Scaling a practice, one family at a time

How do you build an advice business from scratch with a goal of reaching 1,000 client families? Michael Bova (Family Wealth Advisory) and Rebecca Jacques (Mercer) discuss Family Wealth Advisory’s journey working with families.

It was back in August 2009 that Michael Bova founded Family Wealth Advisory, a business that specialises in the delivery of financial planning and wealth management services, with a focus on working with families. He attributes the “power of what’s possible around people’s relationship with money” as being the defining reason for starting the business.

“I started day one with no clients, so I was motivated from the outset to make this business work,” says Michael.

Looking back at the first 3-5 years of the business, Michael acknowledges this was a particularly challenging period. It involved onboarding new clients, while hiring staff, which did affect the bottom line. However, his attention to detail saw Michael grow his client base to about 125 families in 10 years, which he was comfortable with.

“Overall, the first 10 years of Family Wealth Advisory was challenging, but we were able to steadily build our client base — one family at a time — by focusing on delivering a service of excellence. As we are a strategy-based firm, we were able to solve the complex issues facing our client families.”

By Jayson Forrest

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Speaking on the topic of building a family-focused advice practice at the 2026 IMAP Advice in Action Conference, Michael believes there’s a considerable difference between onboarding client families and looking after existing clients. “It’s so much easier to simply maintain your clients, rather than continue to grow your client base. That’s because onboarding and building relationships with new families requires a different skillset.”

Although Michael was initially comfortable with his 125 families, he says he recognised the value in growing the business, which meant letting go of the day-to-day management of staff and instead, focusing on the wider vision for the business.

“I kept hiring good people, but they would only last for about 18-24 months before leaving. I eventually realised I wasn’t a good manager. I wasn’t good in bringing out the best in people. Instead, I knew my strength was in the vision for the business. So, having come to that understanding, I knew I had two choices: either scale down the business or push through and grow it.”

Michael chose the latter, and 17 years later, it’s a decision he doesn’t regret.  

“I decided to push through, because I wanted to grow the business from 125 families to 1,000 families. That was a pivotal movement for me, where I made the decision to scale from a single advice practice to a practice that could service 1,000 families.”

As part of its growth vision, Family Wealth Advisory recently set up a wholesale-only division within the business, which caters for the 40 per cent of family business clients who own their businesses. According to Michael, these clients typically own commercial property that they run their family businesses from, while also typically sitting on significant cash amounts.

He says these business owning families don’t require highly sophisticated investment solutions, as they already have considerable private equity in their business and commercial properties, which are essentially illiquid. Instead, they require help building a liquid portfolio solution, which aligns with their needs and objectives.

“We also started taking on C-suite (high-ranking senior executives in a company) clients, who tended to have a slightly more sophisticated investment portfolio, but with higher demands in what we needed to do for them,” he says.

At this time, Michael adds the business began to onboard, what he considered to be ‘virtual family offices’ — a technology-enabled wealth management model that relies on outsourced, remote professionals rather than a physical, full-time in-house team.

“All of this meant for anyone with family wealth of over $50 million, we needed to be able to deliver them a solution that was similar to what the big investment banks were able to offer, or we would risk losing these mandates.”

In response, Family Wealth Advisory turned to Mercer to help it deliver an SMA solution for its retail clients, as well as an illiquid private markets solution that it could provide to its wholesale clients. Almost six years on, Michael says it has been a successful partnership.

According to Head of Wealth Management Investment Solutions at Mercer, Rebecca Jacques, Mercer’s role as an investment model manager is to enable advice practices to deliver solutions to clients that they need.

“Investments are our ecosystem,” says Rebecca. “Pivoting from what we classify as liquid SMA solutions into private markets is part of our expertise. We’ve got 160 investment analysts worldwide looking at private markets. However, the challenge we still face in Australia is that technology can’t really handle private markets, so you still need that human element as part of the investment skillset.”

In delivering investment solutions, Mercer works closely with practices to find the right solution for different client scenarios.

“I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘best idea’. That’s because you need a very different solution for a 65-year-old retired with money compared to a 65-year-old retired with no money. And that’s how we work with practices,” says Rebecca. “When Family Wealth Advisory decided to shift more into wholesale, we needed to understand what their requirements and needs were, and address them.” 

