Welcome to that super show, the podcast where we talk all things super from the inside.

I'm Neil Benson, CEO of Superware.

And I'm Sarah Penn, CEO of Mayflower Consulting.

Each week we unpack what's changing in the industry, what funds are wrestling with and how tech and regulation are shaping the landscape.

Sometimes we bring in expert guests, but mostly it's just us having a real conversation about how super is working and what could make it even better.

Let's get into.

Hi Neil, how are you going?

I'm great, Sarah.

How are you doing?

I am very good.

What's news in your world?

Well, it's been a busy week.

We're getting into the last financial week of the year.

Last week of the financial year.

It's, you know, obviously everybody in Australia's in a financial year, but it's also globally.

It's Microsoft's financial year as well.

So it's silly season at Microsoft.

They're all, you know, you just can't talk to anybody.

Everybody's thinking about July and then everybody in America obviously takes the first week in July.

It's quite a popular time for vacation.

So it's been a crazy time in, in technology world.

But yeah, looking forward to my own little holiday over the next week or two.

How much extra work do you have to do before you go on holiday?

Is it worth it?

I know it's ridiculous.

I saw a meme about it the other day, you know, clearing everything to go and leave and then you come back and the piles.

You've been busy this week.

Yes, yes, we've been very, very busy too.

Finishing up financial year and like hopefully many businesses, making sure that we've paid all our super for our employees and that that's all up to date.

Messing around with payroll to make sure everyone's on the as of Tuesday next week.

I wonder how many contributions arrive slightly late into accounts on the 1st and 2nd of July.

There's a lot of rush going on, I'm sure people trying to make last minute contributions.

What's the cutoff date for my fund?

I can't remember.

Yes, no, it is, it is the 30th.

The money has to be received on the 30th and if you work in super, you spend a lot of the afternoon of the 30th dealing with panicked advisors and members on exactly this topic again, as per last week, working in operations.

It's another thing that I wouldn't be great at.

I'm good at making friends.

But yeah, I can't even remember Day in, day out.

Sounds hard work.

So we've got some news this week.

The first one is our mates at APRA being on the warpath about money.

I enjoyed one aspect of this article compared to what we talked about last time.

Apra at least, you know, notified everybody that they're in discussions with some like 14 funds that they have been scrutinizing, but they didn't name them, they didn't shame anybody in particular.

Yes, and they didn't call it any specific practices.

That just reminded everybody that marketing and connected entity spending, amongst other things, are being looked at carefully.

Yes, I did read it carefully, actually.

It was interesting to see what they were saying about expecting to see business cases and expecting to see policy and procedures around spending and decision making, which did make me think about our previous discussion around how are you even able to take small bets as a fund if you really need to be able to show dollar payback?

And they said in the article too, it's not just that they want to see it in the business case, they want to see that it's being tracked down the track and that something's been done about it if the plan for savings or uplift hasn't been achieved.

Which comes back to the how on earth do you take small bets and move a business forward?

It's tough, isn't it?

So on the one hand we want to see innovation, a bit of risk taking and people trying new things and running experiments, and on the other hand the regulators are saying you can't do that without a business case and benefits tracking.

I'm not sure everything stacks up pretty tough.

I think it's very tough too.

I do like the three Horizon model, which is from Harbour Business Review from many years ago, but it basically says that Horizon one is the things that you're doing now that deliver profit to the business, and Horizon 2 is things that are delivering income but aren't profitable yet.

And Horizon 3 is small bets that you're making and roughly 70, 2010 is the sort of split that you should be looking at for your expenditure.

I'm sure there are many smart people at Super Funds, I am sure, and I hope that there is that sort of approach being taken if you try and put Horizon 2 and 3 issues through a Horizon 1 lens, which is that everything should be making money right now.

Then there's a lot of things you'll never do which will of course send you backwards in the long term.

Can we touch on one topic that APRA mentioned, which is marketing expenditures, please?

Oh yes, you probably have a lot more expertise than I do here, but I see my super fund making some, well, apper calls it questionable marketing expenditure.

And, you know, as a member, I'm not quite sure how I feel about sports team sponsorship.

For example, I understand it's good for funds to have awareness and brand awareness costs a lot of money.

Generally advertising on the backs of buses and on TV programs and putting your logo out there, it's necessary, it's part of being in business.

