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For established advice firms

Client acquisition systems for established advice firms.

We build the sales infrastructure that moves a proven practice beyond referral dependence. Built around your compliance environment, your ideal client, and the way your firm already works.

Book your assessment

A 60 minute working session with Allan, the founder. No obligation, and it takes 30 seconds to book.

Allan and GSA's work has been featured in

The firms we build these systems for.

Advice practices, licensee groups and investment managers across Australia.

Sound familiar

Most established firms hit the same ceiling, and it is almost always one of these six things.

You have proven the advice model works and you have the clients to show for it. Growth has still gone flat and it is hard to say exactly why. These are the patterns we find in nearly every practice that comes to us.

You depend on referrals to grow

Your growth comes from accountants, mortgage brokers and existing clients sending people your way. It worked for years. It is now inconsistent. Good months feel random, quiet months feel permanent, and you cannot plan two or three years out because you do not control where the next client comes from.

A room of advisers at an industry session

The people coming through are not your ideal client

A lot of what gets referred is basic super and insurance work, one-off transactional advice, or people simply not in your target market. You take it anyway, because if you say no the referrals stop.

The firm only grows when you personally push it

There is one rainmaker, and it is usually you. New business happens because you go to the coffees, the events and the calls. You are deep in fulfilment and acquisition is the afterthought. When you stop, growth stops.

There is no acquisition process anyone can follow

Nothing is written down. No documented process, no nurture sequence, no content plan, no way to tell what is working. If you have other advisers, you cannot see what they are actually doing to bring clients in.

You are sitting on a database that has gone quiet

Past prospects, lapsed clients, event lists, maybe a super or insurance book you bought. Hundreds or thousands of people who are not dead. They just stopped hearing from you at the right time with the right message. That is a growth asset sitting untouched.

You cannot scale what already works

You have spent five or ten years building this and you know the model works. But doubling it from here looks like another five or ten years of the same effort, because there is no infrastructure underneath it.

Why it matters

Referrals give you a good month, then three quiet ones. A system gives you meetings every month.

Below is the same practice over the same twelve months. The point is not that the second one is bigger. It is that you can hire, plan and forecast against it, because you know roughly what next month looks like before it arrives.

Illustrative shape, not a specific client's numbers.

What we build

Your complete growth engine, and how each piece feeds the next one.

This is not a strategy document you then have to go and execute. It is eleven jobs we take off your desk and run for you, in this order. Each one produces the thing the next one needs, which is what makes it a system rather than a pile of marketing.

We research your target market

We work out exactly who your best clients are, what is going on in their life when they start looking for an adviser, the words they use for it, and where they spend their time. Real research on real people, not a persona invented in a workshop.

Feeds the next step: A clear picture of who we are talking to

We build the brand around them

Your colours, your voice, your positioning, all set up so that everything we make afterwards looks like it came from one firm. If you already have a brand we work inside it. If it is dated, we fix it.

Feeds the next step: One consistent look and voice

We write the content, from several different angles

Different people respond to different things. One person is worried about running out of money, another has just sold a business, another is turning sixty. So we write a set of angles rather than one message, and we find out which ones your market actually reacts to.

Feeds the next step: A bank of angles to test

We build all of your assets

Landing pages, guides, lead magnets, videos, emails, SMS and booking flows. Everything a prospect will ever see or read, built once, on your brand, and put through your licensee before anything runs.

Feeds the next step: Somewhere for the traffic to land

We run your ads

We design them, write them, get them compliance approved, launch them and manage the spend every day. When an angle stops working we replace it. You never touch an ad account.

Feeds the next step: People arriving every day

We drive that traffic to the assets we built

The ads do not send people to your home page to wander off. Every ad points at a specific page built for that specific angle, so the promise in the ad is the first thing they read when they land.

Feeds the next step: Attention pointed at one thing

We get them to convert

The page asks for the enquiry and the form qualifies as it goes. Anyone not ready yet drops into a nurture sequence over email and SMS that keeps talking to them for months until they are.

Feeds the next step: Enquiries, and nobody wasted

We book the meetings into your calendar

Not a list of names for your team to chase. Actual appointments, in your calendar, on the times you told us you are available, with the reminders and confirmations already running behind them.

Feeds the next step: A calendar that fills itself

We set expectations before the call

Before they sit down with you they get a confirmation, preparation material and a plain summary of what the meeting covers and what it does not. They arrive knowing what they are there for.

