The meaning behind the name of Andrew Peters’ planning firm, Semaphore Private, is usually lost on the younger generation.
But his older clients know exactly what he is referring to.
“Semaphore is an old signaling system, and my wife, who has a marketing background, helped me come up with the name,” Peters said.
“The idea behind the name is that we will point you in the right direction.”
The small Semaphore team has been steering clients to safe ground for seven years, but it wasn’t always smooth sailing.
When Peters first set out on his own he didn’t pay himself a wage for 18 months.
“I remember going into Target to buy paper because it was on sale,” he said.
“These days we would never think of doing that.”
When Peters, who has two children at university, left the large US multinational he was working for to start his own planning business, he gave himself two years to make it work.
“I said to my wife that if we couldn’t make it work by then I would go get a job with a big corporate,” he said.
“And, you know, just be miserable for the rest of my life.”
Luckily for Peters, starting Semaphore has been one of the best decisions of his life.
He has a small team of three employees, including Certified Financial Planners Tracey Pace and Juliet Callaghan, who have 15 and 24 years of financial services experience, respectively; and he refuses to take on too many clients because he likes to give them value for money and undivided attention.
“I think if you have more than 200 clients on your books, you are not really able to do a proper job,” he said.
“And I like to give my clients consistency with who they deal with. Often with the bigger firms they are moving people around and they are getting a different adviser each time.”
First planning job ‘stapling red forms to green forms’
Like many advisers before him, Peters “fell into” the financial planning industry.
He initially worked as a high school maths and physical education teacher “in a rough part of Gippsland” before quitting at the age of 27 to try his hand at something new.
“I picked up the paper one day and saw an advertisement for administrators at Mercer Wealth,” he said.
“It was 1987 and the ad said something like, ‘Are you numeric?’ and ‘Do you want to be trained’.”
Answering yes to both of those questions and short of attractive alternatives, Peters took the job thinking he would stay for about 12 months.
He ended up staying for 10 years.
“At first I was just stapling green forms to red forms,” he said.
“But then I got moved around the company and spent time in computer programming, then with the actuary guys, and I helped run some super funds for the police and army in Papua New Guinea.”
Eventually, he was tapped to work in the financial planning wing of Mercer.
“They asked me if I wanted to move across but I had no idea what financial planning even was,” he said.
“So I sat in on one of the meetings and I remember thinking it was fantastic. I loved the contact with people.”
Eventually he was poached by a US multinational where he spent five years before ultimately striking out on his own.
From school teacher to planner and golfer
It has been a long journey from Gippsland high school teacher to the head of an established financial planning business, but Peters has made sure to enjoy life along the way.
For the past 10 years, he has taken his family to remote or interesting parts of the world, including Hungary, Africa, Poland, on annual trips.
“We could have spent $50,000 a year sending them to an exclusive private school, but instead we thought we would take them overseas as part of their education,” he said.
Peters is also a “half-handy” golfer and now that he has turned 55 is a regular at seniors’ golf events across Victoria — where he bumps into a large amount of clients.
“The Saturday after the budget was handed down, the guys at golf jumped on me about what the super changes meant,” he said.
“I told them to book an appointment and that I was there to play golf!”
Andrew Peters’ business, Semaphore Private, features in 24 HOURS, a series of articles focusing on a day in the life of leading financial planning businesses, in the July edition of Professional Planner.
