(4 November, 2004) It’s all in a name in this tropical paradise

Rod Koch knows he’s a local — he just has to cut through the park in Cairns near the casino and look up at the monument to his great-grandfather, who was the first doctor in the area in the 1870s and responsible for curing malaria.

Koch would be the first to acknowledge the family name helps. His business — Koch Financial Services — has been thriving since its 1986 launch.

“It’s very cliquey…it’s still a small town. If you do something wrong then everyone talks. We have a case up on the [Atherton] Tablelands where a guy is claimed to have embezzled $9 million. He was a planner and that had a huge ripple effect…but we find that when people know our name, they relax,” Koch says.

He tells the story about how he was invited to a heated wharfie meeting where they were chewing over rollovers for redundancy when Cairns was still a seaport in 1998.

The wharfies were buzzing like angry bees, but when the head wharfie told them that a Koch was present, everyone shut up and listened.

These days, his major clients remain within the farming community.

Koch says $1.5 billion of the gross regional product comes from the [Atherton] Tablelands.

“People don’t realise how important farming is… tourism is important but far north Queensland also produces a wealth of horticulture and has a huge export beef and dairy industry. So the northern lying farms are where it’s at,” he says.

“We deal with the farmers and the mums and dads. We get involved in estate planning for farmers and Centrelink issues. No cane farmer ever retires; they die on the tractor.

“I set up from scratch as a life agent; there’s a return to insurance because mortgages are so high and many people are underinsured. I believe it’s a big issue,” Koch says.

“Overall, the industry has become more professional, which is great but the cost of meeting compliance as a small practice may be too high.”

He says most clients don’t appreciate what goes into service provision. Even standard professional development costs more for a regional practice when factoring in airfares to Brisbane for all the senior planners.

“We charge a combination of fee-for-service or a commission. It may be an entry fee as a percentage; clients like the fee for an initial consultation and the plan.”

And for Koch, travelling huge distances to make a house call is a regular event.

“It’s nothing to do 600 kilometres in a day. We have clients in north west Queensland who are a thousand kilometres away. When you go, you need everything with you…if you have them as existing clients, then you may stay over too.

“In the old times, you’d take fresh bread with you because that’s what they’d appreciate. You have a very personal relationship with these people.

“When the market turned down, we found it very difficult. We had to reiterate the plan with existing clients; some planners went into the bunkers and we inherited the funds. In the country, you’ve got to be able to deal with it.

“The FSRA is a challenge; [but] what concerns me is that I can’t help people who cannot afford the fees. But you can’t do it for nothing.”