When Leanne Bull was just 13 she worked at the family service station serving fuel, washing windscreens and counting the takings. It was in Geelong in the 1970s, and a good long weekend might pull in $26,000. The family also had a car yard and panel shop.
The family was doing well. “We had farms at Drysdale; we had a blocks of land at Port Arlington; we had boats; we had absolutely everything,” says the founder and principal of Bull Financial Group, based in Bundaberg, Queensland.
But all that changed in 1980. “As soon as the petrol price doubled from 30c [a litre] to 60c in 1980, they sold everything and moved to Queensland with $1000,” Bull says.
There was little understanding of the concept of cash reserves and the need to save.
“I think business is the most important foundation of anything,” she says. “Without business, we’ve got nothing: no employees, no economy, no future – nothing. We have to have business. But we have to have people who understand how business works.
“There are a lot of people out there who are very good at their job, but they have no understanding of how to manage a business. They spend their profits, thinking the money is always coming in, and put nothing away for a rainy day. If you go back in time, even my grandfather was a very wealthy man, with 6700 acres of land out in the Mallee, and [he] got cancer in his early 50s and the family went from pretty much the richest in the area to pretty – well, Grandma had to board Collingwood football players.
“By the time I was 13 I was fairly grown up, and I had to make a lot of decisions. I wanted to make sure I lived a good life … but also that there was money to support it in the bad times.”
The desire to help others understand the power of deferred spending and long-term savings underpins Bull’s approach to advice, and this year she chalks up 30 years as a financial planner. In truth, the milestone was reached in September last year, but she plans to celebrate the anniversary with clients this month.
“We just didn’t want to do anything before Christmas,” Bull says. “Once we hold a function, clients refer – and we didn’t want any more referrals.”
Absolute, complete passion
Bull says it’s “absolute, complete passion for what I do” that has driven her through the past three decades, although it has not always been plain sailing. After a stint working on the Gold Coast, Bull moved back to Bundaberg and became a partner in a financial planning business there.
“I remember having a difficult patch with some people around me at one particular point in time and thinking that I needed to change my life,” she says. “But then I looked at my diary, and I saw the people I was committed to speaking to the next day and thought, well, I’d better help them out first, and then when I’ve got them sorted out I’ll look for something. But, of course, I never left.”
Instead, Bull went on to purchase the business outright, rebrand the business to its current name, and increase staff from three full-time and one part-time employee to 10 full-time and two part-time employees.
Over the course of three decades, Bull has established strong relationships with her clients.
“[Among] my clients I’ve got 38 who have been with me 25-plus years; 30 that have been with me 20-plus years; and another 70-odd that have been with me 15-plus years,” she says.
“And I’ve got their children and their grandchildren as clients in many instances.”
(Continues below.)
[tv playlist=’55a4af5c150ba0e92e8b459c’ theme=’pp_article’]
Helping comes naturally
Bull says that helping people comes to her naturally.
“I really enjoy taking the weight of the world off people’s shoulders,” she says.
“It’s something I find very easy, to help people. It took me a while to understand that there was a need to get people to pay for it. To me it’s like so much common sense that I felt like, ‘what am I doing for people? I’m just doing things that everyone could work out’. It’s taken me a long time to work out that not everyone can work it out.”
Building a business with such a strong client focus, and one that has evolved to become central to so many of its clients’ lives, takes commitment and discipline. Bull’s client base is clearly segmented, with a defined service offering for each segment.
“I’m doing about 266 appointments a year,” Bull says.
“In 2012 I did 344, which was just crazy. That’s when the floods [in Queensland] were happening, and this and that.
“I’ve always done a lot of things for clients. I’ve helped them with their Centrelink paperwork … I’ve helped them with whatever needed to be done, so they see us as the first port of call for help.”
Fostering client loyalty is a natural result. “People really need help. So if you help them, it’s easy,” Bull says.
“And they are getting bombarded with more information, and getting more confused, and needing more help. You would think that [additional information] is making it easier to work things out themselves, but that’s why I’ve got a very big team of people to service our clients. Most advisers work with one admin person or two admin people; I work with eight, and those eight do nothing but service and look after my clients.”
Image of Leanne Bull by Phil Carrick
This is an edited version of a feature article that appears in the Fenbruary 2016 edition of Professional Planner.