Feeds the next step: People who turn up ready

We build the sales process with you

The meetings only matter if they convert. We work with you on the structure of that first conversation, what to ask, what to send afterwards and how to follow up, so appointments turn into clients.

Feeds the next step: Meetings that become clients

We run the whole thing as a managed system

Every step above is tracked in one dashboard. Cost per lead, cost per booked meeting, show rate, conversion, pipeline value and return. We review it with you every month and tune the weakest link rather than guessing.

What changes

Six things that are different in your practice once the system is running.

Most firms operate without any of this, so it is worth being specific about what actually changes. Each one has a picture of the shift next to it. Read the headings on their own and you have the whole argument.

JaggedSteady

Consistency

You stop wondering where the next client is coming from

The system runs whether you are in the office, on holiday or in back to back meetings. Every month it puts a predictable number of qualified conversations in front of you, so you can plan the year instead of hoping.

First touchBooked

Visibility

You can see exactly where every client came from

Which ad, which guide, which email, which day they first raised their hand and everything they read before they booked. It is all in one dashboard, per person, not a monthly summary.

4 channels1 pipeline

Reliability

One quiet referrer no longer means a quiet quarter

Growth used to hang on a handful of relationships and a bit of luck. Now several channels feed one pipeline, so when one goes quiet the others carry it and you barely notice.

One sourceFive sources

Diversification

Referrals become one channel instead of the only channel

Your referral partners stay valuable and nothing about that relationship changes. They just stop being the whole business. Outreach, content, nurture, database reactivation and paid all work alongside them.

Your numbersMonthly

Measurability

Every dollar you spend is traceable to a result

Monthly reporting shows cost per lead, cost per booked meeting, show rate, cost per client and pipeline value. You decide whether to spend more or less on evidence rather than on a feeling.

A campaignA system

Compounding

It gets cheaper and better the longer it runs

Your database grows every month, the winning angles get clearer and your cost per client falls. A campaign stops producing the day you stop paying for it. This does the opposite.

The business case

The meetings are the obvious part. What it does to the value of the business is the bigger one.

A practice that grows because the principal knows people is worth less than a practice that grows because a documented system runs every month. Same revenue, different business. These are the four things owners tell us mattered most once it was in.

Recurring revenue multipleIndicative

Your enterprise value goes up

Buyers and licensees price risk. A book that grows off one person's relationships is key-person risk, and it gets discounted. A documented, transferable acquisition system that keeps producing after you step back is the opposite. It is the difference between selling a job and selling a business.

Same adviserTwo offers

It becomes a recruitment asset

Good advisers do not want to join a firm and be told to go and find their own clients. The firm that can say "here is your calendar, it fills itself" wins the hire. You go from competing on salary to competing on something nobody else in your market can offer.

Capacity firstDemand met

You can hire ahead of demand

When the flow is predictable you can put an adviser or a paraplanner on before the work arrives, because you know it is arriving. Firms without a system have to hire after they are already drowning, which is the most expensive time to do it.

BeforeAfter

The whole process gets streamlined

One documented path from first click to signed client, that every adviser in the firm follows. No more three advisers doing acquisition three different ways with nothing written down. It is trainable, it is measurable, and it survives someone leaving.

Why a system changes the number on the front of a valuation

Advice practices are typically valued on a multiple of recurring revenue, and that multiple moves with how much of the growth depends on one person. Two firms on the same revenue can be worth very different amounts.

Real results

Two financial planning firms that were stuck on referrals, and exactly what changed.

Both were established practices with a proven advice model and no reliable way to fill the calendar. Both interviews were filmed in their own offices, neither is scripted, and both run about half an hour.

WealthPartners Financial SolutionsSydney NSW, aged care advice

A 25 year old practice sitting on 3,200 contacts who had gone quiet.

A certified financial planning firm with a strong aged care capability and no reliable way to reach the families who needed it. Previous agencies had overpromised, so the bar for trust was high before we started.

ICP research on aged care families3,200 contact reactivationLicensee compliance review before launchAppointment setting into their CRM

“Get ready for the ride. You need to properly resource your team. The system works, we just had to make sure we could handle what it produced.”
Andrew, Principal, WealthPartners

Watch the full interview

295

Appointments in six months

4.2x

Pipeline growth

Six months, before and after

Contacts being spoken to before0

Dormant contacts reactivated3,200

Appointments in the six months beforeReferrals only

Appointments in the six months after295

Pipeline value grew 4.2 times over the same period.