But sports team sponsorship would be fine with me if the executives and directors were seen to be taking no benefit.

So there's no corporate boxes, there's no staff taking tickets.

In fact, any tickets that arise through the course of sponsorship are given away in a raffle to members.

Then it would all be above board and we can all live with it.

But I'm not sure, I'm not sure how.

If there is benefit going back to the staff and to directors, there's a little bit of a lack of transparency there.

What do you reckon?

So the additional benefits of boxes and chairman's lunches and getting to shake hand with your favourite sporting person, aside from a pure marketing perspective and looking at the efficacy of sponsoring sporting teams versus doing other things, for me it just comes down to the maths of it.

And so what you're trying to do, obviously with advertising, but just to get back to the absolute basics, is you're trying to get in front of the largest number of people in your target market that you can.

And so if your target market happens to be people who a lot of your target market really like, I don't know, watching golf, for instance, and really love golf, and watching golf, you might look at sponsoring a golfing event as a marketing strategy or part of your marketing strategy.

And then what you look at is you go to the market, you go to the golfing thing and you go, okay, what are our sponsorship options?

And you look at the cost of each, and you look at cost per view through the lens of how many people in our target market, sorry, not the total number of people who are going to see whatever the thing is, because some proportion at least of them aren't going to be in your target market.

So what you have to do is say, of all the people that are going to see that golfing, watch that golfing tournament that we're thinking about sponsoring, say, I think a million people will watch it.

Of that million people, how many people are in our target market?

And maybe it's 800,000 people are in our target market.

And then what you do is you take the cost of that sponsorship, divide it by the 800,000 people in your target market, and that gives you how much it's going to cost to get in front of each of those people in your target market.

Yeah.

Cost per eyeball.

Preparable.

Yeah.

Cost variable.

Exactly.

So if, if there is a high crossover between people in your target market and people who watch XYZ sporting event, then it can actually be very cost effective to use sporting events as part of your marketing strategy.

However, here's the crux, however.

Because of the issues around who gets to be in the chairman's box and who gets the signed golf ball.

People sign golf balls?

They probably do.

Or who gets to play around with some famous golf player because of all those issues.

It can be very on the nose for the average person in terms of doing that advertising.

So if I was in a marketing role, and I used to be, and these issues were kind of around surrounding it, you would want to make sure that that part of your marketing spend didn't just wash its face, as they say, which means, you know, pay for itself, but you'd want to make sure that it really delivered over and above so that you could hand on heart, say, regardless of what other benefits anyone might be getting.

This is an exceptionally good use of the fund's money.

Yeah.

And that's a really tough job for marketers.

You know, attributing brand advertising to an increase in the number of members joining a fund.

It's really tough to do that attribution compared to investments in HR software.

When somebody joins a new employer and they sign up for a new super fund investment, there is conversion marketing much easier to attribute.

But brand advertising is kind of necessary as well.

Yes.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it?

Like if you look at a marketing funnel, you need to start off with awareness.

Like, if people aren't even aware of your fund, well, they're never gonna buy from you.

And then you wanna move people from awareness to consideration, which is, I'm thinking about changing fund.

And I'm looking at this one, this one and this one.

That's your consideration set and you wanna make sure you're in it.

And then you want people to actually obviously convert.

So what you can do from a market research point of view, and statistically, is look at of your target market, how many people are in each parts of those funnel and you where do you have the biggest drop off in terms of the number of people in each stage of the funnel?

And that's the Fundamentals of how you decide where to spend the money.

So there's a lot of strategy and maths and research that goes in behind it, but as I said, top of the line.

People look at it and go, how come your name is all over that sport?

I'm not interested in that sport and I'm a member of.

Yeah, Then, like, it's taken me, what, five minutes to explain it.

That's a long time to explain to every single member why it is okay for your fund to sponsor and maybe.

I'm sure there are some sporting opportunities that are exceptionally good value.

You know, the cost per eyeball is really good.

I imagine Formula One sponsorship is probably not that.

So we're probably not going to see too many super funds sponsoring Ferraris at Albert park anytime soon.

But perhaps we might one day.

I don't know.

There would be a global opportunity probably not so suitable for an Australian super fund.

Oh, I think you buy those sort of sponsorships through.

