Our Speciality Brands
We specialise in risk insurance advice for small business owners, their families, dual income couples, and Trustees of SMSF and SMSF members.
While that can sound like a lot, we simply say, We Help People Protect & Provide for what’s important to them.
- Sapience has specialty brands all working to support our diverse customers and their specific needs; Sapience Financial - Unusual Risks - Finally Sorted - Modern Estate Planning.
Helping you Protect & Provide
We see the instinctual human desire to protect and provide, as the two sides of the same coin.
- One side is using Life & Disability insurances to build a safety net for people, while we’re all working to get ahead.
- The other side is using Estate Planning with clear death benefit nominations and Will documents, (and even special investment products) to make sure the best laid plans also have the financial resources to fulfil them, when needed.
Financial Life in Australia is getting more complicated
Financial life in Australia can certainly feel complicated and can seem to span such a wide range of opportunities and decisions that sometimes interlink, and at other times, don’t (but should).
- Regulated Financial Advice is said to be personal advice – a phrase defined by the Government Regulator ASIC as: ‘Personal advice is a recommendation or opinion tailored to your personal circumstances.’
- All other guidance is safely considered, general advice and usually comes with a consumer warning making clear the listener (or reader) bears personal responsibility for their actions, and you should, ‘Before acting on any you should consider your own circumstances and whether it is appropriate for your needs, financial situation and objectives’.
Sound Confusing? Yes! We think so too
For the last 20+ years we have been vocal advocates of the need for better intergrated financial advice standards and a clearer message to the Australian consumer. And we’ll continue to voice that, until we see it.
What are the two Types of Financial Advice?
- General advice does not consider your personal circumstances and is general in nature.
- Personal advice is more specific and is tailored to your personal situation from an adviser, depending on what you need.
Who is not a Licensed Financial Advisor?
- Mortgage Brokers are Credit advisers, but not financial advisers.
- Real Estate agents will try and sell you a property, but are not financial advisers. They have even been warned by ASIC not to provide investment advice as investment advice is provided by a licensed financial advisor. (You can read more about that government report here).
- A Buyers Agent who sells a property based upon its investment potential, is not a financial adviser.
It doesn't take long to realise that financial life in Australia can feel fractured so it begs the question, ‘Who do you speak to, to get real financial advice in Australia?’ We’d like to help answer that question.
What is not considered Financial Advice?
Factual information given to you is not financial advice.
People giving it do not need to be licensed. General financial advice is when your adviser gives you strategic advice about what your options may be, but doesn't recommend any specific investments or financial products.
We believe in the Privacy of Our Clients and their work with us
Well believe, the financial lives of Australia by default, should be private.
Why we don't promote Google Star Ratings
You may see we don't promite the Google Star Ratings on our website — that's deliberate, and this is why.
- We respect that our client's work with us is private.
- We never ask for or publish client reviews or testimonials.
- We never ask our clients to disclose to the world their private work with us.
- And we don’t track website visitors for re-marketing purposes on social media.
If we sound like the type of people you'd like to do business with, please contact us.
Our Process
Every good decision has a repeatable process.
Every good decision follows a deliberate process and framework
We believe there's great value in a good decision and the ability to recognise the right dots to connect.
When working with clients, we use our proprietary S7 Strategy Framework to make sure;
- we first understand your situation, then
- understand how you got there, and
- where do you want to go now
This means we strive not to miss the important small stuff, while we’re also looking at the bigger picture. We make sound judgments because they are always based on sound principles.
Why do we have a Strategy Framework?
Simple. This ensures we gather all the pieces to your story first before we even start thinking about what's possible. And like all good journeys, it's not a simplistic procedure to an end result, but a carefully designed process to begin to understand what's possible.
Our experience has been, the best solution to a problem depends on the best start to its diagnosis.
Getting good at making good decisions
Good judgment is hard to define and harder still to acquire.
Certainly, some part of good judgment seems to be innate: connected with having a balanced character and understanding of people. But we believe that 'good decisions' can be improved with practice and using a framework to achieve clarity on the right strategy for you.
