A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece for professionalplanner.com.au having a crack at Yellow Brick Road for a retirement planning promotion it staged at a recent Sydney Football Club A-League match.
It was an easy target and the article accurately represented my reaction to what I saw at the time, which was pretty dismal.
Not long after it was published, the chief executive officer of YBR Wealth Management, Matt Lawler, left a voicemail. Lawler is a class act and his message was more reasoned and measured than it could have been (certain members of the AFA could take note).
The upshot was that we met for a coffee this week not far from our respective offices and he explained the background and the strategy of the A-League event.
What the crowd at the Sydney Football Stadium didn’t know at the time was that the Celebrity Apprentice contestants were being filmed for an episode of the television show due to go to air on Channel Nine in early May. Lawler explained that the TV footage will suffer none of the considerable sound and vision issues that the “live” performance suffered from.
And the live performance was the culmination of a process that took several days, during which the contestants explained in some detail their own experiences with inadequate retirement planning, and explored some of the reasons why people tend not to engage with the subject until it is, in may cases, too late. This background and context will also go to air in May.
So, in fact, the audience for the retirement planning promo wasn’t me, my daughter and 15,600 other people at the Sydney Football Stadium at all – which is just as well – but an estimated 1.2 million people who will tune in to Celebrity Apprentice in May.
And those viewers will get a fuller and more rounded idea of what retirement planning is and why it’s a good idea to start it early.
Planning for the masses
Yellow Brick Road’s strategy is to take the financial planning message to the masses. It has about 130 advisers – either proper authority holders or advisers operating under its credit licence – and it has a tie-up with a range of service providers, including Macquarie Bank and OneVue, to offer a full range of services to the public.
It’s building a high-street retail brand, and building a retail presence takes heavy-duty marketing. One million-plus viewers of an hour-long TV show is not a bad start.
Increasing awareness of the benefits of financial planning is a noble objective, and Lawler’s explanation of the SFS performance got me thinking. Right now, only about 20 per cent of the eligible Australian adult population currently use the services of a financial planner. Not a lot is being done to successfully grow that number. Everyone talks about it, but there are few strategies that seemed aimed at doing it.
If the YBR strategy works, it will expand its own customer base, but it also has the potential to attract more consumers to the financial planning industry overall. In his phone message, Lawler expressed the hope that I wasn’t becoming cynical – I prefer to think of myself as sceptical – but now I can see why he might have thought that.
Is more better?
A bigger market means more planners will be needed to service clients. One way to increase those numbers would be to recruit a whole bunch of new financial planners to the industry. But it seems that many licensees prefer to grow by poaching from their rivals; at the same time they’re avoiding being raided themselves by paying ridiculous “retention” or “loyalty” payments to planners before the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) put an end to the worst conflicted remuneration structures.
These “growth” strategies are cannibalistic, at best, and suicidal at worst. Either way, they’re unedifying and hark back to the darkest and dumbest days of the life insurance industry’s so-called agency development wars. We know how that ended, and it is to be hoped that there are enough people around who have learned from history not to repeat the same mistakes. (Cynical? Me?)
But none of that is YBR’s problem, and Lawler remains focused on his own organisation’s strategy and growth plans. It will be fascinating to watch in coming months and years how YBR progresses in building a retail brand in the financial planning space against competition from major banks and institutions.
I’ll be tuning in to the Celebrity Apprentice episode in May to see how it plays out on TV. While it will be the first time I’ve ever watched this show, I am a regular watcher of Sydney FC games. I hope that in future I can watch their games in relative peace – or at least without anything else adding to the threshold level of agitation that they seem to be able to create for fans all on their own.
