The SMSF Association’s director of technical and professional standards, Graeme Colley, has hailed as a success a test run of a new format for technical sessions to be held at the SMSF Association National Conference in Adelaide next year.
“I’ve been doing some master classes in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne this week, and we’ve had pretty good crowds – better than we’ve had in the past,” Colley says.
“That’s mainly because we changed it a bit, and it’s worked out well. It’s mainly been about self-managed funds and structuring investments, and getting people to think about the most appropriate way you might structure a particular investment.”
Colley says this represents a departure from the “pure technical” approach the association has traditionally taken.
“The way in which we’ve done it in the past is to have a session on, say, in-house assets, or on the acquisition of assets from members, but this looks at it from a more comprehensive view, a higher view, where you’re looking at the whole range of technical possibilities plus the structure that you would fit it under.”
Colley says the structure of this week’s master class series will be adopted at the national conference in February.
“We had this idea earlier this year that we would introduce far more comprehensive sessions into the conference through the workshops that we’ve got next year,” Colley says.
“That’s totally new, and what we’re doing there is spending a double session – that’s an hour and half – where we are looking at how to fix up problems that might have been created. It’s a specialist stream that we’ve got, and it’s limited to [SMSF] Specialist Advisers [SSAs], and we’re limiting it to no more than 100 people at each session.”
Colley says the sessions will be split into groups of 20 people, and “while we’ve got someone that will oversee the whole thing and create the problem that they have got to solve, or need to fix up, each group of 20 people will have their own person supervising that group”.
“Everyone will have their own little ‘tutor’ for it,” he says.
The SMSFA national conference typically attracts between 1100 and 1500 delegates, meaning demand for the workshop session could be intense.
“But they have got to be specialist members,” Colley says.
“Over the past few years we’ve had comments from people saying they want to see more specialist arrangements, and more case studies – and more complexity in the cases that are there.
“We thought about that and we thought, well, you could have a reasonably large session but they really don’t provide any value.
“It is elitist, but we’ve given people the opportunity – first in, best dressed.
“And we’re going pretty well. In the first couple of week everyone who is a specialist and wanted to come to the conference, wanted to come to these specialist sessions. It’s optional, but we were more than pleased about that.”
Colley says he was keen to use this week’s master classes to “experiment, and see how much the audience would participate in it”.
“That’s been excellent,” he says.
“And overall, this series that I’ve done has been far more successful than any others we’ve done.”