Well, it depends how it works, but yeah, but again, it just comes down to, like, if you're running a super fund that is only for serious, seriously, people who are seriously into Formula One and that is 90% of your target market, then it might be worth it.

Yeah, but I don't know of any of those funds.

As an aside, I have spoken to people before who've wanted advice on setting up a super fund to invest into vintage cars or sports cars or such things.

And yes, hypothetically, and yes, some people have made huge amounts of money investing in such assets.

Assets.

Using it loosely.

I always say to them, before you do anything, you need to go and figure out how many people there are who are actually going to put money into your super fund.

That's just for people who love vintage cars.

Because I can tell you through long and bitter experience, it's very expensive and hard to stand up.

A new product of financial product of any sort and you need a huge number of people who are potentially going to be buying it.

Well, I imagine there are lots of SMSF members who are trustees who do invest in vintage cars.

Why isn't there a managed fund simply for vintage and exotic cars?

We can do it for stamps and we can do it for wine.

We can do it for art.

There are managed funds for art.

Why can't there be managed funds for exotic cars?

Maybe that's something I should consider as a business opportunity.

There could be, if you'd like to start one, Neil, I'll find some luck.

Lovely advisors for you who are not me.

As long as it's not my own SMSF because you're not allowed to benefit from the asset.

Well, well that's the thing, isn't it?

So actually people, early days of SMSFs, people did invest in wine, sports cars quite a bit but with the absolute clamp down on, you cannot derive any benefit from the thing until you retire.

That has.

The number of people with those sort of assets in their super fund has decreased significantly.

Yeah.

Which is probably a good thing really.

If you've got enough money to be investing in sports cars and things then wonderful.

And knock yourselves out and do it outside your super.

So I was a member of a track car club when I lived back in the uk.

I'd sold my business.

I had dreams of buying a supercar.

We sold the business and there's nowhere near enough money to buy a supercar.

But I did buy an annual membership of a track car club.

So we had like 12 track prepared little cars.

You tow them on a trailer and race them on a racetrack.

A lot of fun.

But never consider that as an investment opportunity.

It's stupidly expensive trying to keep cars on the right track.

Yes.

I have a number of friends who rally cars actually, but it is definitely a money out, not money in situation.

What else have we seen in the news this week, Sarah?

Well, in good news, super funds are apparently and makes sense on track the third consecutive year of excellent returns, average of 9% I think per year over three years, which is really solid.

Obviously that's averages.

That doesn't mean every single person's going to get that in their super fund, but that's very solid returns and I think we're going to be very thankful for that in the coming few years with goodness knows what happens on the geopolitical front that may tip the whole thing on its head.

I think it's an amazing performance certainly given the volatility we've had since, you know, January and I saw today Bearsant has wheeled back the potential taxes on foreigners are holding us investments that was going to affect Australian superannuation funds.

So there's all sorts of incredible investment volatility in the markets at the moment and geopolitical stuff happening.

So 9% is a stonking performance.

Well done.

To all the teams out there looking after our money, I think that's a great performance.

Yeah.

And I think that's one of the fundamental things, isn't it about super.

For all of our discussions about should they spend money on this sporting thing or what's the the right thing to do with a bunch of other issues.

Fundamentally, our super system is well governed, well managed and delivers fantastic results for the majority, majority of people who get to retire with more money than just the age pension.

And that's an amazing thing and it is certainly not the case in most other countries.

We've got a lot to be proud of.

Can it be better?

Can we, can we ratchet up?

But of course, of course.

So there's been a couple of.

I think asfa, maybe one of the super funds has been pushing back a little bit on some of the plans, particularly to lift stands.

Not pushing back on the director's standards, but trying to acknowledge that we've got reasonably good governance at the moment.

There's a principles based approach to governance on how boards are run and the kind of experience and qualifications and the terms that directors can serve and questioning really, do we need more regulation in this area?

Are there absolutely massive systemic failures that we need more rules based approach to solve?

They're making the case probably not.

I maybe wonder if the chickens want out of the hen house, but yeah, what do you reckon?

I think it's a tricky thing.

So CPS 510, which is the paper that's out for all the new standards that are out for consultation at the moment, they do have in them something.

One of the things actually, which is funnily enough was in said article that you've referenced, APRA is saying that 10 years should be the maximum that someone can sit on a board.

