Looking for a lesser role leads to top spot

For a man who has just been namedMoney ManagementFinancial Planner of the Year, John Wotherspoon is trying awfully hard to make himself redundant. But then Wotherspoon has been making himself dispensable all his working life and to good effect.

Wotherspoon, originally an engineer by trade, actually began his career in financial planning after proposing a restructure of his engineering department in the South Australian public service that effectively left himself without a job.

Looking back, with a four and a six-year-old at home, and with the 1987 stock market crash just around the corner, it was probably a risky move.

But Wotherspoon has always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit and besides, he had already had his business instincts confirmed.

While still at university, Wotherspoon started a band and took it on a national tour. The band, Benjamin Courtney, paid for his civil engineering degree while other musicians were still trying to figure out how to pay for their band.

“Musicians in general are not very commercial. We were a group of friends who put together a rather good band but we had the unusual attitude of also being commercial and quite well organised,” Wotherspoon says.

So well organised, in fact, that when touring became too much, and the time came to get a real job, Wotherspoon actually had to take a pay cut.

It is not a huge stretch to see that someone who can turn a teenage garage band into a profitable entity could also make a success of himself giving financial advice to others.

Wotherspoon picked up the trade with South Australian-based Wheeler, Grace and Pierucci from late 1987, before buying into a planning franchise under the Bleakleys dealer group.

Within four years, the franchise had 300 clients, $300,000 in revenue, two support staff and a succession of awards from Bleakleys itself confirming that Wotherspoon was already a rising star.

In 1994, along with business partner Rosemary Osman, Wotherspoon left Bleakleys to start his own planning group, Accumulus, and never looked back.

Today, Accumulus is widely heralded as a model planning practice, having grown 500 per cent in a little over seven years and currently advising on $300 million to well over 1,000 clients.

The group’s 18 staff - including 10 authorised representatives, five of whom are certified financial planners - generate over $2 million in revenue, although Wotherspoon himself remains Accumulus’ largest revenue producer, personally advising 150 clients.

But no-one becomes Financial Planner of the Year on business acumen alone.

When Wotherspoon was highly commended in last year’sMoney ManagementFinancial Planner of the Year awards, the tributes flowed for a values-driven man who was more than generous with his time to clients, staff, the financial planning industry and the community at large.

Those qualities have only been confirmed by the raft of nominations that were a factor in propelling Wotherspoon to the top spot in this year’s awards ahead of a host of other noteworthy candidates.

Talking to Wotherspoon, it is clear he is no longer motivated by the type of status, not to mention financial rewards, that can come from being named financial planner of the year. To be honest, he already has both.

“You get to a stage in your career when what you really want to do is give something back,” he says and it is something he has been doing for some time.

When he is not meeting with clients at Accumulus, supervising the group’s investment research, or just managing the day-to-day business, Wotherspoon passes on his experience as a mentor to new business owners as part of the South Australian Young Entrepreneur Scheme.

The support he provides South Australia’s up and coming entrepreneurs is simply an extension of the philosophy Wotherspoon has instilled at Accumulus from day one.

Wotherspoon teams up with all the young planners at the group, helping them to develop their skills and experience, before transferring some of his own clients to them.

“I have been gradually sharing my client base with other people so it can become the Accumulus client base rather than just John’s. So if I happen to be run over by a truck, my clients know there is a good quality team there looking after their interests,” he says.

It is a predictable comment from a man who has a record of trying to make himself expendable. But it also reveals one of Wotherspoon’s most enduring contributions to the financial planning industry in Australia.

As a founding member of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), and one of the first Certified Financial Planners (CFP) in South Australia, Wotherspoon was one of the early advocates of higher standards of training and professionalism for investment advisers, even in the face of often stiff resistance.

He remains, to this day, one of the most committed believers in life-long learning for financial planners.

“I came into this industry when they gave you a badge that read proper authority holder and sent you out to give advice. I felt that was very unprofessional and not a very good way to arm people to give good advice,” he says.

“So when Accumulus started to expand, the first person we took on, we brought them through from being a semi-professional paraplanner, to being a trainee planner, to being a young planner, to being a certified planner and now being a senior planner.”

“People who were used to financial planning only as a sales environment in the early days resisted that sort of formal qualifications process. Luckily, there were a few of us in the FPA with a strong voice.”

The comment is poignant. Wotherspoon, along with Osman, is in fact the voice of financial planning in South Australia, hosting a Saturday morning talkback show on local ABC radio.

His most consistent message to listeners is a simple one: financial planning is just a tool towards lifestyle planning. It is the perfect synopsis for what Wotherspoon himself has got out of financial planning.

“In terms of my own lifestyle, I chose early on that I wanted balance [between work and private life]. I’m trying to become dispensable, so I can continue working because I choose to, not because the business needs me,” he says.