Celebrating its 100th anniversary, Shadforth CEO Terry Dillon says the firm is seeing ‘more growth than ever’ and is working to achieve a dominant position for in the high-net-worth client space.
The firm is also celebrating 10 years under institutional ownership with Insignia Financial, while Dillon has been in this role since 2018 and has over 20 years of experience as an adviser himself.
The business strategy is centred around creating a premium advice offering and more capacity for its advisers and staff, while being an ‘unapologetically growth business’.
“Because we are a large [business], our challenge now is not only to service our existing clients really well but really to move to a growth phase,” he tells Professional Planner.
The firm has over 100 advisers and serves approximately 10,000 client families managing $16 billion in assets on their behalf.
Dillon also adds that although he is “relative happy with that very big successful business”, there is always a question of ‘what if’ they were 10 times bigger and what the business would need to look like to then dominate the high-net-worth advice market in Australia.
“It’s not about being 10 times bigger but this is about challenging ourselves to think if we want to get better, so we could service more people, what are the sort of things we would have to do,” he says.
“Whether that involves embracing technology; becoming more efficient; seeing our clients more, not less, but in a more efficient manner that we had in the past.”
Shadforth uses a clear target operating model which is the advice philosophy under which every client’s investment is linked to an agreed goal or outcome expected to be achieved in the future and, according to Dillon, the issue is not to find potential clients.
“We would love to help everyone, but we tend to help people who will have half a million minimum in year one and two million within three to four years,” Dillon says.
“We are talking to high-net-worth people and our problem, at the moment, is making sure that we can get through the work in a timely manner.”
The licensee expects FY24 will end up being one of the strongest years of organic growth.
“That level of growth is coming [mostly] from our existing clients referring us to new people and that is 75 per cent of our new clients who would join us this year,” Dillon says.
“As a business, Shadforth is at the stage where we probably have more growth in our work than we ever had before and our challenge for the past six years has been actually to create capacity for our advisers, so they have time to look after existing clients better and take on new [ones].”
The Shadforth CEO also emphasises his company is in the business of “making 50 year promises to clients” and aspires to be “the last adviser any client ever appoints”.
“That is a very big commitment with someone’s money,” he says.
“We tend to take on clients in their early to mid-40s and then help them grow their wealth through retirement and manage their retirement and manage their legacy beyond retirement.”
The two anniversaries for Shadforth come amid a shifting licensee business model for Insignia, which finalised the transition of Rhombus Advisory (RI Advice, Consultum and TenFifty) at the start of the current financial year.
Insignia maintained its salaried advice channels, Shadforth and Bridges, which Insignia CEO Scott Hartley has indicated is very much still a core part of the business.
Asked about the possibility that Shadforth can follow the fate of other once Insignia-owned businesses and be sold, Dillon says it’s always a possibility. “We are a very valuable business.”
“[But also] my expectation is that we will be a valuable business for Insignia for as long as I can see,” Dillon says.
“But I am sure that we would be a valuable business to other people as well, but my expectation is that we will be a long-term valuable member of the Insignia business.”
