What is growth to a small business that wants to stay small?

Established in 2019, PlanningSolo is a Victoria-based advice firm specialising in high-empathy advice, assisting clients through divorce, separation, bereavement, and retirement.

Speaking as a small business owner, Vaka told ifa that because he isn’t really looking to expand his operations or even necessarily take on more clients, growth and progress in his business looks slightly different to the norm.

Taking a page from Jason Staats, an American accountant turned podcaster, Vaka is focusing on the idea of a “client roster”, explaining that even when the business is at maximum size or has reached the desired growth, “you should always be looking to bring on new clients to upgrade your client roster”.

“It sounds quite crude, but you also always should be looking to bring on better clients and moving up that curve. The argument for that is that as you develop as a practitioner, you're going to be able to solve bigger problems and create more value.

“As you're doing that, you'll find better people, people with more interesting problems, who have greater capacity to pay you for those problems to be solved, and you keep growing that way. So, actually, your count of clients may not grow, but your revenue should, and so should your satisfaction.”

While it can seem that an expectation when owning a business is expansion and growth, Vaka said at this point that isn’t the plan for him.

“There are businesses out there that are nailing it, and hats off to them, but I know, where I am in life and the business that I want to have, we're focusing on probably distilling the client roster to a group of people that we can absolutely help and who can afford to pay for that level of service,” he said.

As a keen advocate for specialisation within the advice industry, Vaka argued this internal improvement strategy is particularly suited to small, specialised firms.

To this point, Vaka suggested that sharpening his business niche and having 100 well-suited clients with the “capacity and propensity” to pay for his services allows him to operate with greater efficiency, with a team of support staff, in a way that is profitable and supports the delivery of high-quality financial advice.

“You need clients who are feeling a pain, and it's such an acute pain that they need you to take it away, and then you need to be able to take it away in an effective manner,” he said.

“I think that's really hard to do if you have 1,000 clients. Maybe you can do it. Maybe if you scale right, I don't think our system really rewards that, but you can do that for 100 clients.”

Notably, the 2025 Global Adviser Study from Dimensional released earlier this year found high-performing Australian advice firms have a high client conversion rate.

Catherine Williams, head of practice management at Dimensional, said this suggests Australian advisers have become “incredibly purposeful of who they work with, they don’t take on clients who aren't a good fit, and they ask their clients for referrals”.

This, she explained, highlights the importance of targeting the right type of clients, with Australian firms proving particularly dedicated to nailing their target demographic.

“Australian firms are incredibly focused on their clients and who can deliver the greatest value. They are refusing to take on clients who don’t suit their firm, and being systematic and disciplined with that,” Williams said at the time.

While this mentality proves true for Vaka and his business, the cost of growth is also a significant consideration for small businesses.

Although bringing on more advisers and expanding the business would open up client capacity and revenue generation opportunities, the additional expenses – such as salary, industry levies, professional indemnity (PI) insurance and general operation costs – along with extra regulatory responsibilities can be a significant deterrent to expansion.

“I know there's really good operators out there that are really scaling up, but I know for us, we're taking a different direction that we'd rather scale down, and when we run the numbers, I don't know. I feel like I always find it quite hard to make the profit line show a nice number when you have multiple advisers,” Vaka said.

All of this not to say that growth is not in the cards for the future, Vaka explained, but right now he is more focused on refining the business and doing the kind of work he wants to do.

“We’re pretty happy at the moment. I think we work quite well. I think, if anything, we would look to build up the capacity we have in the background so that we can personally deliver more advice before we look at bringing people on,” he said.