And I presume that is based on the kind of standard three plus three times three plus one, which is to say that three terms of three years plus one year, you know, if something drastic happens and you need to hang on to them for a minute more.

Now there aren't very many super fund directors around now who have been on the board for longer than that, but there are a handful of.

And I do think that because it is other people's money and it's public Money, I think 10 years is more than enough.

And for me it fundamentally comes down to the issue of, well, Mr. Or Ms. Director, if you're an amazing director and you've been on this fund for 10 years, then you can take your amazing directoring skills and you can apply them to another fund.

Although the number of funds has shrunk, there are a lot of funds or you could go to a listed company.

What seems to be the sort of the unstated thing is that, oh no, no, I couldn't possibly be an excellent super director for someone else's fund.

I must stay on as a director for this fund, which then of course raises the question of if you're an amazing super director, then you can be an amazing super director for someone else's fund.

But if this is the only fund that you can be an amazing director for, then maybe it's the super bit that's not actually in that picture or not so much in that picture.

So yes, I know some people are upset about it, but it's still a pretty loose Guardrail.

I mean, 10 years,.

Long time and a job.

Yeah, there's been a lot of change if I think back to where what super looked like 10 years ago, so 2015, we just had Faux implemented and I worked at Macquarie at that stage, so retail super, and we were still coming to terms with what that meant and grandfathering and a whole lot of stuff to do with commissions and things.

You know, it looked very different to how it looks now.

And I think if somebody's new to a board, they've got a curious investigative kind of mind, they're getting up to speed, they're asking lots of tough questions.

Sometimes they're asking the really obvious questions as well.

And after 10 years, do you really still have the same hunger and investigative mind and are you too cozy to the executive team you're trying to govern?

Fair enough.

Some of the funds want to push back.

This is why it's a consultation paper.

These kinds of debates are great, but I'm siding with APRA on this one.

Yes, yes, I find myself siding with APRA as well.

God, I'm excited with the regulators, Neil.

We're supposed to be entrepreneurs doing new and exciting things.

I know, yes.

Just going to disappointing realization about my own positions.

Speaking of new and exciting, though, as of, I think end of last year, AMP is including cryptocurrencies in their super fund.

So that's new and exciting, isn't it?

I think it's terrible.

Well, there are a certain cohort of folks who want to diversify into other asset classes.

AMP is I guess, reacting to that demand and offering themselves as an option there.

And I don't imagine it's going to be tens of billions of dollars they're shoving into a crypto etf, but maybe a couple of tens of millions might be sufficient to whet the appetite or satisfy the appetite of those crypto hungry investors.

Yes.

My fundamental issue with crypto is simply is that it is not, it's not delivering any actual value to anybody.

So it's, there's no product or service behind it, there's no this is it's completely speculative.

There's no value to the universe that is being developed aside from the monetary value of the thing that is speculative.

Fundamentally I only want anyone, especially in super, to be investing in real things that are actually going to make a difference to the universe over the long term.

And so super funds do invest in some fairly technical financial instruments for hedging and other issues, but that is to deal with a real issue, which is currency risk.

Currency is the hardest part of any portfolio to manage.

So hedging against currency risk is a sensible thing because it is a real risk that you're managing.

Whereas crypto, it's just the Dutch tulip bulb all over again.

There's nothing behind it.

So there's nothing behind it.

You could say the same thing about gold or exotic cars or any type of commodity, or pork bellies or coffee, you know, platinum.

None of these things are income producing assets.

They all rely on the price going up over time as demand increases or supply becomes more limited.

I agree with you.

It's probably not the type of thing that superannuation funds should be investing members of money in.

But if there's a fraction of a percent in a small asset class, and I wouldn't say my super products are balanced, pooled investment options should be investing in crypto.

But if there's one option that those risk hungry members can choose to satisfy that itch that they have, then I'm glad to see amp offering that as an option.

I don't expect many other funds to be wading into the crypto market anytime soon though.

No, I do not think so.

You look horrified, Sarah.

I am horrified.

I'm completely horrified.

You don't hold many trump meme coins or anything in your, in your portfolio?

No, I do not.

Opportunity missed.

I think it's crashed.

The market's fallen out of that market.

Yes, well, I mean, I guess that's the thing, isn't it?

