, where I have conversations with pioneers of the new world of financial advice. I’m your host, Fraser Jack, and I want to say thank you so much for tuning in today. If you’re enjoying this podcast, then please help me spread the word and share it with your friends and colleagues, and leave me a review on iTunes or whichever platform you use. I’d also like to thank our supporting partner, Advice Intelligence, for powering this podcast.
Now this episode I chat with fellow money nerd, Trish Gregory, who recently got back from two US conferences and managed to fight her way through jet lag and come on the show and tell us all about them. Trish has a really interesting story and one that has shaped the type of advice that she wants to provide to the people she wants to help most. I admire her tenacity and making her career and life work together no matter what. I feel like we can all take inspiration from her story. Let’s hit play on my chat with Trish.
Welcome to the show Trish.
Trish Gregory: 01:25 Thank you, Fraser. Excited to be here.
Fraser Jack: 01:28 Fantastic. Now, this is your first podcast you just mentioned.
Trish Gregory: 01:31 It is. I’m very excited. Thank you for having me on. A little bit nervous, but yeah, I’m sure we’ll do great.
Fraser Jack: 01:37 No, you’re fantastic. You’ve got some pretty cool stuff to talk about. Tell us about you right now.
Trish Gregory: 01:44 Well, right now I’m pretty sleep deprived because I’ve come back from overseas, but right now I am on parental leave. We’re up to 10 months of parental leave from my job, looking after baby number three, Felix, who’s yeah, 10 months old.
Fraser Jack: 02:02 Fantastic. Yeah, so financial advisor on parental leave at the moment, but tell us your story. Let’s go back, what made you want to get into financial advice in the first place?
Trish Gregory: 02:12 Oh, well it goes back a fair way I suppose. I’ve always been a money nerd and I recall when I was a kid in primary school I used to reconcile my parents’ bank credit card statements with their receipts for fun. That was fun for me, and I always enjoyed math, but never really thought about a career in finance in any way.
Had jobs that I fell into, that sort of thing, and then met my partner. We had a kid, and I stopped working. That was the goal, it was to be a stay-at-home parent, he was in the military so we moved around a bunch. All that time still reading money blogs, listening to the few money podcasts that were out there at the time, talking about money whenever I could, annoying my partner about that.
He is not a money person so he was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Then, he was injured in the military and he was medically discharged. At that point, we were going to have to switch roles. He was going to be the stay-at-home parent, at that point in our time, our two children, and I was going to go back to work.
Did a bit of a soul searching, said, “Well, what do I want to do? I don’t just want to do a job which I’ve always done.” Because I didn’t really want to be away from my children for just something. My partner, Harley, he said, “Well, you always talk about money, so how about you do something with that?” I went, “Oh yeah. Let’s see what’s out there, financial advice, that seems like a good idea. Doesn’t seem too onerous to get into.” Obviously you only needed your diploma.
We moved down to Melbourne from, we were in Darwin at the time, and I started studying, quickly found a job that was local to me and jumped straight into it. I had five months of training and then straight into an advice role. Not the normal way of jumping into financial advice.
Fraser Jack: 04:30 It turns out there is no normal way, by the way.
Trish Gregory: 04:33 That’s right. Well, I think every single person I talk to, they’re like, “Oh yeah, you do client services, and then you become a paraplanner, then you become an associate, and then you become an advisor.” I’m like, “Nah, nah. I just ran straight to advisor, why not?”
Fraser Jack: 04:47 Yeah, fair enough. That’s what I did, too. I was a chef, and then I decided to become an advisor, you know? Natural progression.
Trish Gregory: 04:56 There you go.
Fraser Jack: 04:56 So, that led you into the role. You have a job as an advisor and how long were you an advisor for, before you got pregnant again?
Trish Gregory: 05:07 Yeah, so I was an advisor for about two years and then yep, surprise, baby number three came along. Sorry Felix, if you’re listening to this when you’re older. Yeah, I’d been an advisor for about two years, then got pregnant and went on leave.
Fraser Jack: 05:29 So you went on maternity leave. Now, this is a big point because there’s going to be a lot of people going through this, both male and female, parental leave, and wanting to be able to think about in the future, taking some time out and obviously there’s different legislations coming in and a lot of extra education and extra CPD and a lot of all that extra costs involved with taking some time out. Tell us about your experience.
