A sudden appreciation for the real risk/reward trade-off led to Darren Steinhardt accidentally discovering financial planning. Now he has his sights set on a national presence for his planning business. Simon Hoyle reports.
Darren Steinhardt never planned a career in financial services. After finishing Year 12, he enrolled as a cadet police officer with the Queensland Police Service.
“I wasn’t attracted to the business at all,” Steinhardt says.
“I love it now, I am absolutely passionate about it now and thank my lucky stars that I’ve ended up here, but I started in the industry in March 1989 with SGIO as an insurance consultant. At that time I was a police officer. I had a couple of interesting things occur while I was a police officer, so it was time for me to get out – one of those things was being shot at, which I didn’t really appreciate. I was thinking back then with overtime and everything I was doing, and night work, I got paid $27,000 for the year, and I thought it’s worth a bit more than that for the risks that are being taken.”
Less than 10 years ago, Steinhardt set up his current business, Infocus Money Management. Based on the Sunshine Coast, it has 75 offices across the country, and about 150 financial planning practitioners. His target is to have 250 offices, and to establish Infocus as a “publicly-recognised, quality financial planning practice – a national financial planning practice”.
‘The head office is about five minutes’ drive from four magnificent surfing breaks’
“The head office is about five minutes’ drive from four magnificent surfing breaks. That’s why we’re there,” Steinhardt says.
“And by the way, trying to recruit key staff away from the likes of Sydney and Melbourne is easy. If we want a good researcher, I just shoot them down a photograph of what the point break looked like at Point Cartwright this morning, and ask them what they did with their kids before school today.
“There’s 35 staff at head office, encompassing the MD functions and a COO, compliance and professional standards, research, administrative support (brokerage, conferences), IT, training and implementation, and BDMs.”
All of this is a far cry from the late 1980s when Steinhardt saw an SGIO job advertised, applied for it, and was accepted.
“I was happy, and over the moon, so I handed in my resignation at the police force,” he says.
“Then I was absolutely shocked when I turned up at SGIO on the first day to find out that everyone who had applied for the job got it, even – I was quite involved with the gym at the time – a couple of the not-so-bright-but-could-lift-heavy-things guys from the gym also got the job. It was back in the days where they would put on a whole lot of people and some would make it and some would fall out. That’s how I got started in the industry.
“It was an exceptionally brutal [way to do it], especially when I had given away what could have been quite a good career for it.”
Steinhardt says he discovered very quickly that he loved the financial services industry. The SGIO job initially involved selling insurance; as it developed he became involved with rollover funds “and became absolutely fascinated in it, and started doing an economics degree”.
Steinhardt says that in 1991 he met “a guy who had a big impact on my career – Ross Duncan, from MLC”.
“I was living and working in Mackay then, and he was the regional manager,” he says.
“I moved from SGIO over to MLC and stayed there for quite a few years and learned an amazing amount from Ross Duncan that helped me cement what I wanted to do in financial planning.”
A desire for a lifestyle change saw Steinhardt and his wife move from Mackay to the Sunshine Coast. For the first couple of years there Steinhardt focused on replicating what he’d had in Mackay. Then he had what he describes as a rehearsal for a midlife crisis.
“After a bit of soul-searching I decided that this industry that I’d happened to find myself in, I love it, I want to be here, but I want to do something more significant with it,” he says.
“At that point, with my wife, we took a couple of years to work out a plan and a vision of what we wanted to do with the business.”
That eventually led, in November 2001, to the establishment of Infocus. Steinhardt had a vision for the business, and for the people it would deal with.
“We do not want to deal with everybody,” he says.
“We call [our target market] the ‘Harvey Norman’ clients: the mums and dads who are just above average financially; the mass affluent. There are millions of them throughout the country. A lot of financial planners do target the high-net-worth clients, but that’s not the market that we’re really after.
“Having said that, we do have people who have a lot of money with us, but their mindset isn’t of a high-net-worth, demanding customer. Their mindset is they’re an average mum and dad with 2.3 kids and the dog and the bird, and they’ve done well in business. They still want to take advice, and we’ll have a good personal relationship with them.