Financial Planning Services QueenslandNorthlakes QLD, retirement planning

Forty years of experience, and every lead still came from a mortgage broker.

An established Queensland firm covering superannuation, retirement planning, protection and investment management. They wanted pre-retirees with a million or more in super, and doubted digital could reach that person at all.

ICP research on pre-retirees aged 52 to 65Compliance reviewed Meta creativeEight touch nurture sequenceWeekly reporting with full attribution

“I did not expect anything like the response we have had. If you do not have a referral partner giving you four or five leads a week, you should talk to GSA.”
John, Principal, FPS Queensland

Watch the full interview

200+

Meetings in five months

$1M+

Average super balance

Where the meetings came from

Before: mortgage broker referrals100%

Before: their own channels0

After: meetings from the system200+ in 5 months

Time from launch to full pipeline5 months

Target client was a pre-retiree aged 52 to 65 with $1M or more in super.

In their own words

Three principals, filmed in their own offices, talking through the whole thing unedited.

Each interview runs 20 to 30 minutes and covers the full experience, from what was not working before through to what the numbers look like now. Nothing is scripted and nothing is cut.

Retirement advice

FPS Queensland on reaching pre-retirees with $1M+ in super without a referral partner.

Aged care

WealthPartners on waking up a 3,200 contact database that had gone quiet.

SMSF

A B2B campaign reaching a new segment of wholesale and SMSF investors.

Who builds this

Allan spent over a decade supporting financial advisers. Then he built the acquisition system for them.

Allan is not a marketer who picked up financial services along the way. He came up through it, supporting advisers inside the biggest advice distribution networks in the country before he built anything for himself.

That is why the questions in the first meeting sound like someone from the industry asking them, why we understand your licensee's compliance boundaries before we write a single word, and why nothing goes out the door that we would not be comfortable putting in front of ASIC. Financial advice is all we do. Every assessment is run by Allan personally, not by a salesperson.

Growth Studio Agency

Founded 2024 to build the compliant acquisition system he could not find anywhere inside the industry. Now serving established Australian advice firms.

Channel Capital

BDM across small and mid cap, private credit, bonds, emerging market equities and renewables, promoting strategies from Jamieson Coote Bonds, L1 Capital and Bell Asset Management.

TAL Australia

Senior BDM, intermediary distribution across AON Hewitt, Infocus, Garvan, Commonwealth Financial Planning and Westpac Financial Planning. #1 performer and Money Management BDM of the Year finalist.

MLC Life Insurance

HUB Lead and Senior BDM running a five person team across NSW and ACT, working with AMP Financial Planning, Securitor, Yellow Brick Road, Affinia and Clearview. 115% of state target, National GM Award winner.

ANZ — OnePath

Retail distribution BDM across Millennium 3, Apogee, Garvan, JBWere, Spectrum Wealth and self-licensed dealer groups. 105% of panel target. Created the Reviver Campaign strategy.

NAB Wealth (MLC)

Adviser services and distribution across Godfrey Pembroke, Garvan, NAB Private Wealth, JBWere, MLC Financial Planning, Apogee and Meritum. 110% of state target.

RG146 accreditedAGSM educatedFinancial services onlyASIC compliant by designEducation based

Allan Whatmore, Founder of Growth Studio Agency — Allan Whatmore
Founder, Growth Studio Agency

What people say

People inside financial services who have run campaigns with us, reviewing GSA publicly on Google.

These are public Google reviews, left by people who have run campaigns with us rather than by clients we selected for the page.

5.0 Google Reviews

“Allan and his team are proactive and always helpful, consistently finding ways to maximise results and return on investment. 10/10!”

Devon SL Nicholl

Group Marketing Manager, The Hopkins Group

“Allan's creativity and understanding of successful digital customer communications are outstanding. A rare combination of technical skill and strategic thinking.”

Peter Bennetto

Co-Founder, iExtend Holdings

“Allan understands the financial services industry well, particularly the cutting edge between marketing and information technology.”

Michael Block CIMA

Financial Services Executive

Is this for you

Before you book, here is exactly who this works for and who it does not.

We turn away firms that are not the right fit, because taking them on wastes their money and our time. Read both columns honestly. If you are on the right, do not book the call, and we will tell you the same thing if you do.

