The big licensee networks are shifting their weight.

There’s a lot of noise in the market about size — who’s got the most advisers, who’s shrinking, who’s the biggest.

For most firms doing the work inside the networks, the mothership’s headcount matters far less than whether it knows how to help them grow.

Akumin’s recent activity is a useful case study. In the space of a few weeks, two very different stories landed under the same roof.

One is Ironbark Advice: 120+ advisers (Money Management cites 128 across 35 offices) moving, from 31 August 2026, onto a dedicated AFSL — LFC Group Pty Ltd — inside Akumin for Ironbark’s exclusive use. That’s less a “new recruit” story and more a licensing restructure: consolidate several licences/CARs into one custom AFSL, keep operating focus on advice, and plug into Akumin’s support.

The other is Aperio Financial Services, a Melbourne boutique that’s been running for about four decades. Its planning leadership is lean — Senior Financial Planner Serhan Aslan and Practice Manager Jim Gulabovski — and it sits alongside accounting firm Tax Matters and mortgage broking business 123 Loans.

On paper, Ironbark and Aperio look nothing alike. Dig in, and the shared thread isn’t desk count. It’s hitting a ceiling where hustle alone doesn’t unlock the next level.

The trap of being your own tech support

Aperio is a familiar pattern. Aslan and Gulabovski have said the firm cycled through several licensing arrangements over those decades — roughly 20 years self-licensed, more recently a boutique AFSL — and reviewed about five licensees before choosing Akumin.

Gulabovski was blunt about the cost of staying small on support: when you’re in a tiny shop, you end up doing everything yourself. You’re the CEO, the lead adviser, the marketing manager, and the person fixing whatever broke between the printer and the CRM.

Aperio isn’t “small” in complexity. It’s an integrated advice, accounting, and lending business. What it lacked, by its own account, was background support — the marketing, recruitment, paraplanning, and technology muscle that a licensee can bring if it’s acting as more than a compliance wrapper. Gulabovski’s line after joining: with Akumin they’re supported in recruitment, paraplanning, technology, and marketing.

The shift isn’t only a licence move. It’s treating infrastructure as someone else’s specialty so the principals can spend time seeing and winning clients again — Aslan’s framing, not mine.

Ambition isn’t a headcount metric

Matt Lawler, CEO at Akumin, has been positioning the firm as a growth partner rather than a pure compliance shop.

On Ironbark, he pointed to a relationship with AMP heritage dating back to the 1950s, and said Akumin is proud to support Ironbark’s next phase of growth as one of the larger advisory firms in the country.

On Aperio, he talked about aligned values and helping Aslan and Gulabovski enhance the value proposition and deliver advice to more people.

In this industry, “we want firms that actually want to grow” shouldn’t be rare — but plateau-with-steady-drawings is still a common default. For practices that want new services, succession, or a cleaner operating model, licensee size is secondary to licensee services.

The Ironbark structure makes that explicit: their own exclusive AFSL, with Akumin still powering the licensee support underneath. Aperio makes the same point from the other end of the scale: a boutique that picked Akumin for wide-ranging support after a five-licence bake-off, not for the biggest logo on the wall.

The question you should be asking

If you’re in a boutique environment — or self-licensed — it’s worth looking at where your time actually goes. Are you growing the business, or maintaining the machine?

Most firms I talk to don’t have growth barriers; they have capacity challenges. Clients and opportunity are there. Systems and background support aren’t. Whether you partner with a network or build the infrastructure yourself, you have to stop being the bottleneck.

I’m having more of these conversations lately — advisers pressure-testing whether where they are now is the right place for where they want to be in three years. It’s not about the cheapest licence. It’s about the tools to scale.

If you’re doing too much of the heavy lifting on admin and tech, pressure-test the model.

Take the next step

• Book a quick chat (15 minutes) to map where you want the practice to go.

• Run a Capacity & Profit Diagnostic to see where time and margin are actually leaking.

• Book a Practice Growth Session to map out your next moves.

• Run a Capacity & Profit Diagnostic to see where your time is really going.