Sarah Riegelhuth runs a successful advice business for Millennials, is the author of finance book Get Rich Slow and has a couple of side businesses that are humming along nicely.
Success did not fall into her lap. She set up her advice business in 2012 and the last six years have been marked by the usual mix of start-up highs and lows.
“When you start out, you have no idea what you’re doing,” Riegelhuth, 36, says.
“You’ve never been responsible for paying other people before and you don’t want to let yourself, your clients, or the staff you’re employing, down.”
Riegelhuth worked hard but the learning curve was tough. By the time the end of 2015 rolled around, she had hit a brick wall.
Her Gen Y financial advice business, which she had co-founded with then-husband Finn Kelly, was bleeding money and she seriously doubted whether she could turn it around.
“We were losing $30,000 a month and the company owed us, the founders, $200,000,” Riegelhuth says. “I wrote the staff an email telling them I had let them down, but I was going to do everything to turn it around.”
That is exactly what she did. Putting into practice the principles she had extolled to her clients over the years, Riegelhuth did a comprehensive audit of her business to work out where the holes were.
“We worked out that the model was working, we just hadn’t translated enough of the interest into sales; there had not been enough emphasis on the marketing,” Riegelhuth says. “Within six months, we had turned the business around and now have a proper sales process. We’re aiming to be a $20 million company by 2020.”
Financial planning runs in Riegelhuth’s blood. Her father was an adviser and she worked in the family business for many years before taking it over.
She started her own company, WE Private, which catered to high-net-worth retirees, when she was just 28, and it wasn’t long before she spotted a gap in the market.
“I would ask clients how they came to be so successful and they would tell me that they started looking after their wealth early,” Riegelhuth says. “I noticed that there were lots of people in my generation who were running businesses, but not really looking after their own wealth.”
Later, she and Kelly decided to found Wealth Enhancers as a way of putting Millennial professionals and entrepreneurs on the right financial path.
The Wealth Enhancers business employs a membership structure. There are three tiers of annual membership (that can be paid monthly), which give the client various levels of finance coaching and portfolio management, along with admin services and access to a close community of movers and shakers.
“It’s not just financial advice that the planners provide, it’s a community of like-minded people,” Riegelhuth says.
About 44 per cent of her clients are women, a statistic seldom seen in traditional planning businesses.
“I think women these days realise that they can’t rely on a man, that they need to be in charge of their own finances,” Riegelhuth says. “Women are more independent these days.”
In addition to the book she has written, Riegelhuth runs global recruitment firm Grow My Money, and has started her own Wealth Enhancers video series on YouTube.
“I honestly feel like I have done about 10 per cent of what I am going to do,” Riegelhuth says. “Gen Y or Millennials could be the first financially free generation in history.”
Name of firm/business: Wealth Enhancers
Years in the industry: 17
Academic qualifications: Bachelor’s degree in financial planning from RMIT; master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Accreditations: CFP
Professional association memberships: AFA
Other memberships: Entrepreneurs’ Organization; League of Extraordinary Women (co-founder); Habitas
