Laurie wants to stop and retire.
Originally from New Zealand, he built a landscaping business from nothing in 1986 to the best on the north coast.
He reckons he is working harder than ever.
Finding and keeping staff is getting harder.
Dealing with their attitudes is even tougher.
His father built Tauranga’s biggest sheet metal business serving New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The old man was never home when he grew up. Didn’t have any time to come to his school events or weekend matches.
They didn’t take many family holidays.
He was the youngest in a busy family with five kids.
Life was OK. Hectic, but OK.
When he told his parents he was leaving home to start something in Oz, the old man lent him enough to make his start in a landscaping job.
The rest is history.
Laurie is black and white.
Nothing needs to be deeper than a teaspoon.
If something can’t be explained simply on paper, forget it.
It is what it is.
Hard work, watching his football team and poking around in his shed is a good week.
He was never around when his kids were young.
If he had his time again, he’d get more involved with his three girls as they grew up, but that’s the past.
It had suited him that his wife took on most of the kid stuff as he built his business. She was available as she worked regular hours in an office job.
He always thought everything would be OK.
She left him six years ago.
Just after their youngest left for university in Canberra.
The two other kids live with her.
He has a new partner.
Her divorce was messier than his.
He wants to keep their financials separate.
He thinks she does, too.
ADVISERS?
Laurie isn’t short on advisers.
A business broker had referred the financial planning firm he met with.
The broker helped him purchase two businesses during Covid and is potentially finding a buyer for the whole business.
Laurie doesn’t know his banker very well, as the good one he had has left. She arranged a valuation of the business pre-Covid when he bought a warehouse. He’s still trying to get copies of that paperwork. His valuations have changed as he bought some heavy-duty machinery and at least another half dozen different vehicles. He also owns a few holding yards the bank doesn’t know about.
He likes his accountant of ten years, but the guy has been promising for months to provide some numbers to help Laurie with new valuations.
Laurie’s new life partner pays a financial adviser from Melbourne. She said her guy offered to fly up and meet with them both. He reckons there’s a conflict of interests if he wants to keep their financial lives separate. The guy keeps ringing.
Laurie is getting plenty of advice.
But how does he know what the best advice is?
ADVISER ROLE?
What is the role of an adviser?
Is the role based on what each client wants?
Or is the role about providing the relevant subject matter expertise for clients to progress, which can differ from what the client may want?
Or does the role extend beyond specific subject matter expertise and include the support of the post-advice progress, with ongoing re-assessment to ensure enduring progress?
Or is it doing for the client whatever the client would do for themselves if they possessed the adviser’s objectivity, impartiality, expertise, experience, networks, knowledge and beliefs to only serve each client’s comprehensive best interests?
(Obviously, any debate about the role of an adviser in this country is ridiculously influenced by a Corporations Act that still can not differentiate between financial product advice and non-product advice.)
Advisers, bureaucrats, and consultants like me might have opinions regarding Laurie’s best advice.
But can’t only Laurie determine his best advice based on what is most valuable to him?
If that is the case, is the fundamental role of an adviser to first help Laurie impartially identify what is of most value to him before advising him on how best to achieve it?
Or is that the kind of “sales mumbo-jumbo” everyone so distrusts about financial advisers?
What do you reckon?
Photo credit: shutterstock_2425524929
ABOUT JIM STACKPOOL
Since 1989, Jim has influenced, coached, and consulted financial advice and accounting firms across Australia. His training firm, Certainty Advice Group, skills comprehensive advisory teams to price and deliver valuable, methodical, non-person-dependent advice relationships with their clients. He has built a collaborative community of firms aligned to his firm’s comprehensive advice model – Certainty Advice – Australia’s only Certification Mark accredited by ACCC and IP Australia for impartial financial advice. He presents at conferences, has judged professional advice awards, written industry white papers, chaired practice management curriculums for tertiary institutions, and authored four books on financial advice – his latest being What Price Value.