Ben Smythe knows with complete certainty what he would have done for a living in another life.
“I would mow lawns,” Smythe says, without missing a beat.
“There is something I love about physical labour and the satisfaction that comes from it at the end of the day.”
Lawn mowing may seem like an incongruous second-career choice for someone who deals with clients’ investments and superannuation for a living, but it is, in fact, closely aligned with Smythe’s personal philosophy.
Despite his years of experience with big firms, Smythe has always preferred to work as part of smaller operations that can offer attentive, bespoke service.
Structure of big business makes it difficult to help every client
It took Smythe a while to work this out however, and when he graduated from the University of New South Wales with a commerce degree, he went knocking on the door of wealth management giant MLC.
“It was a graduate program and I basically did the rounds of insurance, funds management and so on,” Smythe says.
Part of his training involved manning the phones and handling customer complaints, which, at that time, were coming in thick and fast.
“It was during the time when whole of life policies were being sold, but they were not really giving clients what they expected,” he says.
“The returns on these products were very poor and I was fielding a lot of those calls.”
The experience had a profound impact on him.
“It was a great graduate program and I was working with some fantastic people, but I could see how the structure of big business was often the problem,” Smythe says.
“It was very hard to be a big company, make money and look after each and every client all at the same time.
“Many people focus on the behaviours of certain advisers, and that can be problematic, but sometimes it is the structure.”
After two-and-a-half years at MLC, he quit to travel the world. He was still in his early 20s and wanted to see Western Europe before he committed himself fully to his career.
Entrepreneurial spirit runs in the family
When he returned, at the age of 23, he started his own business, Australian Superannuation Nominees.
It was a game thing to do at such a young age, but Smythe had watched his father run a small business his whole life.
“I was taught that in order to really be successful in life you need to run your own race,” he says.
He sold the business after almost six years when APRA’s licensing regulations became prohibitively complicated and it became clear “they weren’t interested in having small trustees”.
The history buff then took six months off to train for and walk the Kokoda Track, before taking a role with Citigroup.
“It was basically a company of stockbrokers at that point, and they got me in to expand their wealth management area,” Smythe says.
“It ended up reinforcing many of my past assumptions about big business and it was not where I wanted to be at that stage of my life.”
Smythe, who had a young family by this stage, took a jump and moved his family to Newcastle for a role at Heffron SMSF Solution, where he worked in the sales and marketing divisions, and eventually became a director.
It was a good fit and Smythe stayed for eight years, but eventually his father’s entrepreneurial influence resurfaced.
Need created by the “advice scandal”
Three years ago he established his fixed-fee firm Smythe Financial Management.
“It was the desire to be my own boss, to live and die by the sword,” he says.
“I wanted complete autonomy. The advice scandal was also starting to bubble away in the background and I could see there was a need for this.”
Smythe started off on day one with no clients and no revenue, but a combination of persistence, talent and hard work has ensured his success.
“To work for yourself, you really need to be a decision maker,” he says.
“You need to not be afraid to stand out from the crowd and question the dominant paradigm.
“You also need to be adaptable because things are going to be very different from what you think.”
