Lifespan nears a decade

It is almost 10 years since John Ardino started Lifespan Financial Planning.

Starting up a financial planning dealer group reflected Ardino’s desire to run his own business after a decade in the industry.

“My background had been in financial services since 1983 working at Scottish Amicable,” he says. “It was taken over by Colonial, so I went to work for Count and in 1994 I left to set up my own company.”

With his background in dealing with accountants, Ardino started Lifespan offering financial planning services to them.

“This is what we have been doing for 10 years and we have been successful doing it,” he says.

Currently, Lifespan has 134 authorised representatives working in 100 offices throughout the country. The dealer group now has almost $1 billion in funds under advice.

During the past 10 years, Lifespan has remained non-aligned, despite plenty of offers.

“I had the personal resources to get the company up and running when it started,” Ardino says.

“We have continued to have the resources to keep the business running while offering a comprehensive set of services.”

He says this has been done without institutional support and Ardino believes selling part of the company would result in the institution wanting to run things.

“I know a lot of advisers like the idea of having an institution behind them to offer support and in some cases that has been very good,” he says.

“We haven’t wanted to go down that path despite numerous expressions of interest from institutions to take a stake.”

Ardino says the dealer group has held talks with some institutions on occasions, but at this stage of the business, he thinks a move in that direction is “inappropriate”.

The Lifespan structure revolves around providing services to a number of boutique accounting and financial planning offices.

“We don’t employ financial planners or have outlets or branches,” he says.

“We provide support services that include training, compliance, an adviser help desk, paraplanning and dealer discounts on software.”

The dealer group does provide some practice management advice and marketing support.

“Having an accounting base, our businesses know their client base so marketing is not a big issue,” Ardino says.

The introduction of the Financial Services Reform Act (FSRA) has added significantly to the workload of offering the services to planners, he says.

“We are in the process of installing a new IT-based compliance system which is a result of FSR upgrading,” Ardino says.

Recruitment of financial planners to the group is not a priority, he admits.

“We want to connect to our existing people rather than continually recruiting,” he says.

“When we do recruit, we want compliance orientated people rather than good sales people. This is because I like to sleep well at nights and I do sleep well at nights.”

Ardino says the long-term plan is to steadily increase the size of the dealer group and its influence on the financial services industry.

“Our first strategy is to grow the existing businesses to deliver quality advice,” he says.

“Our second strategy is to grow the number of planners because we do have an ageing number of accountants in the business.”