NFTs which was another equally crypto sort of based on BS investment.

The bottom has fallen out of that spectacularly and a lot of people lost a huge amount of money.

And I guess that's, that's part of my concern around crypto is by super funds investing in it, it's legitimising it and therefore going to attract more average punters who just do not know what they're doing.

And the old, you know, past returns are not indicative of future returns issue.

Like if you look at a graph of crypto, you'll see it's, it's going like this so you'll get really excited and put money in.

But unfortunately your likelihood of losing that money is enormous.

And as I regularly say to people, no investment.

You cannot really say that you've made X, Y, Z money even in your super fund until the point at which you take it out.

And with a super fund, it's just paper returns.

Until then, it's all just paper money.

Well, they're going to start taxing paper returns.

Div.

296.

I know.

Yes, well, let's not relitigate that argument.

But that's the thing with superannuation.

Because of all the governance and everything around it.

If your money's in a super fund, when you go to take that money out when you retire, I'm very confident it's going to be there.

Well said.

If you have money in a crypto wallet and you eventually want to go and take that money out, I'm not confident it's going to be there.

Because not only are there a whole lot of issues around governance and none, no governance, total lack of governance around such things, but also it's fine when a market's going up, there'll be lots of people who want to buy what you're selling.

So if you invested a thousand bucks in crypto, now it's worth a hundred thousand and you go, great, I'm going to take my a hundred thousand.

At the moment, you could likely sell that 100 grands worth of crypto, no problem, and get your money back.

However, if the market goes up and if it starts to turn and starts to go the other way, your 100 grand, even if it's 500 grand by then you, when you go to start to sell it, which will be after the experts have already sold it, you'll be trying to sell it to everyone else who's also trying to sell it.

You might not be able to sell it at all because there's no liquidity requirements or anything around crypto because it's so unregulated.

So your ability to sell it then is potentially problematic, which is the thing of.

Until it's in your hot, until the, the normal cash is back in your hot little hands, it's just very high risk.

And I don't think people understand about liquidity risk and all those things when they're just chasing something that looks amazing.

So people who want to invest in crypto, she did well outside super.

According to Sarah.

I'm a bit more open to the idea for a fraction of a percent for a couple of funds and let those Members who really opt into that asset class choose it.

But okay, no.

Well, we'll see how that plays out for all the crypto bros and girls out there.

Do you own any crypto?

I do.

I bought.

So my brother in law was big into crypto way back in the day and he made heaps.

I put, I think I put 500, I put a thousand dollars into ethereum.

It doubled.

I took my thousand dollars back out, I left $1,000 in and it's kind of, it's maybe worth 2 or 3,000 today.

And I have a little bit of bitcoin.

I don't even look at it in total.

Combined they're half a percent of my portfolio.

But yeah, you can, I'm sure, guess very accurately how much crypto I own.

I can probably accurately guess which time you spent considering crypto.

I know I have actually, I have looked at it.

But yes, I have an ethical issue with the fundamental lack of anything behind it apart from anything else.

You've got a big idea for us in this episode.

What's your big thinking for the week?

What I want to actually want to talk about is framing.

So framing is this idea that the number that you or the first number that you see, everything else will be framed around that.

So for instance, if we're talking about buying handbags and I tell you that I bought a handbag that the listed price was $2,000, you go, oh my God, will I actually manage to buy it for $500?

So that was very exciting.

$500 Is still the most I've ever paid for a handbag in my life.

If you told me you spent $500 on a handbag, I would have racked into the like, what?

That's, that's outrageous.

But because it's only a quarter of the first number you told me, it seems much more reasonable you framed.

It doesn't look so bad, does it?

Yeah, that's right.

Yes.

So that's framing.

So I was hoping you were going to talk about window framing because I need to get some window framed around my house anyway.

So do I.

And we're getting a quote.

Speaking of framing.

Yes.

We're waiting for the price on that for our own house.

So framing and super.

So whenever you price anything, if you start off with a round number, you're in big trouble.

And part of that is because it's very hard to move away from that because people can remember really easily what you started with.

So for instance, if your starting position and the roundest of all numbers is of Course, zero.

So if your starting position is, for example, picking something off the top of my head, the drawdown tax rate on super, which started off as zero, if you try and move away from zero, everyone knows it's zero.