By using a strategy framework, you increase the chance of challenging your current thinking and therefore learning something new.
Yes, we said 'challenge'.
If your financial adviser is not stretching your thinking, challenging your default attitudes about your Money Mindsets and helping you achieve something bigger, then maybe you need to be working with a more experienced and proactive adviser like Sapience.
The problem of managing complexity
While growing wealth can add numbers to your bank account, it can also add complexity to your financial and emotional life.
We understand that life is busy, and talking about insurances or income protection, estate planning or money matters - may not be at the top of your list, like it is for us. That's why you can benefit from our focus and expertise.
We also appreciate our clients like to move at their own pace and learn about their options first. That's why we follow a deliberate process.
Our Process Framework
Some people can work through the framework quickly in a single conversation. Others may like to take a few weeks. Regardless of how you like to make financial decisions, we can help manage the process for you.
You make the decisions, we'll bring them to life.
Our S7 Framework leverages seven core steps
Connect
Let's get acquainted first and make sure we're a good fit to do business together. We seem to work better with people looking for a longer term relationship. We expect we'd both like to know:
- Are we the type of people you could see yourself doing business with for the next five years?
- Can we add value to your financial life?
- Do we challenge your thinking and could you see yourself doing business with us?
- Should we do business together?
Clarity and Goals
Get clear about your situation and what you want to achieve.
- You first need to get clear about your 'why', before you can make a decision about your 'how'.
We're good at helping you do that because we're professional problem solvers with over 20 years of experience working with a diverse range of people, and we've seen a lot.
Strategy
Many attempts at strategy lack a clear diagnosis.
A strategy is not a set of goals or a collection of big ideas; it's an approach towards thinking about how to help shift your thinking from 'what needs to be done' to 'why it's being done'.
- Many people and business owners miss the strategy step and end up rushing off into a binge of DIY and usually end up getting lost in treating the symptoms, not the actual cause.
We help people separate the symptom from the cause.
Plan
A good idea without a plan to bring it to life is just a wish. The key to achieving anything meaningful is to have a plan with a deadline.
But a plan by itself is useless unless you first know what's possible, what's worth focusing on first and what's the right sequence of actions you need to follow.
- Writing a plan down ensures that important steps are understood and the roadmap ahead is clear.
Implementation
The more complex the problem being solved, usually the more complex the implementation process is, that needs to be managed.
- Even the best-laid plans never put themselves to work - people do.
Track Progress
Managing the progress of the many different people and processes in your strategy protects it from stalling or slipping through the cracks (or not completing at all).
- Rome wasn't built in a day, so good plans usually take time to build too.
Adjust and Review
The one constant in life is change. How we anticipate and react to change is a key indicator of our ability to continue to be successful.
- Keeping in touch and staying current as situations and circumstances change, is important to make sure your strategy continues to fit your life.
Sapience — We're all about 'The How'
What you get from talking with a real-life person is not a conceptual framework or academic theory, but an experienced point of view integrated into a personality.
Our guiding philosophy is based on the belief successful people:
- have deliberately different behaviours and attitudes to their life and business
- regularly lean upon the expertise and advice of professionals to avoid mistakes,
- are prepared to always learn new skills and accelerate their own progress, and
- have a realistic understanding of the risks they will face and follow a plan to meet them, just in case.
Where to start
The most common frustrations most people have with financial advice are based on three recurring problems;
- Not knowing what's possible
- Not knowing what's practical, and
- Not knowing the sequence of steps needed for deciding what to do first.
We specialise in helping answer these 3 core questions for our clients.
- To start the process it's important you take time to understand the statistical, Numbers of Life, and if you're in business, to understand the statistical Numbers of Business, too. Remember the problem lies in their being statistical realities we can't avoid, just manage better.
- Then we encourage you to learn about the Cost to Care and the risks of surprise out-of-pocket expenses that can drain a family's budget or derail a small business's cashflow, and how they can be managed with a life insurance policy.
See us as your professional financial problem solver and put our expertise to your benefit.
How we can help
Following a deliberate process with a view to the end result is an important part of protecting your business and your family, from the business.
