Speaking at the 2026 Evolution of Advice Summit in Sydney, WT Financial Group managing director Keith Cullen discussed the myriad factors driving mergers and acquisitions activity in advice: new education standards, the banks exiting wealth management during and after the Royal Commission and superannuation reaching $4.5 trillion.
“All of this has created a supply and demand imbalance. We’ve got a wall of people and a wall of capital coming to retirement, and that imbalance has attracted the attention of global capital,” Cullen said.
He added that valuations in professional services businesses – particularly in financial advice – are well below their peers in the US and UK, and “private equity here and overseas has woken up to that fact”.
Despite this, Cullen said many advisers struggle to understand the actual value of their business.
“The difficulty for advisers is that they’re technicians. But when you’re running a practice and building a business, it’s not enough just to be a technician. You need a manager’s mindset and an entrepreneur’s mindset as well,” he said.
He continued: “The reality of it is that in a well-structured practice with those three different mindsets at play and the right allocation of resources, you should be able to service 120 clients by the time Tuesday afternoon rolls around. But when you’re worried about the website going down, and the admin guy quitting, and proofreading, it’s very difficult to focus on building a transferable asset.”
For those advisers who do want to build a transferable asset, though, Cullen said there are four distinct pillars to consider.
“The first is pricing confidence. To us, this is still one of the biggest shortfalls in the profession. We’ve seen the average fees charged to clients increase over the last seven or eight years, but that’s less about pricing confidence and more about the lower-value work disappearing – because the lower-fee-paying clients have gone from the system – which is driving up the average.”
The next pillar, he said, is capacity building – or, having a clear process for automating different tasks across the business.
“A lot of advisers, when we sit down with them, will say, ‘I want that tech solution. I want that automation.’ But not a lot of people can process map their entire business. And to the extent that they have, you might have one adviser doing it one way and another doing it a different way. And sometimes they follow the process, but sometimes they don’t. So, it’s really about understanding your capacity model,” Cullen said.
After capacity, Cullen said advisers should focus on lead flow. He encouraged practice owners to develop a client flow strategy and regularly monitor it to ensure the business is “delivering on a consistent client experience.”
The final pillar, he said, is succession: “For too many people, their succession plan has been to get to 63, put the white flag up, take whatever the market will give you at the time. That’s not a succession plan. What are you doing to build actual transferrable value in the business?”
It’s no surprise that Keith Cullen’s advice philosophy reflects a distinctly buyer-centric perspective, but it seems to me that the pillars largely describe the characteristics that make a practice attractive to an acquirer, rather than anything necessarily improving outcomes for clients, staff, or professional standards. Clearly, he sees professional practice as a financial asset first and a professional service organisation second. That’s not inherently wrong, but it creates tension and reduces trust. Professional firms exist to provide trusted advice, whereas valuation frameworks tend to reward standardisation, efficiency, and scalability.