FinWiz revives Enterprise 121
Sixteen planning practices in the Financial Wisdom network have entered a program of business coaching and consulting through the dealer group’s Enterprise 121 operation, which was revived in January this year.
Financial Wisdom’s parent, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, originally established Enterprise 121 in September 2004 to take equity stakes in boutique advice firms and supply high-end dealer services to planning groups outside the bank’s network.
In October 2005, the strategy of taking minority holdings in planning businesses was discarded and the operation was amalgamated with the dealer group.
Financial Wisdom general manager Paul Barrett said Enterprise 121 had been repositioned to offer high-end consulting and coaching services through its five-member team, which is headed by Greg Hansen and includes a specialist in mergers and acquisitions, a marketing specialist, a process engineer, and a management consultant.
Barrett said he expects high-end services such as those offered by Enterprise 121 to be a key differentiator of dealer groups in future.
“The dealer group value proposition has changed significantly in the last few years from providing hygiene services, to extended services, to tailored one-to-one services,” he said.
Practices will be charged a fee of $11,000 for the services, with half of this to be refunded if performance targets, which are agreed to between the practice and Enterprise 121 at the outset of coaching or consulting, are met.
Barrett said to make sure participating practices valued the services and were prepared to implement recommendations, they would be required to qualify for coaching based on an assessment of their performance and how “coachable” they were considered to be.
“It’s one thing to have the capacity to pay and sit in front of a coach and another to have the intent to do something about it,” he said.
Barrett said the group was hoping to have 30 planning practices signed up to coaching and consulting services by October.
He said the services were only available to practices in the Financial Wisdom network and there were no plans to extend the service to Commonwealth Bank Financial Planning group practices as the expertise of team members lay in small to medium businesses, rather than operations in larger networks.
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