The Strategist Group - back from the brink

Lookingback, Grant Abbott, the chief executive of The Strategist Group (TSG), is not sure exactly when things started to go so wrong with his business, all he knows is that they did.

Abbott, who founded TSG in 1996, built the business into one of the leading providers of expertise to practitioners in the self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) industry, advising many groups on how to make a business out of this fast growing segment of the super industry.

But behind the scenes, TSG itself has spent the best part of the last year teetering on the edge of financial collapse.

While the situation TSG found itself in may go deeper than any single cause, there is no doubt the group’s slide has coincided with its decision to diversify into SMSF administration.

Over the last 18 months, TSG has spent countless millions of dollars building its Total Super administration platform, leaving the group with a severe cash flow shortage and in very murky financial waters.

Apart from anything else, the launch of the administration platform took Abbott even further away from what has always been his core focus — advising in a field, self-managed super, that he is passionate about.

“I began to think about marketing [my] product. It was always about numbers, numbers, numbers. I lost what was important to me in business and the business started to slowly die,” Abbott wrote to his clients in his monthly newsletter,The Strategist.

The lowest ebb for Abbott came in mid-February last year when he had to make 12 staff redundant in the same week. Abbott admits it was at that point he considered giving it all away.

“I was out of control and so was my business,” Abbott says.

“My mind was telling me to take option one — walk away and go back to a well paid job with an accounting firm or fund manager.”

Instead, Abbott made the decision to fight on.

Twelve months on, with the group seemingly back from the brink, Abbott is urging his clients to make equally conscious decisions about their business.

Abbott has told his clients they can continue in their current relationship with TSG, or they can get serious about building a specialist SMSF business and join TSG’s new Strategic Alliance program, Abbott’s vision for resurrecting TSG out of its financial woes.

Through the alliance program, launched in February, TSG is looking to build a national network of specialist SMSF practitioners delivering to clients a uniform message about self-managed super under the TSG Strategic Alliance Program brand.

According to Abbott, groups that join the alliance will, for a monthly fee, be provided with the ongoing training and business support required to set up and run a specialist SMSF business, including direct telephone access to specialist SMSF consultants.

Up to 30 groups, concentrated in New South Wales and Victoria, have already joined the alliance program and TSG is aiming for at least 100 strategic alliance partners nationwide within 18 months.

But more importantly, the new direction puts Abbott back in the position he has always been most comfortable with: that of trusted adviser, not salesman.

“For the first time in my life I have total focus on how I want to lead my life and how I want my business to be,” he says.