Trish Gregory: 05:54 Well, so to start with for me, it’s really important to me the way that me and my partner have chosen to parent, that the first year of the child’s life, they’re basically attached to me. It’s called attachment parenting, it’s the way we do things, and it really is, we live to our values and that’s really where we are. For me, it was really important that all of our children had at least one year attached to me.
What I did basically was to start, going back, it was we needed savings, right? No employee’s going to pay you for a year of parental leave, so over the years, I have really worked hard to build up our family’s savings for the what ifs, which has helped us a couple of times with fairly dramatic periods of our life, which included my partner being medically discharged from the military and then us being a single income family for pretty much the entirety of our children’s lives.
Yeah, then really what it came down to was that’s what I wanted to do, and so I pitched it to my boss and I said, “Well I want to” ... I was leaving, he was due in November, so I said, “Well, if I take from November to the following January off, so 14 months, how do you feel?” They went, “Yep, we can sort it out.” Some people thought it was a bit weird. They said, “Well, what about your clients?” But had a really good handover with all of my colleagues. My colleagues are looking after my clients very well, I trust them.
And yeah, so that’s essentially what we did. I suppose it wasn’t much of a negotiation because it’s what was going to happen. For me, there’s no alternative, I’m not going back to work early. I know that in the first year of my child’s life, I don’t cope well, I’m sleep deprived, life is hard. There’s no point for me, going back to work and not giving my employer my best.
Fraser Jack: 07:54 Yeah, fair enough. Like you said, Felix was coming no matter what, so there was no choice.
Trish Gregory: 07:54 That’s right.
Fraser Jack: 08:02 So then I’m going to fast forward a few months, obviously when I first met you was at a conference in February, so I think Felix was about three months old, or thereabouts. You decided to that you obviously wanted to keep your CPD up and learn new things and keep upskilling yourself, so tell us about that experience.
Trish Gregory: 08:23 Well yeah, that happened, I mean that started when I was pregnant. Yeah, Steve Crawford had LTMA. I thought it sounded really awesome, and I wanted to go, and I went, “Oh, but I’ll have a baby and I don’t know how that’s going to fly.” I pitched to Steve, I said, “Hey, I really want to come, really want to support you, it sounds like you’re doing something fantastic. How will we go if I bring a baby, a three month old?” I thought, “Well, he’s a parent, he knows what babies are like,” and fortunately for me he was like, “Well, yeah, we’ll see how we go I suppose.”
It worked out really well. It was a two-day conference, big days, but he was only three months old, so basically he was breastfed, so he fed and he sleeped and he goo-goo’d and ga-ga’d. That was pretty much it, like at that age, it’s pretty simple to cart them around, as I’m sure you know. They’re pretty cruisy. But then from that, I had such a great experience at LTMA. Everyone was really supportive there. He was even at the pub and got passed around actually, I didn’t see him for probably half an hour at the pub on the first day which was rather entertaining.
I wrote an article about my experience of bringing a baby to a financial planning conference, which got published in the IFA and had an interesting response.
Fraser Jack: 09:55 Yeah. Now, I have to say, it was great parenting by the way, passing your baby around at the pub. Well looked after, a lot of people certainly as a community of advisors and people very close to being advisors, there was a lot of people, more than happy to step up and help you out, and to give Felix a cuddle. He ended up with probably a fair chunk of CPD points over the last 12 months, probably a lot more than anyone else, but just on this article, this was really interesting.
Because the community was very supportive at the time, and then you wrote the article which was a lovely article that essentially talked about your experience, which was very truthful and open and honest. And then the reactions started coming in, the responses started coming in. That was a little bit shocking.
Trish Gregory: 10:51 It was. Actually, before I even new that the article had been uploaded, I got two messages from Steve and from Peter D, and they both said, “Hey, don’t worry about the comments. We think you’re fantastic. You did an amazing thing.” I’m like, “Oh, what comments? Oh, my goodness. Let me go have a look.” I had a read and I read the IFA, I know what the people are like on there, and I was kind of expecting a few trolls because you see them on all the articles, but so I was able to just laugh at it.
