Building an Inclusive Business Isn't a Marketing Strategy

I am a white, middle-aged man in financial advice. So is most of the room at every industry conference and event I've walked into this year. Same suits, same haircuts, same well-meaning nods when someone mentions diversity from the stage. (To be fair, I never wear a suit) 

I'm not saying that to be self-deprecating. It's just the maths of our profession right now. And it's exactly why I think inclusion is one of the most underused business advantages available to advisers today.

The comfort of sameness

Our industry has a comfort problem. Not comfort for clients. Comfort for us. It's easy to build a team that looks like you, thinks like you, and shares your assumptions about what a "normal" client wants. It's efficient. It's low friction. But it limits how far your business can grow, because you can only serve as many kinds of people, as you have people who understand them.

I think a lot of practices mistake this comfort for competence. They assume that because they can competently advise on super, insurance, and cash flow for the client sitting in front of them, that client's experience of the process is fine. Often it isn't. It's just tolerable. There's a difference, and clients feel it even when they don't say it out loud.

Why representation changes the room

When a client walks into an advice practice and sees a team that actually reflects the world they live in, something shifts before a single word about money gets spoken. They relax a bit. They stop pre-editing their questions. They stop worrying that the "silly" question about their situation is going to get a blank look or an awkward pause.

That shift matters more than most advisers give it credit for. Financial advice is not just a technical exercise. It's built on someone trusting you enough to tell you the truth about their income, their debt, their relationship, their fears about money. People are far more likely to tell you the truth when they don't feel like they have to translate their life into a version you'll understand.

We built our LGBTQIA+ offering at Smart Happy Money because it mattered to us personally, not because a consultant told us it would be a smart commercial move. But it has turned out to be exactly that. Clients who had spent years getting vague, hedging, or quietly uncomfortable advice elsewhere finally found someone who didn't need the basics explained to them before the real conversation could start. That's not charity. That's just better service, delivered to people who were previously being served badly.

The blind spots you can't see from inside them

Here's the part that's harder to admit. A practice full of people who look and think alike will always carry a blind spot the size of everyone they don't look and think like. You won't necessarily know it's there, because blind spots are, by definition, invisible from the inside.

Think about how many advice conversations quietly assume a nuclear family structure, a linear career, home ownership as the default goal, retirement as a fixed date rather than a fluid transition. None of those assumptions are wrong for a lot of clients. But when they're the only lens your team has, you're not giving advice, you're giving a template. And templates fail exactly the clients who most need someone to actually see them.

Diverse teams challenge those templates from the inside, in the room, before the advice ever reaches the client. Someone on the team asks the question you wouldn't have thought to ask. Someone flags the assumption baked into a standard strategy paper. That's not a soft benefit. That's risk management for the quality of your advice.

Where this goes wrong

None of this works if it's a slogan on a website or a rainbow logo that appears every June and disappears every July. Clients, and frankly other advisers, can tell the difference between a business that's genuinely built this way and one that's added the aesthetics without the substance.

I've seen practices proudly announce a diversity statement while their leadership team, their client base, and their referral network stay exactly the same as they were five years earlier. That's not inclusion. That's marketing wearing inclusion's clothes, and it tends to backfire, because the clients you're trying to attract are usually the ones best equipped to spot it.

Real inclusion shows up in decisions that have nothing to do with a campaign. Who gets hired. Who gets promoted into a client-facing role versus kept in admin. Who gets sent to the conference and who gets left running the office. Who's actually trained, properly and specifically, to have culturally competent or identity-aware conversations, rather than being told to "just be respectful" and hoping for the best.

It also shows up in smaller, less glamorous things. Whether your forms ask for a relationship status that assumes a straight couple. Whether your intake process has a place for a client's chosen name. Whether your default strategy examples ever feature anyone who isn't a heterosexual couple with two kids and a mortgage. These aren't dramatic gestures. They're the accumulated evidence a client uses to decide whether your business actually means what it says.

The business case.

I want to be direct about something, because I think our industry tends to dance around it. Inclusion isn't just the right thing to do, even though it is that too. It's a genuine competitive advantage, and most of the industry is leaving it on the table.

Australia is more diverse than the advice profession serving it. Every year that gap stays the same, it represents a growing pool of clients who are underserved, mismatched, or quietly avoiding advice altogether because nothing about the industry looks like it was built with them in mind. That's not a moral failing you need to fix out of guilt. It's a market opportunity sitting in plain sight.

Standing out in a sea of advisers who all look the same, think the same, and pitch the same generic value proposition is genuinely difficult. Standing out because your business has actually done the work to be different, in substance rather than slogan, is one of the few differentiators left that can't be easily copied by a competitor tweaking their branding.

What this looks like in practice

Building an inclusive practice isn't a single initiative you complete and move on from. It's an ongoing set of decisions that compound over time.

It starts with who you hire, and being honest about whether your recruitment process is actually open to different backgrounds or just optimised to find people who feel familiar. It continues with who you promote, because a diverse junior team that never sees diversity reflected in leadership sends its own message. It shows up in your professional development, in whether your advisers get real training on serving clients whose lives don't fit the standard template, not just a slide deck once a year.

And it shows up in your client base itself. If your practice has been operating for a decade and your clients still look almost identical to each other, that's worth sitting with honestly. It might mean your marketing is only reaching one demographic. It might mean word of mouth has quietly filtered who feels comfortable being referred to you. Either way, it's a signal, not an accident.

An honest acknowledgment

I want to be upfront about where I sit in all this. As a white, middle-aged man ( Is 45 middle aged?), I'm not the one who benefits personally from an industry becoming more inclusive, at least not in any immediate sense. I don't experience the friction that clients from different backgrounds experience when they walk into a room like mine.

But I do benefit from running a better business. I benefit from a team that catches what I'd miss. I benefit from clients who trust us because we've earned it, not because we're the only option that felt safe. And I think that's a more honest way to frame this conversation than pretending it's purely altruistic. It isn't. It's good business practice, and I'm comfortable with both of those things being true at once.

One more thing that we, the 'traditional' adviser need to consider. Encouraging a more diverse industry, more woman, more people of colour more queer advisers, might feel a little uncomfortable. We, who have benefited from privilege for so long suddenly have to share our toys. We are no longer special, but thats ok, that's how it should be. 

Where to next

I don't think our industry needs another diversity statement. I think it needs advisers willing to look honestly at who's actually in their business, who's actually being served, and where the gap between those two things is quietly costing them clients, quality, and relevance.

This isn't about performative gestures. It's about building a business that reflects the country it operates in, because that business will be more resilient, more trusted, and frankly more interesting to work in than one that stayed comfortable.

If you're interested, here is a link to Smart Happy Money's statement of culture and inclusion. 

https://www.smarthappymoney.com/inclusion

Tell me, what's actually working in your practice when it comes to building a team and client base that reflects the diversity of the people you serve? I'd genuinely like to know what other advisers are doing here, because I don't think any of us have this fully figured out yet.

Ben G-N

Ben Graham-Nellor is a financial adviser and founder of Smart Happy Money, based in Melbourne. He writes about building a more human, more inclusive financial advice industry.