Michael Chesworth – retired
I’ve been in professional services for 40 years and retired last year, but at one stage I was general manager of what we call premium banking at Westpac.
I’d sometimes sit in the planners’ interviews with customers – though I’m not sure how much they liked it – and I was really impressed with the relationship David had with customers. We’d had other planners, but there was always a bit of trepidation…like, ‘My god, what am I going to say to this guy?’ But when David came on board, he had no worries about debating things with me and saying, “Look, here’s what we should be doing.” I mean, when I was general manager of planning, in many ways I was his boss’s boss’s boss, but that didn’t faze him at all. And it didn’t faze me either.
I took some long-service leave in 2016 and planned to work another nine months before leaving corporate life. But we were unsure. One day we saw David, and he pre-empted the entire thing. He said: “You want to know if you’re in a position to leave the organisation and live the life you want to live, don’t you?” He’d mapped it all out for us.
Someone once told me that the main conversation isn’t the one you have when a client is in front of you, it’s the conversation they have when they get in the car to go home. By the time my wife, Eleanor, and I got in the car that day, we were both euphoric. It was confirmation. He detailed things well enough so that I could go straight to the chief executive and say ‘I’m out of here’.
David’s energetic and he runs at a thousand miles an hour. He’s a person who wants to help you, and wants you to be successful. I don’t know of any customers who leave him.
David Simon principal adviser, Integral Private Wealth
Mike’s a lovely guy, really affable and friendly. He became a client in 2008 when we were at Westpac – I looked after one of his best friends but I certainly didn’t ask for a referral. I mean, you don’t prospect colleagues. He hadn’t really gone through the true holistic financial planning process at that point. Because he’s spent 40 years in financial services, he’s quite savvy, but he had a complex array of issues.
If you’re an executive for a bank, shares become a big part of your remuneration, and there are a lot of implications around taxation and diversification. I guess he was looking for a simplification of complexity. It was almost like being in a theme park full of waterslides that are all crossing over one another, where he just wanted one waterslide going down.
We spoke about trusts and superannuation, about investing in his name, in his wife’s name – the lot. Mike was quite averse to debt, yet he had a margin loan and an investment loan. So I had to recommend he alter his financial position to comply with his risk profile and also his investment ideology. These can be quite confrontational conversations, especially with an executive who has thousands of people reporting to him, including me. But I think the strategy shift helped him feel like he was in greater control and less vulnerable. The first year was very different to now.
Like any relationship, we had to build trust, not just in the person but in the process. It takes time, even if someone comes recommended. Initially, he was a little distracted, but now he wants to spend a lot of time understanding things and getting more informed. And I spent so much time getting his wife, Eleanor, involved and engaged. She’s a really active participant now and seems to enjoy the meetings.
Mike has been around financial services for a long time, but you still need rigour and discipline – look at the way Roger Federer uses coaches, serving specialists and physical therapists. You need help. He’ll like that, being compared to Federer.
