A chance meeting in the waiting room of his local accounting firm helped seal Ben Lancaster’s fate.
“I ran into my old basketball coach, Gary Lucas, and he was a partner in an accounting firm and he suggested I come work for them,” Lancaster says.
“I was there for an interview anyway because I had $13 in my account and needed a job.”
Lancaster studied accounting and commerce at Melbourne University, and, on graduation, dutifully went through a range of interviews with the top-tier Melbourne accounting firms.
He made the final stages of many of the interviews, and had been encouraged to apply the following year, but Lucas’s offer was all the incentive Lancaster needed to lay down some roots in the Gippsland town of Sale.
“He was both an accountant and a financial planner so I joined the company, which was RGM at that stage,” Lancaster says.
“When I first went for the interview, they were concerned that I had too many ties to Melbourne — I had a girlfriend there at the time — but bumping into Gary made all the difference.
“It’s funny how life works.”
Lancaster spent the first 12 months with his head buried in accounts and quickly realised it was not for him.
“Gary suggested I try financial planning and it was a much better fit,” he says. “I am quite an outgoing and driven person, and I really enjoy helping clients so it was a much better job for me.”
After a few years, Lancaster, still in his mid 20s at this stage, realised he needed a break and took off travelling for a few months. While he was in Finland he received a phone call from Lucas asking him to return to Sale to work on a six-month project.
“There was not much happening in Finland and it was getting cold so I returned home,” he says.
Some 15 years later, and Lancaster is still there. The company has since morphed into DMG Financial, and now employs 14 staff.
“I remember when I first started I would fill out all of my own application forms and do all of the administration,” he says.
“It has changed a bit since then.”
Lancaster married a local girl not long after he returned from overseas, and they have three children and strong community connections.
“When you are a country business, you are held accountable by the bush telegraph,” he says.
“It can make or break your business. You really need to have a strong connection with the community.”
Which is partly why DMG Financial uses such a transparent fee structure, based on a yearly flat fee for clients.
“It is also just the right thing to do,” he notes.
“We have never shied away from talking about fees and how they are structured.”
Recently, the company has introduced its own DMG diversified portfolio that can be used as part of a client’s portfolio or as the total investment.
The portfolio will generally be exposed to around 25 underlying investments, most of which are further diversified, and the idea is to offer the flexibility to manage investments more conservatively or aggressively depending on market volatility.
“It’s partly in response to the lessons that came out of the GFC,” Lancaster says.
“It’s about a growth fund, but one that is diversified and flexible.”
None of the planners receive any financial kickback from the DMG diversified portfolio investments.
“Seeing this (fund) take shape has been extremely rewarding,” Lancaster says, when asked to nominate the highlights of his job.
“That, and watching the business grow. We put a lot of time and effort into staff training and all of our planners are either university educated or they are in the process of becoming so.”