And so all hell breaks loose every time you try and move away from it.

Whether that's.

So the 1.6 million limit that sent people into an absolute tailspin, the current 3mil and then more tax over that is sending people into more of a tailspin.

So the next time, Neil, you find yourself designing a new superannuation system, you'll be well advised to have some kind of tax on drawdown.

And it wouldn't really matter if it was, I don't know, 2 or 3%.

It's not that it has to be a large amount of money, it's that if it's.

And it's better if it's some weird amount like 7.68.

Right.

Because then when you go and change sounds like something that probably has been changed before and it's easy to change.

We have other ones.

The other one in Australia is gst.

So I'm led to believe by people much smarter than me, that our GST rate actually now should be more like 11 and a half or 12%.

But because everyone knows that it's 10%, it's a round number, it's almost impossible to change.

And I know why they would have done it at the start, because I was.

The business I was in at the time was a retail business, in fact, hospitality.

And so everyone probably doesn't even remember.

But GST is payable on packaged goods, but not on fresh fruit and vegetables.

And in the cafes I worked in, we sold loaves of bread as well as sandwiches.

So the loaves of bread had no GST on them, but the sandwiches did have gst.

We had to update all the cash registers and everything to go with that.

It was a.

A very big deal.

And I can understand why 10% was an easy number because people could sort of cope just with 10%, but it would have been better if they'd started at 8 or something, because 10's just so hard to move away from the same with zero.

And you'll notice on super, on the accumulation side, there's 15% contribution tax, which again, is still a fairly round number.

If someone put up to change that to something else, they'll probably have a harder time.

Mind you, not as hard a time as you're going to get with moving it away from zero.

So, yes, whatever number you're starting with the interesting thing for this too is if you're a financial advisor, for instance, don't tell the clients the fees are $5,000.

Tell them they are $4,857.26 and then each year you can put it up by 5% and no one will notice or CPI or what have you.

But if you tell them it's 5,000 or it's, say, I don't know, it's $300 a month, that's a round number.

You've made up the cost.

Whereas if you say it's $311.25.

Oh, that must have been calculated from something.

That's right.

And then you can easily change it to other numbers.

So, yes, it's very important.

The other place where it comes in on industry superside, actually, and there's a whole story behind this which I don't know and I'm sure there'll be listeners who do know and can tell me, but basically a lot of industry super funds you'll find have a base cost of $52 per year, which is a dollar per week, which is based on what was deemed to be reasonable in the 60s or 70s or something last century.

Mine is $1.50, it's 50% more.

Imagine.

Outrageous.

How are you supposed to run a super fund on $78 per member per year?

It's nuts.

But that's the thing, isn't it?

It is categorically insane that you would be able to run a super fund on $78 a year.

Of course you can't.

So they have to build it into the investment fees.

And you will, you will find that there is arbitrage and very careful thinking between what's in the dollars amount and what's in the percentage amount.

And a big part of that is simply because it's, it's very hard to move away from the dollar or a $50 or $2 a week thing.

It's been badly framed.

It's been very badly framed.

Yeah.

It's been framed in a way that makes it very hard to change and very stuck in people's minds as well that a couple of dollars a week is the right amount of money for a super fund to charge.

And it's not really based on anything current.

It's from a very long time ago and it still sticks.

So there you go.

That's my idea for the week.

Framing.

Thanks.

You've given me a lot to think about.

In superware's business, we have a consulting rate card.

Most consultants have one so yeah, we have different tiers of experience in the team at different charge out rates and we started out at, I don't know, 100 bucks.

An for a junior person, it's a very round number today.

It's gone up by percentages here and there.

It's not a round number anymore and it's probably, it's harder to remember.

It sounds less contrived than round numbers do.

It's the same for the software subscriptions that we sell, for the managed services that we offer.

Move away from round numbers.

Even if you just bring them down a little bit, the perception of value is much higher.

That's right, yes, yes.

The $59.99 business.

Yeah.

Try not to look that obvious whenever we think about pricing.

So, yes, that's my big idea for the week.

But I think it's helpful to understand why you see so much grief and carry on about things like the $3 million tax and even the $3 million number.

Right.

Give it a few years, someone will index it.

It'll be 3.126493.

No one will know.

We used to have RBL's reasonable benefit limits back in the day and they were not round numbers.