Contact us for a confidential chat about your needs.
The Story behind our Name and Logo (the background info for those folk who like detail)
The word sapience is derived from Old French and the Latin Sapientia, meaning 'wisdom' and its older English definition has come to be known as 'great wisdom and insights, often from unusual places'.
Understanding our guiding Philosophy and inspiration behind our brand Logo
In looking for a way to identify both our professional ability and our unique personal insights to create unique solutions for people, we found ourselves inspired by the traditional tribal cultures and their view of wisdom as a 'tradable resource and commodity' that elevated the holder above the average person.
- The Nyansapo or Wisdom Knot is a traditional Adinkra Symbol of West Africa for wisdom, ingenuity, intelligence, and learning, and experience developed into a niche expertise 'with an ability to apply such faculties to practical ends'.
- Over time, this rope knot design became known as the square knot and was later adopted by the worldwide Scouting Movement, (its own origins extend from its founder's experience in Africa) as the Reef Knot - one of their key symbols representing the 'be prepared for anything' approach to living.
And for the mathematically oriented reader, the mathematical version of the Reef Knot can be found here at Square Knot (mathematics).
Wisdom and Knowledge — and the wisdom to know the difference
The exchanging of wisdom for value is not new but the way it occurs today doesn't always connect to the ancient traditions of sharing knowledge and useful information for the betterment of others.
- Today ubiquitous search algorithms may deliver information at your fingertips but like trying to drink from a firehose, the sheer volume of information available usually creates more reasons to feel confused and fall victim to 'paralysis through analysis'.
Today's sheer volume of information to wade through creates overwhelm
Today, wisdom has been replaced by knowledge of shortcuts, data points, and search engine queries (and the ubiquitous Wikipedia).
But we like to think, the difference between wisdom and knowledge is more straightforward — you can have knowledge without wisdom, but you can't have it the other way around. Put another way, knowledge is understanding, 'that a tomato is indeed a fruit' — wisdom is knowing, 'and it does not belong in a fruit salad'.
Have you ever felt stuck in information overload?
Many people today fueled by good intentions and readiness to move ahead in life decisions, also feel trapped into inaction due to the sheer complexity and volume of information surrounding them, their families, and their businesses.
So, we've developed a set of frameworks to help connect you from where you are now to where you want to go.
We call it The S7 Framework and it's purposefully designed to help people better understand and manage the problem of financial complexity in their lives.
How we can help
At Sapience Financial, we specialise in supporting people like you to live their best financial lives by helping to identify and reduce the key risks to life, love and business.
Contact us for a confidential chat about your needs.
Awards & Recognition
We deeply appreciate our Clients, Friends, and our Supporters who make good business possible.
Awards and recognition external to our industry, help promote our visible leadership, our belief that business can be a force for good in the community, and our guiding philosophy that Secure People Live Bigger Lives.
As established industry leaders, we're now fortunate to be more involved with the formal judging of awards and providing recognition.
Connecting more people to good advice
Awards and recognition help provide those parts of our community who would benefit from our services the opportunity to:
- get to know more about the support and options available to them, and
- get to know more about us and how we approach life, love, and business, as well as
- demonstrating the importance of championing one of humanity's most admirable traits — the drive to Protect and Provide.
We believe our products and services are also a portal to a better self and a better world. We want our clients to think bigger about who they are and what they have to offer the world. Drew Browne — Founder Sapience Financial
Supporting organisations that promote positive change for the benefit of the Australian Business Community
- We believe in giving back to our professional community and provide our time and expertise as Judges at the annual Australian Accountancy Awards, Independent Financial Advisers (IFA) Awards and Women in Finance Awards.
- Our professional blog articles are regularly reprinted with permission in industry professional publications.
Supporting community organisations that promote positive change for the benefit of the broader Community
- We are proud supporters of The Equality Project — a national LGBTIQA+ charity bringing together LGBTIQA+ people and allies to promote a better, more just, and fairer society for all Australians.
- We are proud supporters of Tall Timbers (RDA) Riding for the Disabled — a local charity working to help additional needs children through equine interaction.
