Pivot Wealth is one of Australia's most-awarded financial advice firms. In 2021 it had nine people, more demand than it could take on, and a founder, Ben Nash, who was wearing every hat in the business including CEO, Adviser, Chief of People, CTO, you name it. The advice was good and the brand was very strong. The problem was everything holding it up.
A firm scaling faster than its systems
Growth was leaking time in a hundred small places. The clunky CRM cost a typical adviser one to two hours a week. Reporting and chasing down answers cost the leadership team at least two more. And the deeper the firm got into a client's file, the harder it was to see what actually mattered: which tasks were outstanding at which stage, who in the team was the bottleneck, where slow work was quietly piling up. Client NPS and the reality of task delivery had drifted apart, and no one could see it clearly.
As the team grew into pods, visibility got worse, not better. Leadership could see the basics (capacity, task counts, what was outstanding) but only reactively, after the fact. Even the numbers to run the business took 90 minutes a week to assemble by hand out of Xplan, Monday.com and ActiveCampaign, plus another 90 minutes of admin prep, and the dashboards still weren't live.
The dashboards were clunky and I was second-guessing the data, and so was the team.
No betting the business on a switch
Pivot partnered with VLV to rebuild their operating system from the inside. It wasn't a small decision. The rebuild had to happen while the firm kept running at full tilt, and handing a fast-growing team a powerful new system without the training to use it carried its own risk.
It seemed like a big investment, and we worried about disruption while still running the business. There's real friction in handing the team the keys to the Ferrari without an operating manual.
One system, rebuilt end to end
So the switch was engineered to be safe. The new HubSpot CRM was built in parallel with the old stack and proven before anyone moved across, so the business was never exposed to a failed cutover, and the team came over with the training to run it. From there the rebuild reached every part of the operation that had to hold at fifty people:
- A financial model and hiring plan to fund and pace the growth
- Recruitment, budget and R&D strategy
- Reworked core processes and workflows, with the tech stack rebuilt to match
- Eight disconnected tools (Xplan, Monday.com, ActiveCampaign and more) consolidated into one HubSpot-centred system, with automations that ran 1.5 million client tasks and saved hundreds of admin hours a month
- A sales function for the joint-venture mortgage broking arm, inbound and outbound, with recruitment systemised so it could hire without Tim in the room
We cut from eight tools to one. The whole business (Sales, Delivery, Marketing, Recruitment) now runs out of a single system, in one shared language.
The first sign it was working
Full adoption took weeks, not months. Within four weeks the system was already surfacing things no one could see before, down to which superannuation platforms were slowest to process the forms Pivot submitted.
We could see exactly where the delays were. We took it to the platform's BDM, they acted on it, and the gaps got fixed.
Bigger firm, same standard
Over five years Pivot grew from 9 to 50 people: 9, then 13, 19, 30, and 50, nearly doubling in the final year as the new system took the load. Revenue grew 5x. The firm made the AFR Fast 100 and became Australia's most-awarded financial advice firm, scaling five-fold and winning the industry's quality awards over the same stretch.
The reporting that once took 90 minutes a week to assemble by hand is now live and self-serve; leadership no longer asks anyone to update it. Every business unit works from the same system, in the same shared language, with its own trained champions in house.
We get to do more of what we do while seeing every piece of the process. We sleep at night knowing the work is getting done properly.