They were just indexed every year and everyone just put up with it.

Yeah, go and check the table and.

Yep, yeah, move on.

Yeah, stick it in the calculator and keep going.

Do you have any recommendations for us in this episode, Sarah?

We talked about some of the little tools and things that make our life easier.

What should superannuation folks be experimenting with in their lives to make things easier?

So my one is actually a podcast rather than a bit of software, although I do like playing with new bits of software.

And it's another HBR podcast called Coaching Real Leaders.

They're one off sessions with Muriel, can't remember her last name, who's a professional coach.

And they are so interesting each time it's an executive who has a particular issue in their workplace that they're trying to solve and they sort of don't know what to do and she coaches them through it.

And it's fascinating from a perspective of how often, how quickly as a person listening to it, you can see what the problem is and it's not what the problem is that they've said.

It's also very impressive for the way that she asks questions and helps them come to their own realization.

Yes, I highly recommend it.

I'm going to swing that one into my podcast playlist rotation.

Sounds good.

I'm always looking for good shows that One sounds perfect.

Free coaching.

Who wouldn't want more of that?

A little tool I've been loving recently is Fixer.

F Y X E R I think it's called.

It's an AI tool and I've tried quite a few.

This one pretty common feature I'd record in my meetings and make notes and send me transcript.

And that's wonderful.

The big benefit I get from it is an email.

So it's drafting responses to people sending me emails, which saved me heaps of time.

One downside, I will say is because I appear a bit more responsive now on email, people are sending me more email, whereas if you don't respond, they won't reply.

So it kind of email eventually peters out, whereas if you keep on top of it, they keep applying.

And so your inbox is always full.

So maybe being hyper responsive on email is no good thing, but I got asked a licensing Microsoft licensing question by one of our customers and Fixer answered it.

I don't know whether it was how I got the answer, but it was pretty spot on.

And licensing questions are notoriously difficult and it did a really good job.

So the answer is in my tone of voice.

It checks my calendar if somebody asks about my availability and it's saved me heaps of time.

So I've tried lots of different AI tools, productivity stuff, and this one's yeah, great.

I really like it.

You've tried it as well, I believe?

Yes, yes, I have.

We've had four people in our business try it actually.

Interestingly, Matt and I both really like it and are finding it very useful.

And Katie and Deb both hated it.

Because they get more and more email.

Is that right?

No, no.

They didn't like having someone file emails for their machine, file emails for them and write drafts and things.

Yes, I'm.

I'm the opposite.

I'll take all the help.

I found it very useful, although I did see there is a button and maybe you need to dial this down.

You can choose between whether you are very responsive, quite responsive, or not very responsive.

And I've got mine set to the lowest version.

Yes.

If you're anything about me.

No, I'm not very responsible by email.

Because everyone, you know, everyone knows that I'm.

Yeah, if I really need to respond, I will, but if I don't really need to.

So it puts lots of things in my FYI category.

There's the odd thing in the FYI category which I actually would respond to, but it doesn't take me very long to check those.

I'll double check my FYI category, but I might just dial back the responsiveness.

Yes, I must admit I don't use that many tools.

I tend to use one for a while before I sort of start on start on something else.

So I do find good old chatgpt is just so incredibly helpful.

That's still my main go to but I am enjoying Fixer Good.

Awesome.

So write in, let us know what all the tools you've used to help your life a little bit easier.

We'd love some recommendations from our audience.

How can people get hold of us?

Sarah, if they do have a suggestion or a question or a guest recommendation,.

How should people get in touch on the show notes?

There's a link where you can send us a note and say hello.

Or of course, Neil and I being entrepreneurs, spend way too much time on LinkedIn, so you can always find us there as well.

And we have a page company page on LinkedIn for thatsuper show.

You can follow the page and make a suggestion under every episode that gets posted there too.

That'd be great.

Thanks so much Sarah.

We'll speak to you soon.

Thanks Neil.

See you soon.

Thanks for listening to that super show.

We hope today's episode give you something useful to take back to your team.

If you're thinking we should talk, we'd love to chat.

You could book a meeting with either of us us via the link in the show notes.

And don't forget to follow the show, share it with a colleague and drop us a line if there's a topic you want us to tackle.

Catch you next time on that super show.