One of the pioneers of the planning profession and a true professional to the core has sadly passed away.
Max Campbell, co-founder of the CIS and CWM integrated planning and accounting business, instrumental in the foundation and success of the Snowball Group, died unexpectedly on Sunday, November 16, 2014.
At a time when financial planners are searching for greater definition around what constitutes a true professional planner, Max was ahead of his time and the embodiment of a client-first, professional approach.
It came naturally to Max – no need for textbook and regulatory-driven policies on professional standards. His family was his driver and his clients were treated like family. Looking after clients’ best interests was a given, not an obligation.
While recognising the need for increased efficiencies and productivity, he never lost sight of the “soft” issues of customer satisfaction and the long-term drivers of value creation. He not only maintained a loyal client base, but continually strove to grow the base and unselfishly nurtured clients through transition to greater reliance on his “family” of able-bodied assistants, riding on his coat tails and learning his trade.
Having sold CIS and CWM into the Snowball Group in 2000, Max was a founding director and driver of the Snowball business, all the way from its infancy to a public company with around $5 billion of funds under advice and the eventual merger with Shadforth Financial Group to create SFG Australia, now merged with IOOF. Max was in no small way a major contributor to the Snowball success story.
His contribution was most valued in the staunch application of his core values of integrity and professionalism. Chairman of Snowball Group from 2003 to 2005, Andy Brown, remarked that Max was “the conscience” of Snowball, and indeed he was a “keeper of the keys” to the core values that epitomised and underpinned the Snowball culture.
Most particularly, Max was an expert proponent of holding strong views but always engaging with respect in the articulation and presentation of those views, around the Board table and among the staff who also felt the family bond with their mentor and leader.
A key member of the management team, he was always the realistic but eternally optimistic voice, urging colleagues, even in the darkest times through the global financial crisis, to keep “planting acorns that will one day bear fruit”.
Snowball was awash with Max’s larger than life stories. Colleagues and staff quickly got used to his bear hug of “on the job, life lessons” and patriarchal entreats to put the customer first and to “ring the bell” when successful so that everyone, from the top to the bottom, would share in the collective success.
Above all else, he was at the epicentre of all things family – his close family, extended relatives, friends, staff and clients. He was proud of his home family’s successes but also equally up to speed with the goings on of the families that made up the Snowball workplace.
Such core values, combined with innate, uncompromising professionalism serves as an example to us all, at a time of critical evaluation of the wealth management and planning professions, a legacy best heeded and ignored at our peril.
