For Via Financial Group co-founder Matthew Read the equation is simple: the bigger the business gets, the greater the impact it can have on the community it serves.
“Our key goal is simple as this – if we are being held accountable,” Read tells Professional Planner.
“We are B Corp certified – which is a badge, I know – but it simply means we are accountable to multiple stakeholders and the essence of that is using the business as a force for good.”
The business was a merger of two practices licensed with Apogee Financial Planning in 2017. Read ran Monet Financial Solutions which was a specialised in high-net-worth, retiree, and SMSF specialist advice; LRM Wealth Management was an insurance-based business.
Read says the goal of the firm is to double – or ideally triple – the size of each practice within the overall business.
“If we do that, it means we double or triple the impact we have in using the business as a force for good,” Read says.
“It’s not a specific goal that we need to be the biggest on the eastern seaboard, it’s simply we’ve got capacity, we’re really good at what we do, and we want to maximise the impact we have as a business as a force for good for communities.”
But this drive wasn’t just coming from the top, Read says the focus and the culture of the business has been driven by the firm’s staff.
“When we did merge and we got together, we had a deep session around what do we really stand for and what do we represent,” Read says.
“Through an offsite session our own team helped us unpack what they stood for and what we represent as a business.”
The organisation has offices in Avalon, on Sydney’s northern beaches; Bangalow, outside of Byron Bay; the Gold Coast; and Norwest, located in Sydney’s north-western suburbs.
“We’re definitely not level 41 in the city,” Read says.
“We are quite deliberately positioned to work with our communities and within our communities. So much of what we stand for is being accountable for being impactful within our communities.”
The firm focuses on financial planning only, eschewing the opportunity to imbue the practices with accounting or mortgage services, and will refer out when needed. “We don’t try to be the one stop shop,” Read says.
The firm receives referrals from third parties but has no joint ventures, and its growth has come largely from referrals from existing clients.
“A lot of our insurance work comes from either existing wealth businesses that are moving away from doing insurance,” Read says.
“It’s fair to say we’re swimming against the tide a little bit, there’s a lot of businesses moving that.
“We’ve just gone through 12 months of re-investment, loading that up to be supported by an even better process and team.”
For his outlook for the profession, Read says there are more things to be optimistic about than there are to be pessimistic on.
“There certainly could be some disruption with artificial intelligence, there could be some disruption with continued advancements in IT, but ultimately how proud we should be that we’re not being called an industry anymore, we’re being called a profession,” Read says.
“We’ve got the opportunity where the next generation [is] studying and graduating with financial planning and they want to be champions for being valuable.”
Read says one of the biggest current issues on the community is financial stress, which he believes the profession has the privilege of mitigating.
“Who knows maybe that keeps people married [or] keeps families together,” Read says.
“With a whole new army of talent that are starting to graduate through a trusted professional pathway, that actually makes me feel far more optimistic that people are choosing to do what we want to do.”