But it was kind of appalling, the way that ... I was talking about my experience. As the advice community, we talk about we want more women in advice, we need to have more women in advice, blah, blah, blah, all that jazz, I’m part of the Inspire Committee, and we’re always looking at ways to attract women to advice and then this response from both men and women to me bringing a three month old baby. Like, it was just the end of the world.
People were saying, I mean obviously in jest, they should bring their job, they should bring their cat, they should bring a falcon. I don’t think many people noticed Felix much. I certainly noticed loud advisors who talk in the back of conference rooms more than people probably noticed Felix. Yeah, I was just kind of disappointed at the advice industry on that page at least, that people couldn’t see it for what it was, which was a woman doing a thing to stay involved in the community and instead, they looked at it as, “Oh, how dare you. Just go and sit in your house with your baby and wait until you’re ready to reintegrate with society” I guess.
Fraser Jack: 12:52 Yeah, it was quite incredible how the high horses came out and people jumped up on their high horse and started saying stupid things, in my opinion, around that. And then yeah, it was just quite incredible, like you said, male and female getting involved in that. Even when I think back to that conference, the first day you got there, you wanted to sit up the back and try and find a spot where you wouldn’t disrupt, but essentially by day two, you were right down the front.
By day two, you were right down the front, really doing the money nerd thing that you wanted to do, and Felix was brilliant.
Trish Gregory: 13:37 Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was there to learn but I did not want to disrupt. Once I determined that Felix, nah, he was good, I didn’t need to worry about him, yeah, I was right up there. I was there to learn, I wanted to get the most value out of the conference that I could.
Fraser Jack: 13:57 Yeah. Now, speaking of conferences, that’s not the only one you’ve been to. You just got back from the US where you attended FinCon, one of my favorite conferences of all time, and also the Military Influencer Conference which was a back-to-back in the same venue. Talk to us about this.
Trish Gregory: 14:14 Well, before I actually became a financial advisor, when I was first looking into it, so four years ago, I heard about FinCon. I looked at it and I went, “Oh, my God, this looks amazing. A whole bunch of money nerds getting together, talking about money. That’s awesome.” I recall actually the first person who was a financial advisor that I came across, I said, “Oh, is there anything like FinCon in Australia?” They’re like, “Nup.” “Oh, okay. Have you ever heard of it?” “Nup.” “All right, never mind. Wrong person to talk to, obviously.”
That year I didn’t go because I wasn’t a financial advisor. The second year I didn’t go because couldn’t afford international travel. The third year, last year, I bought a ticket and then I got pregnant so couldn’t go heavily pregnant. I was finally able to go this year and I was really excited just to learn about different ways to do money, really, I suppose. Americans, most of the blogs that I read are money blogs, especially in the past, have all been American. They do some amazing things over there, so I thought, “Why not learn a different way of doing things? Let’s get on it.”
Fraser Jack: 15:35 Yeah, certainly is. It’s certainly, like you said, money nerds getting together, coming up with ideas and different ways of communicating as well to groups, whether it be small groups. I’ve always found that we’ve done things a certain way here and it’s always been that way, and the traditional way, and you don’t go and try anything different. But this podcast wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t have gone to FinCon and learned all about different ways of getting your message out there.
You booked your ticket, got some flights, Felix in hand, flew over to the states. Tell us what that’s like, taking again, a youngster, not really a baby anymore, but a youngster overseas.
Trish Gregory: 16:26 Yeah, not the easiest thing to do when you’re going to a conference for the first time. I have to say, the 14 and something hour flight to LA and then the five and something hour flight to Washington D.C. with a baby is horrible. Let’s just call it what it is. But I knew I wanted to go and this year because I am on parental leave, I thought it’s a perfect opportunity. I don’t need to ask anyone for time off, I can take as long as I need to recover afterwards, so let’s just do it.
I reached out to the FinCon community before I went and said, “Hey, does anyone have tips for people bringing a baby?” A whole bunch of people again, same sort of thing as IFA, were like, “Don’t do it. Sit at home, wait. Come when you don’t have to bring your baby.” But then I had a whole bunch of predominately women messaging me and saying, “Yep, we know what it’s like, life continues on despite having children. You’ll do fantastic, here if you need support” which actually one of the ladies who said, “Here if you need support,” she did end up actually providing with a good amount of support.
