Stephen Sloane

Ask a room of advice principals whether their offshore support is properly structured and most of them will say yes. But our experience suggests the answer is not always as clear.

Some of the arrangements we see raise questions about whether they would survive scrutiny. That gap, between what principals believe they’ve built and what they’ve actually built, is where the risk sits.

It matters more now, with higher penalties under the Fair Work Act from 1 July 2026 and renewed regulatory attention on sham contracting. The cost of getting the structure wrong is climbing, and the scrutiny is sharpening.

Offshore support is no longer unusual in Australian advice. As capacity pressure builds, more firms are moving administration, paraplanning and client servicing offshore. That’s a sensible answer to a real problem. The problem isn’t the decision to offshore. It’s treating the arrangement as an informal resourcing fix rather than part of the firm’s operating model.

Here’s what trips them up

Whether someone is a contractor or an employee isn’t decided by the label on the agreement alone. It’s decided by the practical reality of how the relationship works. If your offshore paraplanner keeps set hours, works inside your systems, takes day-to-day direction from your team and performs an ongoing role, a contract calling them a contractor may not settle the question. Depending on how and where the arrangement was established, employment, tax and local legal obligations may need to be considered.

That’s not a technicality. Where a worker has been misclassified, the consequences can include penalties, potential backpay, superannuation or PAYG withholding liabilities, depending on the circumstances and the jurisdictions involved. The financial exposure can grow quickly. For a profession already under close regulatory watch, the reputational hit can land alongside it.

So how do capable firms end up here? Usually because offshore was treated as a cost decision, not a structural one. The aim was a cheaper hour, not a better operating model. Someone found good people overseas, agreed a rate and built the relationship from there. The saving showed up straight away. The risk stayed out of sight until something forced it into view. In offshore support, the cheapest arrangement is often the most expensive.

None of this is an argument against offshoring. Across the firms we work with, structured offshore teams are one of the clearest routes to real capacity. The distinction that matters is between offshore support that’s deliberately structured and support that’s improvised.

Structured support starts with the arrangement itself: people engaged through an appropriate structure, with the relevant obligations in each jurisdiction understood and met. Then comes supervision. Someone owns the work, sets the standard and answers for the quality. It runs on defined roles, documented processes and secure systems, so client data is protected and the firm can explain exactly how the work gets done. That’s a team built on purpose, not a handful of individual contracts held together by good intentions.

That version of offshore is leverage. It takes work off the adviser that they never should have carried. It holds up under scrutiny and makes the business steadier rather than more fragile. The improvised version may clear the same work, but it can quietly introduce a risk the principal can’t see and hasn’t priced.

There’s a second cost that rarely gets counted

When an offshore arrangement is improvised, the knowledge often sits with one or two people and nowhere else. No documented process, no backup and no shared standard. If they leave, the firm can lose capacity overnight and inherit a compliance clean-up at the same time. That’s not a team. It’s a dependency.

This is where firms get caught. A model that saves twenty hours a week but can’t withstand legal or regulatory scrutiny, a client complaint or a buyer’s due diligence hasn’t solved the firm’s problem. It’s swapped a capacity problem for a structural one.

The firms getting this right aren’t necessarily the ones spending the least. They treat offshore as part of their operating model, with the same rigour they’d apply anywhere else in a regulated business. They know who does what, who supervises it and how the arrangement would be explained to a regulator, a buyer or a client. It was designed deliberately and reviewed regularly, not assembled by accident and left to drift.

If you’re reviewing your own set-up, the test is simple enough. Can you show your offshore staff are engaged and classified appropriately for the jurisdictions involved, and can you explain who supervises their work and how quality, continuity and data security are maintained? If the answer isn’t clear, the model may be more exposed than it appears, however well it’s running today.

Offshore support will keep growing because the capacity pressure behind it isn’t going away. The firms that benefit will be the ones that build it properly. The firms that get caught will be the ones that mistake a cheaper hour for a better structure.

Leverage isn’t the reward for cutting costs. It’s what you get from building the right structure.

