The moment the business got bigger than us

The product was working and that became a problem

I have spent most of my career inside the advice process.

I started as a paraplanner and financial adviser. I worked in practice development. I spent time with KPMG in advice auditing. Later, I built and ran paraplanning businesses that supported hundreds of advisers across Australia and helped produce thousands of Statements of Advice.

That background matters because Paradino did not start as a software idea looking for a market. It started with a problem I had seen for years.

Every client meeting creates a long tail of work. File notes, fact finds, strategy papers, advice requests, RoAs, SoAs, reviews, compliance checks, product comparisons and late changes. Then there are the small details: the thing a client said in passing, the goal that was not the main topic of the meeting but still matters, the preference an adviser remembers but now needs to make its way properly into the file and the advice document.

That work is not optional. It protects clients, advisers and licensees. But it also limits how much advice a practice can deliver well. In many firms, too much of the process still depends on a few very capable people carrying a lot in their heads. The adviser remembers the client history. The paraplanner knows the document preferences. The practice manager knows where the work is stuck. The business keeps moving because good people keep making it work.

I knew that pressure because I had lived inside it. So when Josh Ratnarajah and I started Paradino, we were not trying to bring generic AI into financial advice. We were trying to build something from inside the advice workflow.

Paradino is an end-to-end AI advice automation platform built for Australian financial advisers. It helps advice teams move from meeting context, client information and source documents into review-ready advice work, including file notes, RoAs, SoAs, strategy papers and advice requests.

The adviser still reviews, decides and approves.

Advice is not just a document. It is judgement, context and responsibility. The role of technology should be to help carry more of the work around that judgement, not pretend the judgement no longer matters.

For the first year, Josh and I were deep in the product. We were close to the adviser feedback, the customer conversations and the uncomfortable parts of the workflow that still needed improving. At that stage, the company still felt small enough for the two of us to hold most of it in our heads.

Then the product started working, and that became a problem.

We crossed a few hundred paying practices. Retention was real. Revenue was compounding. Paradino was no longer something we were trying to prove. It had become a business that advice firms were relying on.

The question changed from whether we could build the next product release to whether we could build the company around it. That meant hiring more deliberately across customer success, business development, engineering and marketing. We did not need people simply to fill seats. We needed people who could take responsibility for whole parts of the company, stay close to the customer, care about the details and help shape the next stage of the business.

People like Jeremy, Jordan and Edgar were no longer just helping with execution. They were shaping the direction of the business. That changes how you think about ownership.

The business needed people who’d stick around
and grow with it, not just fill seats.

Employee ownership became important because responsibility had moved beyond the founders.

Josh and I had always believed that people doing important work should have a real stake in the outcome. As Paradino grew, that belief became more practical. If someone is helping shape the future of the company, the incentives should reflect that.

We went to Succession Plus because we did not want an employee share plan treated as a bit of paperwork attached to the side of the business. An ESOP affects how people understand their role, their future and their connection to the company.

An ESOP done badly creates more confusion
and resentment than goodwill.

Succession Plus understood the structure, but just as importantly, they understood the process around it: how to engage staff, how to answer the questions that naturally come up and how to make the offer clear. We were still early enough that the company was not weighed down by complexity, but far enough along that Paradino had real customers, real retention and a serious growth path. Waiting felt like the more expensive option.

The same pattern shows up in advice businesses, and I say that as someone who has worked inside them for most of my career.

I see a version of the same pattern in advice businesses. In the early years, the founder’s way of doing things often becomes the operating model. The principal adviser knows the clients. The senior paraplanner knows the preferences. The practice manager knows where every piece of work is up to. It works because the people are good, but good people can hide a fragile system for a long time.

As the firm grows, more work runs through the same few people. More meetings need to be captured, more documents need to be prepared, more staff need context and more clients need service. The business gets bigger, but the way work moves through it does not always keep up.

That is not just an operational issue. It eventually becomes a value issue. If too much of the firm depends on the founder, or on a handful of people who “just know how things are done”, the business becomes harder to scale, harder to transition and harder for someone else to believe in.

A buyer, successor or future partner will want confidence that the business can keep performing without everything running through the same people.

A business that only works when you do is not as valuable as it looks.

Succession does not start when someone is ready to sell. It starts much earlier, when an owner asks whether the business could keep working if they were not in the middle of every important conversation, decision and handover.

For Paradino, one answer was employee ownership. We needed to attract and retain high-performing people who could help build the company for the long term. For an advice firm, the answer might involve ownership, incentives, team design, technology or a mix of all of them.

The aim is to make the business less dependent on memory, heroics and a few overloaded people.

That is also what we are trying to help advice firms do with Paradino. Not by replacing advisers, and not by pretending AI can remove the judgement from advice, but by helping practices carry the work around advice more effectively so advisers and their teams have more capacity to serve clients properly.

The future value of an advice business will not only come from the number of clients it serves. It will come from how well the business works as it grows.

And one day, if the owner wants to step back, bring others in or sell, that difference will matter.

Alex Gassner
Co-Founder & CEO
Paradino