She was kind enough to offer to pick me up from the airport and take me to the hotel. She’s like, “I know what it’s like, my partner’s in the military, he’s always away, we’re always traveling, I have a young baby, totally get it.” Which was amazing. I didn’t expect or ask for that really, but the kindness of strangers, and the kindness of the FinCon community really, just showed itself. Yeah, FinCon, we settled into the hotel and I have to say that it was overwhelming to start with.
I don’t know how you felt Fraser, the first time you went, but 2500 people, it’s a gigantic conference, and I also put Felix into childcare. I was really fortunate that this was the first year that FinCon was providing childcare. They had some sponsors, so it was completely free to us, and it was completely full. They actually booked out which really shows that there’s women who want to come who have babies, that need somewhere to put their children so they’re not disturbing anyone. That was really, really cool that they provided that, and I really appreciated that and I provided them with ... They asked for feedback, “How did it go? We want to do it again but we need to know the right way to do things.”
Yeah, so the first day of FinCon settled into things, found the other Aussies, had a chat. I also did a little walk around Washington D.C. and checked out the White House and the Washington Monument, those sorts of things, and the second day I got completely overwhelmed in the beginning because there was so much going on. There was so many people. I’m not amazing with gigantic crowds and that was a gigantic crowd of people. I had to retreat to my room and just go, “Okay. Let’s just chill. Take a moment and then we’ll just go and sit down at the back of rooms and learn.”
Fraser Jack: 19:47 Yeah, so the funny thing is, I noticed with FinCon, is it’s a room that’s mostly made up, like you said, two and a half thousand people, mostly made up of introverts. But they do get together and it’s like a family reunion.
Trish Gregory: 20:07 Yeah, that’s right.
Fraser Jack: 20:08 And so everybody, whilst introverts generally, and the Americans are big and loud and they want ... Naturally, right? You come across with an Aussie accent and all of a sudden they’re like, they want to know everything about it. I can completely understand how you might have got a bit swamped in that zone.
Trish Gregory: 20:31 Yeah. One of the things that people said, got reiterated again and again was, “When you’re going to FinCon, you need to have a game plan.” There is so much going on that you need to say, “Okay, this is what I want to achieve” or, “This is what I’m hoping to learn” and then just focus on that, because you will not get it all, that’s why they have the [Pal 00:20:54] Pass or whatever it’s called, the pass where you can watch everything, all the sessions online afterwards.
And so one of my goals was start a podcast, because I want to yeah, start a podcast, talking to a specific niche of people that I want to support as a financial advisor. I sort of focused on the podcasting track and then put in a few little other sessions that were of interest to me. Like, there was some financial advisor sessions as well, but mainly it was yeah, learning how to start a podcast and launch a podcast with success, and not to crickets and all that sort of thing. I don’t know how you felt with starting your podcast.
Fraser Jack: 21:42 Pretty much to crickets, and then, but yeah exactly right, getting all that information in behind you, from the beginner level. I know they have different levels as well, you can do more advanced stuff or you can do beginner, like you said, getting it off the ground and starting it. But amazing the different tracks available that you could jump into, depending on what your interest is.
Trish Gregory: 22:05 That’s right. They had the bloggers, they had the YouTubers, the podcasters, the financial advisors, I don’t know what else there was. There was a whole heap of them. One of the best things was so in the middle, FinCon central, there’s all the swag, and Americans are, there’s a lot of affiliate marketing, so how do you make money from your blog or your podcast or whatever? So they’re all trying to, the affiliate marketing companies obviously want to get everyone, so I go, “Oh, you have some good swag, let me take your chocolate or cookie or whatever” and then start talking like, “Oh, so tell me about you.”
I’m like, “Well, I’m from Australia” and they’re like, “Cool. Thanks.” Can’t do anything with them, it was great. Like, “Cool, I’ll just take your free swag and off we go.”
Fraser Jack: 22:47 They do the swag well, don’t they?
Trish Gregory: 22:47 They do.
Fraser Jack: 22:52 They quite like the swag. They call it what it is, a bit of stuff to get you all over to the stands and chatting.
Trish Gregory: 22:58 Exactly.
Fraser Jack: 22:59 They do that well.
