Professional Planner and MLC brought together some of the industry’s leading consultants to identify the steps that all financial planning business owners can take right now to create businesses that will thrive and prosper regardless of the regulatory and industry challenges they may be facing.
PARTICIPANTS: Rod Bertino, principal, Business Health; Andrew Inwood, principal, CoreData Market Research; Tony McDonald, co-founder and owner, T&C Consulting; Duncan McPherson, head of licensee and productivity, MLC Advice Partnerships; Bob Neill director, Seaview Consulting; Dr Adam Tucker, medical director, Beddoes Institute; Paul Tynan, chief executive officer, Connect Financial Service Brokers; Sue Viskovic, founder, Elixir Consulting.
It may never before have been as challenging to run a financial planning practice as it is today. Regulatory change has caused a rethink of business structures – sometimes from top to bottom – and ongoing economic uncertainty means consumers are seeking greater value for money in the services they buy from financial planners.
At the same time, the ongoing push towards professionalism is recasting how financial planners relate to clients, and this in turn has an impact on how a business must be structured and managed to support the provision of professional services, and to be profitable.
A concept that almost all financial planners grapple with is that of “utility”, says Andrew Inwood, the founder and principal of research firm CoreData. Inwood says utility is really another way of saying: “This is what I do, and this is how much it costs.
Read the full feature, Practice made perfect.
