Reflections on achieving scalable practice efficiency

In the rapidly evolving landscape of financial advice, the term efficiency is often tossed around as a synonym for automation or the implementation of the latest artificial intelligence. However, for Justin Grima, practice manager at Rasiah Private Wealth, achieving true practice efficiency requires a far more nuanced approach.

Speaking at a recent INPractice webinar, Grima challenged the industry’s obsession with speed, arguing that the most successful firms know what to accelerate and what to protect.

Redefining the efficiency narrative

For many firm owners, improving practice efficiency simply means churning through more work in less time. Grima observes this trend frequently. “I think a lot of the conversation around efficiency is, how can we do more things faster? How can we just move more things faster?”

At Rasiah Private Wealth, the strategy is different. Instead of a blanket pursuit of speed, they prioritise intentionality.

“From our side, what we’ve tried to look at is really around making a conscious decision around what are those things that we want to focus on doing quickly, and what are the things that we actually want to protect.”

Grima draws a clear line between the tasks that should be streamlined and those that should not. Back-office paperwork and administrative processes are prime candidates for efficiency gains. But adviser thinking time, the space required to work through strategies carefully and consider a client’s situation fully, is different.

Accelerating that process, in his view, risks undermining the very thing clients value most. The human element, he argues, must remain unhurried.

A people-first methodology

One of the most common mistakes firms make when trying to improve practice efficiency is starting with a software purchase. Grima’s approach is the inverse. “We didn’t start any of this by picking a tool or buying some software,” he noted. Instead, the process began with the human capital already within the firm.

Grima and the leadership team sat down with back-office staff who “get their hands dirty every day.” By asking fundamental questions like “What do you actually do?”, they identified real-world bottlenecks invisible from a management-only perspective.

This ground-up investigation provided “the real opportunity to identify improvements” and prevented the firm from making dangerous assumptions about how work actually flows through the practice.

The challenge of legacy behaviours

While teams often blame technical debt and outdated software for sluggish performance, Grima identified a more stubborn obstacle: human habit. “The harder part we’ve found is, addressing legacy behaviors,” he admitted.

In many established firms, knowledge is passed down informally, leading to a “source of truth” that lives in people’s heads rather than in documented processes. To combat this, the group developed the “Rasiah Private Wealth Playbook”, a single source of truth for templates, approaches, and procedures.

However, even with a playbook, Grima acknowledges the tension that arises during change. He describes two extremes in most teams: those asking “Why aren’t we moving faster?” and those who “Can’t believe we’re changing something else after just getting their head around the thing we did 6 months ago”.

Navigating this requires more than just a new manual; it requires a larger connected vision for what the business is moving towards to help staff understand the personal benefits of improved practice efficiency.

Avoiding the shiny object trap

Grima is a self‑professed lover of shiny things and new apps. However, he is well aware of the temptation to jump into the latest tech demo. Yet, he warns that technology is not a panacea for poor management. High-performing practice efficiency cannot be built on top of chaos.

“The challenge there is if you’re just dropping a cool piece of tech on top of something that’s broken, a broken process, it just means things are going to fall apart faster,” Grima warned. Before any automation or AI is introduced, there must be a “really good foundation for what you’re doing, why you’re doing it”.

This philosophy was put to the test during a recent review of Rasiah Private Wealth’s onboarding process. By getting deep with the approach people were taking day to day, they found many steps were out of order or unnecessary. Rather than automating a messy process, they simply “got rid of the step,” showing that the best efficiency gain is sometimes omission, not addition.

Cultivating the light bulb culture

To ensure practice efficiency remains a continuous journey rather than a one-off project, Grima implemented a system called light bulbs. The initiative encourages staff to submit small ideas to fix day-to-day frustrations in their own time, without the pressure of meetings.

This system recognises that the people performing the tasks are the best-positioned to fix them. As Grima notes, staff are often “Very tolerant of, I guess those day to day frustrations”. By giving staff a platform to voice issues and help shape solutions, Rasiah Private Wealth ensures practice efficiency is a collaborative effort rather than a top-down mandate.

Prioritising human value in advice operations

Justin Grima’s insights serve as a vital reminder for an industry at a crossroads. While pressure to scale and modernise is immense, practice efficiency should never erase the human touch.

The firms that scale well will not be the ones that automate the most. They will be the ones that protect the right interactions, fix the right problems and resist the temptation to hide broken processes behind impressive technology. Moving faster is not the goal. Moving smarter is.