Trish Gregory: 23:00 The best one was the massage chair. They had a massage chair where you fill out a ... They wanted you to fill out a survey on an iPad, so you could sit in the massage chair while you’re filling it out, and I took that survey four times really slowly, across FinCon. It was great.
Fraser Jack: 23:20 I just wanted to ask you about this childcare, how many kids were in the childcare?
Trish Gregory: 23:26 They had two different rooms. One for the babies and one for the kids. I saw probably maybe up to 20 children and then the babies there was about, trying to think, but probably about eight babies total I think, that came and went. Some of them weren’t there the whole time. The youngest was one month, and Felix was one of the older ones at nine and a half months.
Fraser Jack: 23:56 Wow, that’s really cool.
Trish Gregory: 23:57 Yeah, it is. There’s this company that comes to hotels and they set up and they do childcare, generally for conferences and that sort of thing.
Fraser Jack: 24:06 Yeah, amazing.
Trish Gregory: 24:07 I’d love to see all conferences in Australia do that, because I know that there’s lots of women who can’t go to things because they can’t get a nanny or they don’t have a grandparent or it’s going to cost too much or whatever the case may be. If we just removed some of those barriers to women getting to things, it’ll help getting more women in advice.
Fraser Jack: 24:34 Yeah, exactly. I couldn’t agree more. So FinCon, two or ... Was it three days of absolute-
Trish Gregory: 24:41 Yeah, three and a half days, yeah.
Fraser Jack: 24:43 Of absolute mind-numbing content going in, but then as if you weren’t satisfied with that, you backed it up with a second conference.
Trish Gregory: 24:53 Yes, well after I registered for FinCon and when you jump on FinCon Facebook page you say, “Hey, this is me, this is what I want to achieve” and generally some people jump in and say, “Hey, you should talk to this person or do that.” I said, “I’m a financial advisor, I really want to support military and veterans and their families.” Someone reached out and said, “Have you heard about the Military Influencers Conference? It’s straight after, in the same hotel” and I thought, “Well, what an opportunity. Why not?”
I haven’t really done much in the space yet, but again, why not learn from the people with the bigger military on how they do things? Yeah, I just tacked that one on, I stayed in the same hotel room and met some amazing people, went to some more podcasting things, met some advisors in America who just support military, and that’s it. That’s all they do, because obviously they’ve got enough people there to be able to do that. That was a smaller conference, only 900 people, so still quite large. But it was-
Fraser Jack: 26:05 The size of a large conference here in Australia then.
Trish Gregory: 26:08 Exactly. But it was much slower paced. I sat mainly on the empower track which was generally for military spouses. That was the first year they were doing that, and they had probably I think it was about 50% representation of women versus men at that conference. It showed that the military spouses are really wanting to do things, be business owners or do their own thing because they move around so much.
That was really cool, got a few different ways of thinking about how to go about things, and some great ideas to bring back to the military and veteran community just in general, nothing to do with financial advice, as well.
Fraser Jack: 26:58 Yeah, I think that’s probably very fortuitous that it was there, but to meet 900 people that were trying to do the same thing that you’re trying to do over here would have been pretty good networking opportunity.
Trish Gregory: 27:11 Yeah, absolutely. Just some of the things that the people are doing. So, the weirdest thing was I ate some dried crickets. There was a lot of veterans who just have businesses that were there and yeah, this was just dried crickets, a whole bunch of financial advisors, a whole bunch of women who are freelancers because the military moves you around all the time. I actually met some lovely people who were house flippers and those sorts of things. Yeah, they do all sorts of amazing things over there.
Fraser Jack: 27:52 Yeah, so they really have to think about industries where they are not location dependent.
Trish Gregory: 28:00 Exactly, exactly. That I think is as a financial advisor, and wanting to niche into military, veterans, and families, I think that’s what I will end up being when I get to that in my career, is being a remote financial advisor for the military people because they do move around and they still need advice and yeah, being able to support them remotely will be brilliant.
Fraser Jack: 28:33 Yeah, exactly. And certainly a podcast is a good way of doing that as well.
Trish Gregory: 28:36 Absolutely.
Fraser Jack: 28:39 Fantastic. I’m assuming you’ve got pages and notebooks fill of great tips and ideas and things that you’ve brought back. Have you got any on the top of your head that you could share, the things that you went, what were your “Ah-huh” moments or your, “Wow, that’s a pretty cool idea?”
