Gerrit Lombard recognised potential in an existing team member.
‍Through VAP's Training Academy, he provided a structured pathway to help accelerate their development into a future paraplanner while remaining focused on serving clients.

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The Challenge Wasn't Finding Potential.
It Was Finding Time To Develop It.

Many advice businesses already have someone they want to develop.

The challenge isn't identifying potential.

The challenge is finding the time to nurture it.

Client meetings need attention.

Advice files still need to be reviewed.

Compliance obligations continue.

And advisers still need to run the business.

As a result, staff development often falls behind more immediate priorities.

For Gerrit Lombard, this challenge felt familiar.

He had a team member who was already contributing valuable work. They understood the business, assisted with ROAs, and had become an important part of the team.

The potential was obvious.

The challenge was creating a pathway to help that potential grow.

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Seeing Potential Is Easy. Developing It Is Harder.

As the conversation turned to staff development, Gerrit highlighted a challenge many advice business owners face.

Developing someone from support work into technical advice work is a long-term investment.

Many businesses rely on team members learning through observation.

They review previous advice documents.

They sit in on discussions.

They ask questions.

Over time, they gradually build their understanding.

This approach works.

But it also takes time.

And time is often in short supply.

Technical Capability Requires More Than Experience

Future paraplanners need to understand far more than document preparation.

They need exposure to:

• Strategy recommendations
• Advice structures
• Compliance requirements
• Insurance considerations
• Superannuation strategies
• Retirement planning concepts
• Client outcomes

This knowledge develops through repetition, education, and practical application.

For busy advice businesses, creating enough time for that development can be difficult.

The First Signs of Progress Weren't Complex Advice Strategies

One of the most valuable outcomes Gerrit noticed wasn't related to SOA writing or technical strategy work.

It showed up in everyday tasks.

His team member began providing more complete information.

There were fewer gaps requiring clarification.

Less time was spent adding comments and corrections before work could progress.

Individually, these improvements appeared small.

Collectively, they reduced the level of oversight required.

And that's often how capability develops inside successful advice businesses.

Not through one major breakthrough.

But through a series of consistent improvements that gradually build confidence and ownership.

How Structured Training Supported The Development Process

To help accelerate that growth, Gerrit enrolled his team member in the VAP Training Academy.

Rather than replacing the development already occurring inside the business, the Academy complemented it.

The program provided structure around topics advisers deal with every day, including:

• Superannuation contributions
• Pension strategies
• Insurance considerations
• Retirement planning
• Advice structures
• Compliance obligations

Participants begin with foundational theory before progressing into practical exercises, case studies, and real-world advice concepts.

Building Confidence Before Complexity

As knowledge develops, participants begin to connect concepts more effectively.

They gain a stronger understanding of advice recommendations.

They become more confident contributing to technical discussions and advice preparation processes.

Most advisers learned the same way themselves.

Nobody starts with complex strategies on day one.

Technical capability is built progressively.

Structured training simply helps create a clearer pathway.

Why Structured Training Matters For Advice Businesses

Many advice businesses already have capable team members who want to grow.

Many advisers genuinely want to invest in their people.

The challenge is balancing staff development with client commitments.

Without structure, training often depends on spare moments between meetings and advice work.

With structure, development continues even while advisers focus on clients and business priorities.

Training And Coaching Work Best Together

Structured training does not replace internal mentoring.

It strengthens it.

Rather than spending time teaching every technical concept from scratch, advisers can focus on helping team members apply what they learn to real client situations.

This creates a more effective learning environment where:

✔ Technical knowledge continues to grow

✔ Internal coaching becomes more valuable

✔ Team members gain confidence faster

✔ Advisers spend less time teaching fundamentals

✔ Capability develops across the business

Investing In The Team You Already Have

Many business owners assume growth requires hiring someone new.

Sometimes the opportunity already exists within the team.

The future paraplanner.

The future technical specialist.

The future senior support team member.

They may already be contributing value every day.

What they need is the opportunity to expand their knowledge, develop new skills, and take on greater responsibility.

That investment benefits more than the individual.

It helps strengthen:

• Client service
• Operational efficiency
• Technical capability
• Team retention
• Long-term business growth

Structured training helps bridge the gap between potential and performance.

And over time, those small gains in knowledge, confidence, and capability can create meaningful outcomes for both the individual and the business.

Because the next paraplanner in your advice business may already be sitting within your team today.

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Key Takeaway

The most successful staff development programs don't start with hiring someone new.

They start by recognising potential in the people already within the business and creating a structured pathway to help them grow.

‍Looking To Develop Future Paraplanners Within Your Team?

Many advice businesses already have capable support team members ready for greater responsibility.

The challenge is creating a structured pathway that supports their development while allowing advisers to stay focused on clients.

VAP's Training Academy helps team members build technical capability through structured learning, practical exercises, and real-world concepts.

‍Explore VAP's Training Academy

Discover how structured training can help develop the future paraplanners and technical specialists already within your business.

‍Learn More About The VAP Training Academy

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Most businesses don't lose momentum because demand disappears.
They lose momentum because the structure underneath the business stops keeping up.

Work begins to queue.
Decisions slow down.
More responsibility concentrates around fewer people.

Demand is still there.

But the operating model has not evolved with the growth.

That is a pattern playing out across Australian businesses right now.

That was the position Now Finance found itself in. The business was already growing, but continuing under the same structure meant one thing: more cost, more pressure, more dependency on the same people to keep things moving.

