When Bronwyn Cant first moved to the Riverland in South Australia, a horticultural border region along the Murray, she was a young mum with a nursing background.
Her husband was a horticultural farmer who had taken up the family business, which meant moving to a remote community that was “30 km from the nearest town”.
“It was pretty isolating,” Cant says now, casting her mind back four decades. “I started to think about what I could do, and I came up with accounting. Mainly because that was the only TAFE course being offered in the region at the time, as it was very isolated.
“But I figured it may even help in the family farm when we took it over later.”
Cant spent some time doing book work for the local farmers’ co-ops, but was given scant opportunity to advance.
“I had a moment when I realised that no matter how many skills I acquired, the board of directors on the growers’ associations would never appoint me to a senior management role,” she says. “It was the ’80s and there was a very solid glass ceiling in place.”
Not long after her realisation, Cant was offered a job as a planner in a new firm that was finding its legs.
Planning was wholly unregulated at that stage and the firm was purely interested in making money off clients.
Cant lasted exactly three months.
“But I was still interested in planning and I took some of those clients with me,” she says.
Cant established Vizion in 1993 and her clients are mostly farmers. She travels hundreds of kilometres to pull up a chair at their kitchen table, and her word and reputation are everything.
“I never wanted to be one of those people who was ducking behind a bin of potatoes because they saw someone they didn’t want to see at the local supermarket,” she says. “Our community is so close so my credibility and authenticity is all I have.”
As a farmer herself — her and her husband have since fully taken over the family horticultural business — she knows first-hand the trials of farming life.
“There is a confluence of factors that farmers face, from the nature of farming, to the weather and its unpredictability, to Government regulation,” she says. “Everything comes together with farmers and it’s very complex.”
She saw some sad figures on spreadsheets during the drought years, but admires the toughness of the other locals.
“The numbers were horrible, and people were going further into debt to keep the farm going or they were selling up and leaving the land,” she says.
“My job was to go through those numbers with them and to give them the external perspective.
“Things such as, ‘Have you even spoken to your children to see if they even want to take over the farm?’ ”
The drought may have passed, but farming remains a tough field and Cant applies the same methodology in speaking with clients today as she did then.
“Sometimes people will come to me and they will present me with a solution to the problem they think exists,” she says.
“And I say to them, ‘Let’s just go back and look at what you want and what your goals are and see if this is the real problem’.
“That is definitely what takes the most amount of time.”
About eight years ago, Cant moved to a fee-for-service model and is proud of the depth of the relationship she shares with her clients.
“I’m really bossy,” she says, with a laugh. “The feedback I get on forms is, ‘She is a lovely adviser and you had better do what she says’.”
| Bronwyn Cant
Name of firm: Vizion Financial Planning Name of licensee (if not self-licensed): Securitor Time in the industry (previous jobs?): 24 years Academic qualifications: Diploma in financial planning Professional association memberships: AFA Other memberships: Most Trusted Adviser Network |