Trish Gregory: 28:56 Well, I would have to say one of the big takeaways for me was like the planning stages. One of the things that stopped me from starting I guess is not really having a clear understanding of how to start. Like, I don’t really want to start and just [inaudible 00:29:15] it out there. I really want to do things properly, and so I really, someone really broke down the framework of like timeline of eight weeks out from launching your podcast do this, six weeks out from launching your podcast do this, and then the timeline of all these tips of how to really launch with success.
I can certainly, if you want, I can email it to you or something and make those sorts of slides or information available, so anyone else who wants to start a podcast can have a look at that. But I’m still kind of disseminating it all, because I have a small baby, so he needs to sleep, as we’re still on a completely wrong timezone. We’ve just been sleeping pretty much since we got back and waking up at really odd hours. I’ve still just been flicking through my notes and trying to tease out a few things. Yeah, still working through it.
Fraser Jack: 30:19 Yeah, fair enough too. It’s going to take a while to consolidate it all, both in your head and then once you start getting into the practical and going, “Right, now what am I going to do first? Now I’ve got so many things I want to do.” Talk to us about the future, what does it hold for you?
Trish Gregory: 30:38 The future, well, three kids so that keeps me busy. Back to work in January, and starting a podcast in the near future, talking to military spouses about money. That’s the goal, broadly about money. Obviously just general conversations, not individual, personalized advice or anything like that. Beyond that, really I want to continue to show women that they can be financial advisors and make things work for them.
Like, for me at the very beginning of my career, I was like, “I know that I’m going to need to find a full time job so that then if I need to go down to part time,” we were thinking about having a baby but not on that timeline, so if I’m full time to start with and I can then go down to part time, because my employer will know what I’m like and I’ll be happy with that.
Where am I going with this? I really want to be able to show women that they can get into advice, and it is a good career, but I also want employers to see that you can’t treat everyone the same. Like, you have to make concessions and allowances for people with small children that they’re responsible for. I think advice these days, you don’t need to sit at a desk from 9:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 to 8:00 or 9:00 or whatever it is for some organizations.
I think more and more organizations need to get onboard with people getting the work done and if that means that they’re doing it from 9:00 p.m. until midnight, because that’s what works around their family, then great, fantastic. Really I want to continue the conversation that women are valuable financial advisors, we just don’t look like your traditional financial advisors where employing us and having us work for you will look different, but it doesn’t mean we’re doing any less work.
We’re probably, we’re really, really good at multitasking and getting a lot of stuff done in a very short amount of time, like in a nap, when your child’s napping. We’re really good at just getting in and doing it. Yeah, I would really like to see the conversation continue and hopefully have less of those comments like on the IFA article. I am going to write another article about bringing a nine month baby to a conference, so we’ll see what sort of reaction that gets.
Fraser Jack: 33:37 Yeah, hopefully it’ll be a bit more positive. I completely agree with you, I think that parents need to be able to take some time out and have really flexible hours. I think with technology, the idea of working from home or a location independent type area is certainly doable with things like podcasts and things that you talked about where you can get out a message out to a lot of people. There’s certainly ways you can do that.
I think that we really need to think about with all of the new legislation coming in and the cost to serve and the cost to run a practice only going up, that we really need to focus as well on how do we make it long term, how do we make things accessible for people to be able to take some time out or work part time while they’ve got kids and young kids?
Trish Gregory: 34:32 That’s right. Because I mean, seeing it at the moment, we’ve got people leaving the industry, some are becoming wealth coaches rather than financial advisors and some are just leaving all together, so the industry’s going to shrink. I’m pretty sure everyone agrees with that one. So, how are we going to make this industry look good for the next generation if we can’t harness technology? Which largely I think, financial advice firms can. If we can’t harness technology, then you’re not going to be able to get the best talent. The best talent may not look like they used to back in the day, but that doesn’t mean that they’re still not valuable and not going to provide incredible value for someone’s business.
Fraser Jack: 35:21 Absolutely. We need lots of money nerds to be getting involved.
Trish Gregory: 35:25 We do.
Fraser Jack: 35:25 What tips do you give to younger planners or people thinking about getting into advice?
