Paul Giordano’s always had an interest in money – earning it, investing it, saving it – but it took him a while to figure out how to best put that passion into practice. In this edition of Planner Profiles, we ask Paul about his journey to becoming managing director of Vogue Financial.
What spurred your initial interest in finance?
I’d always loved the concept of money from a young age. I actually started my own business – of a kind – when I was 14. I wanted additional pocket money, so I went around knocking on the doors of all the houses in my neighborhood, asking them if they wanted their cars washed!
How did that go?
At first it happened every now and again – they’d say, “Yeah, go for it,” and we’d negotiate a price. But within a short period of time I was washing a significant amount of cars on my street and began expanding out through the suburb. I was working my little butt off, and began thinking about bank accounts – what kind of interest I could earn and so on – and asked my parents for advice on that.
Two years later I was 16, and I got my license as soon as possible. I’d saved up $25,000 to buy a brand new car … I was the envy of a lot of guys. They asked me if my parents bought it. I said, “Nah, paid for it myself.” They asked how I did it, and all of a sudden I realized I actually had an interest in answering those kinds of questions and educating people.
So you were set on financial advice?
Not exactly – when I went to uni, I thought I was going to get into banking and corporate finance. I was doing a finance degree at UTS; they didn’t have a financial planning degree at the time. But continuing on with the degree, I started making some contacts in that space and got an understanding about what planners did. So I immediately looked for a job in the financial planning space.
What did you find?
I started working as a portfolio administrator for a company that’s now called Halcyon Wealth Advisers. Very quickly I started hungering for more – seeing more about the whole process, looking at statements of advice, going into client meetings. But even though I was able to grow in that business – to a junior and then senior paraplanner – that’s about as far as I could go there. So having gone straight from school to uni then there, I took six months off to travel.
When I came back, my boss at the time said there was an associate adviser job going at Perspective Group, which was licensed under Madison Financial Group.
That was around 2008 – how was it taking on a new role at the peak of the GFC?
Well, I’d started building some pretty solid relationships and moved up to becoming an adviser. And when the GFC came along, because of the way we did business we didn’t lose a single client through that period. It solidified in my mind that I was doing something right and that I had a passion for helping clients.
At what point did Perspective become Vogue Financial?
Basically, the opportunity came up to acquire Perspective. So I went ahead and worked out a way to do that. I had a partner with a small mortgage broking business and we kind of combined the two together, then we bought two other services: property management and general insurance.
In doing that, we’ve been able to provide a whole suite of financial services that most people are going to need, individually, throughout their financial life.
Property management is an interesting one.
I think property management is often done really poorly by real estate agents. We want to bring the high level of service we’re offering clients when we manage their share portfolios to their properties, which is essentially just another asset, albeit a physical one.
How do you go about advertising that multi-pronged service offering to prospects?
The challenge is that a lot of people think financial advice is superannuation. Worse still, the industry hasn’t done itself a good service in that all advisers are tarred with the same brush and painted as fraudsters. We haven’t done a lot of advertising in the past, but we align ourselves with other professional service providers.
Which service providers?
We work with small-to-medium accounting groups. That’s why we don’t provide accounting here; we want our accounting partners to work with us, because a lot of people will have a trusted relationship with their accountant, and if that accountant can recommend us from an advice, property or investment perspective, we can help them out with that.
Thanks very much for your time, Paul.
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