Ex-Guardian Financial Planning adviser, Lance Milham, advises other advice firms contemplating a dealer group change to do the necessary due diligence to identify a licensee who has the interest and the resources available to help build your business.
In May 2016, after many years running an advice business with Guardian, Lance’s Brisbane-based financial planning firm CB Financial moved to become an Authorised Representative of Centrepoint Alliance Wealth.
While the move was prompted by Guardian announcing its intention to close its license, Lance said that he was unhappy with a number of aspects of their support and had been looking at other licensee options for some time.
“We were already well down the track with Centrepoint Alliance and two other firms, prior to receiving our notice,” Lance said.
“Doing due diligence on other licensee firms is time-consuming but ultimately very important to ensure you are moving for the right reasons to a licensee who is going to help you deliver quality advice and grow your business.
From the 17 responses, Lance and his team put together a decision matrix weighted towards what they thought were most important. This was then shortlisted to five licensees and, after receiving feedback on how their advice and support staff interacted with the licensee staff, reduced the number down to a final two. Lance then met at a board level with the relevant people, and Centrepoint Alliance won the role.
The whole due diligence and transition process took approximately four months.
“The transition itself was not difficult, it was a matter of our people adjusting to new ways of doing things,” Lance said. Our biggest legacy issue was transferring client data from COIN to XPlan. The data that came out of Coin was in a format that wasn’t useable, it needed updating and we lost a lot of history around advice creation and modelling.
“Centrepoint has added value in many ways. They have supported us in understanding their policies and processes, and their technical team is second to none. You get sensible and commercial responses. Importantly, they work with me on the direction of the business.”