Book the assessment if this is you

You run an established, profitable advice firm and you are ready to optimise and scale it rather than start it
You have proven you can convert. You just need more of the right people in front of you
You have the capacity to take on more clients, or you are ready to build it
You want every new client to look like your best client, not whoever got referred that month
You are looking for systems and infrastructure, not generic marketing or bought leads
You are willing to invest in the business and in yourself to make it work
You want an industry specialist growth partner who will implement it for you, not just advise you on it
You see this as a way to optimise the business, not just another expense line
You are in it for the long term. This compounds, it does not spike

Do not book it if this is you

You are a new adviser without a proven track record of converting clients
You have no capacity to see more clients and no plan to create any
You want leads only, and not a system that nurtures and qualifies them first
You are looking for a quick fix rather than something you build once and keep
You are not open to changing how acquisition works in your firm today
You are not willing to invest in yourself or in the business to make it work
You operate outside financial advice

Common questions

The seven things principals ask us before they book anything.

Straight answers, including the awkward ones about money, time and what happens if your licensee says no.

That is the most common thing we hear, and it is usually for one of three reasons. The agency did not understand the compliance environment, did not do the research to work out your specific client profile, or ran a generic campaign that attracted the wrong people. GSA is built specifically for financial planning firms and we have worked inside the compliance frameworks of some of Australia's most rigorous licensees. The assessment is designed to show you exactly how the approach is different before you commit to anything.

On average this saves firms 10 to 15 hours a week compared to doing acquisition themselves. Everything is done for you: content, targeting, nurture sequences, appointment booking and reporting. Your role is to show up to the qualified meetings and give feedback on what you are seeing. We handle the rest.

Bought leads are someone else's asset. You have no control over the quality, no control over the compliance of the process that generated them, and no relationship with the prospect. We build your firm's own audience. You own the data, the contact list and the relationship from day one. That is the structural difference, and it is why the system gets cheaper to run the longer it runs.

It depends on the scope. Every firm is different and the inputs needed to get the outcome vary based on your business case, your niche and where you are starting from. That is exactly what the assessment is for. We get an understanding of where you are as a business and what the right approach looks like before any numbers are discussed.

We work directly to your licensee's compliance requirements. Every piece of content, including ads, emails, SMS scripts and landing pages, is reviewed against your specific licensee's framework before it goes live. We have been through this process with some of Australia's most rigorous dealer groups. Nothing goes out that we would not be comfortable presenting to ASIC directly.

You do. Everything we build, we build for you. The contact lists, the content, the nurture sequences, the landing pages and the data are all yours. We build it inside your systems and you keep full ownership. You are never locked in or dependent on us to reach your own assets.

Most clients see their first qualified appointments within two to three weeks of launch. Full pipeline momentum typically builds over 60 to 90 days as the nurture sequences mature and we optimise on real data rather than assumptions.

Free resources

Two guides you can read right now, with nothing to fill in first.

Both are written for practice principals, both are free, and neither is gated behind a form. If you only want the thinking and not the service, take these and go.

Playbook

Read it in your browser

Ideas inCompliant out

The Compliant Growth Playbook

How to grow an advice firm inside RG 234 without stepping over the line. What you can say, what you cannot, and how to build client acquisition your licensee will actually sign off.

Read the playbook Guide

The first page of the Gold Standard Growth Guide

Read it in your browser

Six blocksOne system

The Gold Standard Growth Guide

The full picture of what a modern acquisition system looks like inside a financial advice firm. The six pieces, the order to build them in, and the numbers to hold each piece to.

Read the guide

Your complimentary assessment

Sixty minutes with the founder, and four things you walk away with.

Not a sales pitch and not a pre-recorded presentation. A real working session where we take the problems above and look at them against your actual practice.

Your source audit

A clear map of where your clients actually come from. Most firms are surprised by what the data shows once it is written down.

Your structural exposure

An honest look at what happens to the business if referrals slow down. No sugarcoating and no scare tactics.

Your system architecture

What a compliant, education based acquisition system looks like specifically for your firm, your niche and your licensee.

Clarity to act

You leave knowing exactly what to do next, whether that involves working with us or not. That part is genuinely up to you.

Reserve your spot

Book your complimentary growth strategy assessment.

Pick a time that suits you. This is a genuine, no obligation conversation with Allan personally. No junior consultants and no pre-recorded presentation.

60 minutes, completely complimentary
Directly with Allan, the founder
We map where your growth is actually stuck
No obligation and no pitch

If it is not the right fit we will tell you on the call. You will still walk away with something useful.

Live availabilityAustralian Eastern Time