Last week, Alex Burke explored why over 500 advisers are self-licensing. This time, he talks to the AFA’s 2017 Adviser of the Year about how joining a licensee can be a major boon for your business.
Charlie Fraser’s 20-year career has seen him develop a family-focused approach to financial advice, which aims to combine financial services with human services to deliver better client outcomes.
He held senior roles at NAB and Perpetual – including being one of the five voting members overseeing the investment governance of Perpetual Private’s advisory, fiduciary and philanthropic businesses – before setting up his own business, Lyndhurst Group, in 2015. Lyndhurst integrated wealth expertise with social and allied health networks to provide a holistic client service approach.
After running the business for two years, he decided to join Shadforth, and here are three key reasons why:
Focusing on clients
Before joining Shadforth, Fraser was faced with an interesting dilemma: Lyndhurst had become a lot more successful than he’d ever anticipated, and as its principal his responsibilities began to shift. “I had to make a decision,” he says, “where I was going to become more of a business owner than an adviser. There was going to be a lot of time commitment coming with that, and I had to ask myself: what’s the best outcome for my practice, for me, my family and my clients?”
Although he feels it could have “made sense financially” to continue running Lyndhurst, many of his clients are in vulnerable circumstances and joining Shadforth enabled him to provide a “better continuity of service beyond being a one-man band.”
A shared philosophy
Along with freeing Fraser up to focus on what he does best, he also found a professional services firm that shared what he calls his “evidence-based investment philosophy.” On top of this, because Shadforth is owned by IOOF, which itself owns a trustee company, there’s “good alignment, because IOOF understood what my practice was. That meant there was a very good alignment from a corporate point of view.”
“Even though Shadforth operates under a large entity,” he says, “the business has retained a strong adviser-driven ethos that’s dedicated to excellent client service.”
Administrative support
Fraser says the assistance he’s received from an administrative perspective has been significant, adding: “Once I looked at the administration support we were going to receive – the paraplanning and so on – not to mention the opportunity to work in a collegiate atmosphere, it was clear it was the right path for us.”
He continues: “the additional resources we gained by joining Shadforth was the equivalent of about adding about $1 million in revenue if we were still operating under Lyndhurst from a purely operational point of view. That freed up a lot of resources for me to focus on trying to secure new clients, develop into new markets and also do some pro bono work.”