Trish Gregory: 35:35 Well, so I think so many people say, “Don’t do what I did.” I think probably having an idea of what your values are and what you want to achieve. If you’re getting into advice to earn a lot of money, then sure, go for the organizations that pay the higher wages. If you want to niche into a certain target, then try and find organizations that support that.
I would definitely say for new people, listen to your podcast and the XY Adviser Podcast. It’s an incredible wealth of knowledge, and I know that for me, in my year on parental leave, it’s been incredibly valuable to stay connected to the community vicariously through my earbuds. If you’re thinking about getting into the industry, listen to these two podcasts and you’ll find out a lot about the industry and what it’s like, and what’s going on. It might help you figure out how you want to step in, really.
Fraser Jack: 36:54 Yeah, fantastic. Tell us, are you off to FinCon again next year? Is that on the agenda?
Trish Gregory: 36:54 Yes, absolutely. I mean, I will hopefully have my ... I will definitely have my podcast started, so then I will be wanting to learn more next level stuff, I suppose, from that. Yeah, I’m looking forward to feeling less overwhelmed because I have met some wonderful people now, so it won’t be just a sea of new faces.
Fraser Jack: 37:17 Yeah, that’s right. And then it’s only one flight I think next year, too, which will be good.
Trish Gregory: 37:22 Sweet, and probably not the baby, so that will be amazing.
Fraser Jack: 37:25 A fair different experience. Fantastic. Tell me, if you go back in time and give yourself some tips or advice, where would you go? What would you say?
Trish Gregory: 37:38 Oh, I would say to myself, just do it. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and sometimes that has led to become a procrastinator, because want to do everything perfect so sometimes I don’t start. Knowing that about myself, I think just get started. Even if it’s terrible, once you start then you can learn how to do things. I see all these, and I sound like an old person saying this, but I see all these young people, I’m not that old, but I see all these young people doing amazing things and especially at FinCon.
These 20 something year olds, they’ve been writing a blog for ages and they’re super successful, or these financial advisors who started young and just had a go. I’m like, “Wow, if I had have just started when I first wanted to start, whatever the thing is, I’d be much further along.” I’ve always wanted to know everything before I started and that’s definitely the wrong way I think to go about it. Just get in and learn as you go, unless you’re going to be a surgeon, in which case know what you’re doing first.
Fraser Jack: 38:51 Or a pilot.
Trish Gregory: 38:52 Or a pilot, that’s right.
Fraser Jack: 38:55 Great advice. Actually, great advice, to start. When are we going to expect your podcast?
Trish Gregory: 39:03 Very early next year, I will be launching it.
Fraser Jack: 39:08 Fantastic.
Trish Gregory: 39:09 It’s a plan. I’ve got to-
Fraser Jack: 39:10 [crosstalk 00:39:10]. Now you’ve said it, it’s officially out there, you have to do it, right?
Trish Gregory: 39:15 That’s right. I’ve got to do the FASEA exam first, that’s in December, and I’ve got to totally focus on that because I’m going to do it one and done, and then yeah, podcast.
Fraser Jack: 39:24 Fantastic. All right. Thank you so much for coming on the show, really appreciate you coming and sharing your story. It’s been fantastic, it was great meeting Felix when he was younger and it’s good to see he’s keeping up his CPD points. He might have to go along to the exam as well and see if he can pass that. He’s had a bit of experience already.
Trish Gregory: 39:42 He’ll be a hero. He’ll pass it with flying colors.
Fraser Jack: 39:46 All right. Thanks so much for being on the show. Appreciate it. We’ll look forward to your podcast in the early 2020.
Trish Gregory: 39:52 All right. Thanks so much, Fraser.
Fraser Jack: 39:54 Thanks Trish.
Trish Gregory: 39:55 Okay, bye.
Fraser Jack: 39:56 If you haven’t already, I’d love you to subscribe to the podcast on your podcast platform of choice, and to continue the conversation, head over to our social media channels. We’ll catch you next time.
Disclaimer: This document is a transcription obtained through a third party. There is no claim to accuracy on the content provided in this document, and divergence from the audio file are to be expected. As a transcription, this is not a legal document in itself, and should not be considered binding to advice intelligence, but merely a convenience for reference.
