Thirteen advisory firms, leveraging Adapt to help build their way of doing business.

Broadleaf Financial Group is a minority investor in Australian financial planning businesses, backing owners who want to build something that lasts rather than sell up and walk away. From Subiaco in Perth, the national firm works alongside next generation advisers, mid career practices and owners approaching retirement, helping each one plan a handover that keeps the culture and the client relationships intact.

Broadleaf came to the partnership the long way. It was an Adapt customer first, running its own business on the methodology, and kept finding itself thinking about how to bring the same way of working to the businesses it backs. The partnership formalised what was already happening.

"In Adapt you've got coaching, an operating system and frameworks," Richard Hernan says. "It enables us to bring each business along in a way that's repeatable, and you get the compound benefit of it because you're not trying to remember things."

Ask Richard what the partnership lets Broadleaf solve that it could not address as effectively before, and he goes straight to culture. Most of the businesses Broadleaf works with could not articulate the difference between values and culture. Richard includes his younger self in that. He had been in business a long time, and read a lot of books, before the distinction really landed for him.

Now, when two leaders in a partner business are butting heads, Broadleaf facilitates with frameworks that have been proven over and over rather than improvising. "We're drawing on all the Adapt methodologies and frameworks," he says. "We're not making it up as we go." And they make it practical to the scenario in front of them rather than reading from a textbook.

One story stands out from the rest. The founder of one partner business, fifteen years in, sent an email to his whole team on a Sunday night saying he was out. Underneath it sat cultural issues driven by things that had gone unsaid for years, led by a decisive owner who internalises much of his thinking, without necessarily communicating it.

The phone call came straight away. Broadleaf's team met the directors one to one, then sat with every person in the team for Career Valuation conversations, understanding what actually mattered to each of them and bringing them into the cultural system.

There is a follow up story Richard tells with some affection. Feeling good, the founder drifted away from the cultural systems. We're good, we don't really need this stuff any more. Six to nine months later another issue cropped up, and the request came back. Can you do that stuff again? The work holds when you keep doing it.

The commercial and strategic value, for Richard, is that Broadleaf can show it has a way of doing business rather than describe one. In conversations with future partner firms and future investors, he opens the platform.

That visibility is what lets Broadleaf run lean. The firm describes itself as an air traffic control team, helping thirteen businesses stay on course with a small crew, and the claim is articulated by opening the platform and showing exactly who is working with whom. In terms of resilience, Richard calls it massively valuable.

Strategy runs on the same rails. OKRs are the base of Broadleaf's own strategy system, and inside each partner business they connect the planning day to quarterly execution. Richard has watched plenty of businesses run a planning day and connect it to nothing. He has also seen the stranger failure mode, a business sitting beyond what it said it aspired to two years earlier, feeling flat about its progress, until someone opens the record and shows them what they actually said back then. Meaningful progress, one hundred percent factual, there on the screen.

Surveys do the same job for sentiment. Where are we really at, instead of a gut feel swung by whoever complained or celebrated most recently.

Richard's advice to an SME advisory firm weighing up the partnership is two words long, and he is ready for the why that follows. He would demonstrate how Broadleaf uses Adapt, hand over the Succession Thinking book as the induction, and name the state most owners arrive in. Isolated, overwhelmed or stuck, and often all three. "Pretty much all of them put their hand up and say, yeah, I'm all three."