The post Offshore isn’t the risk – doing it without structure is appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Stephen Sloane

There is a number that often comes up in conversations about advice firm revenue, and it sits around the $500,000 to $600,000 mark per adviser. It is not a hard rule, nor a reflection of the advisers’ skill or a limit on what a good advice business can achieve. But for many principal-led advice firms, it is a very real pressure point.

This level of revenue often represents years of demanding work and a loyal client base. It can also be the point where growth slows, not because the opportunity is not there, but because the structure around the adviser can no longer support it.

Adviser Ratings’ 2025 Australian Financial Advice Landscape reporting found solo adviser practices generate around $607,000 in revenue, while firms with five or more advisers generate around $5.1 million. The difference is not simply that larger firms have more advisers. It is that scaled firms usually operate with clearer role ownership, stronger support and better systems around advice delivery.

Many advice firms do not hit a growth ceiling because of the quality of their advice. They hit it because the adviser becomes the bottleneck.

In many advice businesses, the principal or lead adviser is still involved in too many parts of the process. Client meetings, strategy, compliance checks, file notes, document collection, CRM updates, follow-ups, implementation, provider liaison, team questions and business decisions all compete for the same person’s attention. It feels like a full business because it is a full diary. But full and scalable are not the same thing.

If an adviser is spending 15 to 20 hours a week on administration, coordination and internal follow-up, that can represent close to 1,000 hours a year. That is time not spent deepening client relationships, generating referrals, improving service quality or thinking strategically about the future.

Investment Trends’ 2025 Financial Advice Report, published by AdviserVoice, found 15.9 million Australian adults have unmet financial advice needs. In other words, the opportunity is there. The question is whether advice firms have the capacity to meet it.

This is where Levera’s work with advice firms becomes practical. The issue is rarely that advisers need to care more, work harder or buy another piece of software. In most cases, they need a better support structure around them. That means clear ownership, documented workflows and the right mix of people supporting the adviser before the pressure becomes unmanageable.

The firms that break through this pressure point usually share one common characteristic. They stop treating administration as an unavoidable cost of doing advice and start treating it as a design problem to be solved. They do not simply ask, “How do we get through more work?” They ask, “Who should own each part of the process, and what should the adviser no longer be touching?”

The firms generating stronger revenue per adviser are not necessarily working harder. In many cases, the adviser is doing fewer total tasks, not more. Other people, clearer systems or better workflows own the execution of the work the adviser does not need to handle personally.

The gap between a plateaued practice and a scalable one is rarely about ambition or effort. It is usually about design.

When revenue plateaus, the instinct is often to hire another adviser or bring in new technology. Both can help, but neither fixes the underlying problem if the operating model stays the same.

Technology is a good example. AI and automation may help with capacity, but they are not the starting point. You can layer automation over a broken workflow and all you achieve is faster inefficiency. The firms getting real value from technology are usually the ones that have standardised their processes, clarified role ownership, documented key workflows and built reliable support around the adviser. Structure first. Technology second.

So, what does a scalable operating model look like? In simple terms, it means the adviser is present only where the adviser must be present. That includes advice strategy, client relationships, complex decisions and the moments where the client needs to feel personally supported.

Meeting preparation, document collection, CRM updates, follow-ups, implementation coordination, provider liaison and recurring workflow tasks should not sit with the adviser by default. They should be owned by someone with clear accountability, a defined process and the systems to support them.

At Levera, this is the practical work we help advice firms build. Not just more hands on deck, but the right support structure so advisers can spend more time advising, leading and growing the business. That support may be onshore, offshore or hybrid. The location matters less than the structure. What matters is that the right work is handled by the right people, with the right accountability.

When that model is in place, the adviser can redirect capacity toward higher-value client work, stronger client communication, better referral relationships or a more deliberate move upmarket.

For principals sitting at or near this pressure point, the question worth asking is not, “How do I work harder?” It is, “What in this business genuinely needs me, and what am I still doing that someone else should own?”

The pressure point is real, but it is not fixed. It is a consequence of structure, and structure can be changed.

By Stephen Sloane, Managing Director, Levera Solutions

The post The $500k pressure point and why many advice firms get stuck there appeared first on AdviserVoice.