Who are the Best Practice finalists?

The quest to identify Australia’s best financial planning practice has produced a shortlist of finalists that demonstrate how regulatory change and economic uncertainty represent no hurdle to running a great business.

The Best Practice Competition 2013, run by Professional Planner and consulting firm Business Health, and supported by MLC Advice Partnerships, attracted more than 200 nominations.

From those nominations, 118 practices completed comprehensive online Business Health HealthChecks. An extraordinary 37 practices, or almost one-third of all entrants, were ranked as “super fit” under Business Health’s criteria, compared to an industry-wide average of 5 per cent.

The six finalists below will be assessed by a judging panel before a winner is announced. Comprehensive coverage of the finalists and the winner will appear in the September edition of Professional Planner magazine.

Business Health owner Terry Bell says the finalists represent a spread of licensee types and represent the strongest field of contenders ever attracted to the competition.

The average revenue of the 118 entrants was $1.6 million per practice, and the average notional profit margin – assuming a $100,00 salary for each business owner – was 35 per cent. The competition entrants control client funds of more than $16 billion. (For a full profile of the field, see the August edition of Professional Planner magazine.)

“We’d say they are the best practices we’ve ever come across,” Bell says.

“As a cohort – and we’ve run this competition in previous years – and in terms of the quality… this is a very high-quality field of practices. We’ve never seen a better level across the whole entry.

“Here we’ve had more than 30 practices gauged super fit, which is not easy to achieve, but they’ve done it.”