As David Norman, CEO of Now Finance Group, put it:
"You can't continue to grow at the same cost base and be a profitable company."

At that point, the decision was not whether to grow.
It was how to support that business growth properly.

A Structural Shift Made Scaling Sustainable

For many Australian businesses, scaling a business within a single location means relying on a tightening labour market and absorbing increasing costs at every stage of growth.

Rather than slowing down, Now Finance changed how the business was built to operate.

"You need to diversify."

That meant introducing offshore staffing, not as overflow support, but as part of the operating model itself.

For Australian businesses considering the same move, the early concern is almost always the same: will the customer experience hold?

For Now Finance, the answer was clear.

"The customers were seeing no difference..."

"Our NPS scores kept going up..."

The offshore team model was not theoretical anymore.
It was already working.

The Model Was Built to Scale, Not Just Support

Most Australian businesses approach offshore teams with the same question:

What stays onshore and what moves offshore?

Now Finance did not frame it that way.

"We don't actually look at it that way at all."

"Whatever we have in Australia, we want to duplicate here."

That meant building real capability across their offshore team in the Philippines, not fragmenting work or creating a two-tier operation.

Customer service expanded into:

sales
settlements
collections
engineering
credit
disputes

The result was not two separate teams operating in isolation.

It was one operating model running across multiple locations, with the same standards and the same culture on both sides.

The impact showed up clearly in performance.

"Our productivity from a revenue per employee has continued to increase."

"Our cost to income ratio has basically been divided by three..."

At that point, offshore staffing stopped being about cutting costs.

It became part of how the business scales efficiently and sustainably as an Australian company competing in a tightening market.

The Structure Now Supports the Next Phase of Growth

"We don't see it as an outsourced business. We see it as a partnership."

That shift in thinking changed ownership and accountability across the entire business.

For Australian businesses exploring offshore team models, this is the part that is most often underestimated.

It is not just about the roles you move.
It is about how you lead across locations.

As the team grew, leadership became critical.

"The best thing that I've found... is you recruit leadership from within."

Internal leaders already understand the structure.

They have built trust.
They have lived the culture on both sides.

That is what allows leadership to scale alongside the business rather than becoming the bottleneck.

"I think it's allowed us to de-risk our business..."

Operating across Australia and the Philippines improved business resilience and continuity in a way that a single-location model simply cannot replicate.

For Australian business owners thinking about offshore staffing, that resilience is increasingly becoming a reason to act, not just a benefit in hindsight.

Now, the business is preparing for its next phase.

"Adding this new product doubles our business over the next couple of years."

That changes the role of the offshore team entirely.

They are not just supporting what already exists.
They are part of what enables what comes next.

"As important as anybody in our business."

Watch how Now Finance built this model in practice

See how their offshore team, leadership structure, and operating model work together to support sustainable business growth for an Australian company built to scale.

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When Walker Lane began experiencing rapid growth, it didn't create a lead problem. It created an operational scaling problem.

As client demand increased, the pressure inside Walker Lane wasn't on winning more work. It was on getting the work done well, consistently, and without overloading the people already responsible for delivery — a clear delivery capacity constraint.

That's the point where many firms start to feel the strain — more clients, more complexity, and not enough team capacity to keep up.

For the Walker Lane team, that became the trigger to rethink how offshore team building and support was built into the business.

What followed wasn't a stopgap hire. It became a scalable operating model.

Over time, Walker Lane grew its offshore support team from one or two people into a much larger structure, including 11 team members in Cebu and a paraplanning function that expanded from an initial setup to six people.

The result wasn't just more headcount. It was measurable output.

Within a year, the Walker Lane team had quadrupled its workload and dramatically increased SOA production each month.

That kind of lift is difficult to achieve when every new hire depends on slow local recruitment and limited internal capacity.

What makes the story more valuable, though, is how they built it.

Walker Lane didn't approach building their team as "give someone a task and hope for the best." Their philosophy was to hire for potential, train deeply, and develop people into more capable roles over time — a key principle in scalable team structure.

One team member started in admin, progressed into simpler advice documents, and then moved into more complex SOA work. That progression was intentional.

As Patricia Peters, Head of Advice and Paraplanning at Walker Lane, explained in the interview, the goal was not just to teach people to follow instructions, but to help them understand the situation, think critically, and know what good looks like — critical for financial planning operations.

That mindset made the Walker Lane team more capable, more fulfilled, and far easier to scale.

That development only worked because it sat inside a strong support structure. Clear communication, proactive performance coaching, and close collaboration between Walker Lane and VAP's local support team helped turn what could have been a hiring challenge into something far more sustainable — improving operational efficiency.

What surprised the Walker Lane team most wasn't just the output. It was the culture that came with it.

The relationship felt genuine, the trust was real, and the team became embedded in how Walker Lane actually operates day to day.

That is the real takeaway from this story. Walker Lane didn't just add support. They built a workflow model that could absorb growth without putting more pressure back on their advisers.

And when they needed more capacity, they were able to move quickly instead of starting from scratch each time — enabling consistent advice firm growth.

If you want to see how the Walker Lane team built this in practice, you can watch the full interview below: Watch the full Walker Lane testimonial

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Watch the Full Episode

If growth is starting to expose pressure in your workflow, this conversation is worth your time.

In this interview, Walker Lane shares how they built a more scalable support structure behind the business — from developing team capability to expanding paraplanning capacity and supporting significantly more output without relying on traditional hiring alone.