As a business owner wanting to scale to 1,000 families, Michael understood that by providing a wholesale private markets offering, he needed a solution that was manageable from a business perspective, rather than each adviser creating bespoke opportunities for their clients. And that’s where MDAs come in.

According to Michael, for business efficiency, Family Wealth Advisory opted to access private markets through an MDA structure, working with Philo Capital Advisers as the MDA provider, while Mercer — as the asset consultant — assisted with portfolio construction.

“The MDA provides us with greater flexibility, particularly with clients who have existing investments. Our MDA solution has a listed component, a private component, and an alternatives component, which allows us to blend a mix of investments with different degrees of liquidity, in order to deliver the right solution for our clients.”

As the asset consultant, Mercer sits at the core of the wholesale solution in terms of Strategic Asset Allocation and Dynamic Asset Allocation, as well as conducting the due diligence on investment opportunities.

“By working with Mercer, we can have conversations with clients about not needing to trade away liquidity if that’s important to them, because we can provide them with a fully liquid solution. But for clients with a longer investment time horizon, like intergenerational clients, we can offer them a solution where they’re able to trade away some liquidity and benefit from the illiquidity premium,” says Michael.

“Like all good asset consultants, Mercer conducts stress testing of these solutions. This means we can have honest conversations with clients ahead of time, so if markets go into a GFC-type event, clients understand their money will be locked away for a period of time. This enables us to gauge how comfortable clients are with illiquidity across various types of scenarios.”

Having successfully weathered the challenges of COVID, Michael acknowledges the importance of responding to the emergence of AI. He did so by hiring a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in mid 2023 — six months after ChatGPT launched — which has enabled the business to stay ahead of the AI curve.

“We spent two years investing in AI, because it was important for us to get the digital solution part of our business right. This year, we have launched four ‘digital employees’. The savings, efficiency and client experience gains from these four digital employees has been absolutely enormous,” says Michael.

A digital employee — like Microsoft Copilot, Coworker, and Claude — is an advanced AI software virtual worker designed to handle complex, multi-step processes and routine tasks autonomously. It differs from a basic chatbot by using AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation to reason through problems, interact with various enterprise systems, and work alongside human colleagues.

One of Michael’s digital employees — Bhindi AI — assists with the onboarding process, helping to save the Family Wealth Advisory team about 900 hours in work time. Another digital employee, which is currently being finalised, will help with reviewing reports. Michael expects the savings by using this tool will be substantial.

“By using these technologies, we’re not looking to replace any of our existing staff,” he says. “We believe these digital tools, which do multiple tasks, will enable us to enhance our client value proposition and improve our productivity. Incorporating AI into our business has been very positive, and provides so many opportunities.”

In hindsight, Michael acknowledges there are a couple of key things he underestimated by running retail and wholesale businesses in parallel. This includes the depth in which these two parts of the business went.

“When investing in and growing a business, there are many challenges and no guarantee that growth will show up. For example, in 2020, I signed a lease, but then COVID hit the next month, which resulted in lockdown. My revenue at 2020 was at $1.53 million and in 2022 it was at $1.6 million. During this time, I took on two advisers, a general manager and support staff. My wages bill increased by about $500,000, however, in two years I was only up $70,000 in revenue,” says Michael.

“And just when I thought we were coming out of COVID, ChatGPT launched. I thought ChatGPT could be the end of the business, with technology replacing advice practices. However, technology has helped make us a more efficient and profitable business.”

However, like all challenges, Michael sys it’s important to fight through. Hiring a CTO six months after ChatGPT launched helped Family Wealth Advisory to stay ahead of the AI curve by rolling out suitable technology this year.

“Looking back, I underestimated how hard it would be to grow my family-focused business, and also how quickly it would begin to scale. For example, last year we onboarded 60 families and we grew at about 40 per cent,” says Michael.

“The challenge now is scaling from our current 310 families to 1,000 families, while ensuring we can onboard and maintain our level of excellence with the growth that is happening within the business.” 

Michael Bova is Founder and Managing Director at Family Wealth Advisory; and

Rebecca Jacques is Head of Wealth Management Investment Solutions at Mercer.

They spoke on the topic ‘A family-focused advice practice: Scaling from 300 to 1,000 families’ at the 2026 IMAP Advice in Action Conference.

The session was moderated by Emily Barlow, CFA — Senior Asset Consultant at Evidentia Private