The time to grow is Now.

Geoff Rimmer is not your typical managing director. Sure, he has an office in a towering skyscraper in Sydney’s CBD, a keen business sense and a good head for figures. However, what distinguishes Rimmer from many of his competitors is his charisma and down-to-earth frankness.

Rimmer joined NOW Financial Services (NFS) in 1999, two years after 12 members of the financial services industry, among them the chairman Tim d’Emdem, founded the group. In 1996, NFS was a life insurance business with 10 small businesses under its banner, including Now Securities. The majority of advisers within these earlier groups were from insurance group Legal and General.

It wasn’t until 1998 that members in NFS and Now Securities heard about CLERP 6 (which in turn become the basis for the Financial Services Reform Act), and decided the group desperately needed to get some skills, expertise and further capital to cope with the impending changes. Shortly after, the group went on a search for a business partner to help raise the capital.

At the time there were five suitors keen to strike an alliance. One of them, Financial Services Partners (FSP) proved the most attractive to NFS because it had adopted a strategy of remaining separate from NFS while providing the capital it needed. After a series of negotiations, the NOW group and FSP joined forces, with FSP taking on the role as dealer. At present, NOW Securities has $199 million in funds under advice, with the NFS group, which includes Abacus Funds Management, boasting $1 billion in funds under advice.

Rimmer says NFS started its existence with 100 life writers and then after joining with FSP, the new combined group merged with Abacus Funds Management, an unlisted property trust business.

“For us, the first step was to really build a framework around the business and to some extent, we were putting the level of organisation around the business that needed to be there,” he says.

Building around the business has been a key fixture within the NOW group’s strategy, with the next 12 months proving no different. Despite having had its securities licence since December 1999, NFS and FSP only began discussing the inclusion of financial planners into the company’s mix in February this year.

After much discussion, one of the things NFS did to break into the financial services market was to sign up for the flexi-plan outsourcing model, as produced by outsourcing specialists, 360.

Rimmer says NFS plans to evolve the business and the group is currently organising its next step, which, in a move that might be seen as downsizing by competitors, plans to limit its adviser numbers to 100. At present, the group has 110 advisers, a drop of 38 from earlier this year when the group had 148 advisers. The group is also planning a forum or college for training within the group.

The college, called Club NOW College, gives a group of NOW’s top advisers opportunities to attend practice development seminars, as well as subsidised business tools.

“We took a decision on a certain number of advisers not contributing and we decided on having 100 planners,” Rimmer says. At the moment, we’ve got 110 planners, we picked up 10 planners in the last quarter, two were proper authority holders,” Rimmer says.

“We’ve been very lucky, because in January, we were approached by a number of Financial Wisdom writers and they said they were interested at looking at the NOW model. The majority had CFPs [status], and liked the way our consultants ran their business and wanted a say as to how the dealership gets built, and that has been very good for us,” he says.

Until April this year, NFS was targeting clients in the wealth accumulation phase, mainly looking at those involved with small businesses, but the group is now at a stage where it is getting a real leaning towards hitting the retirement market.

Rimmer says the competitors’ landscape is becoming much clearer for NFS now, with the bigger product suppliers very much doing their own thing. NFS sees this as very important for its own evolvement plans.

“We see ourselves as being one of the leading premiere brands in the marketplace. To be that, you have that sort of expertise and access to that expertise,” he says.

“We have set a limit to the number of people we will accept. We won’t have more than 150. If we can get away with 100, we’d be quite happy,” Rimmer says.

Of the groups planners, all of them are small business people. They are not salaried advisers, but the group does allow advisers to charge fees and rebate commissions. However, educating and keeping these advisers is what Rimmer says is probably one of the most challenging parts of his job.

He says the group as a whole has probably lost 20 per cent of sales productivity in having to get his proper authority holders on a fast track, but for the advisers to provide the services for their clients that they are, they have had to make a big effort to get themselves qualified. An effort Rimmer is really pleased with.

“Looking at the minimum standard we’ve got, we do four professional development days a year. Through our relationship with product suppliers, they have their various offerings. And there is probably two or three of those a quarter, and now with our NOW foundation, which is our college for excellence, there are four of those a year,” he says.

NFS is a national business with offices in each state. The group is flourishing in Darwin and Tasmania, with Rimmer hinting that further expansion in a few other areas are on the horizon. However, he says advisers looking to join NFS need to have the right criteria.

“To come into NFS you really need to be able to demonstrate that you’re capable of doing the business and we look for minimum earnings between $250,000 a year. I mean, that’s not to say that if you come across a group of five and there are two in there that are at $80,000, but they are young and part of the succession plan, so you’re not silly about it,” he says.

“There are some groups that have got some disenfranchised people and we want to talk to them. But when we employ advisers it has been mainly by referral, and I think, as the foundation starts to have an impact, it will be easy to find the people that we want to find. We don’t want any more than 150 in total, so we’re not on a mad panic burst to get high volumes.”

In terms of ownership, 50 per cent of NOW is owned by FSP, with 26 per cent retained by the 12 founders. The remaining 24 per cent is set aside into the unit trust for advisers to earn into, which means that NFS has a business half owned by its advisers and half owned by FSP. And as reported in last month’sMoney Management,FSP is set to unveil a new distribution platform that will expand its product range and adviser numbers.

FSP, the partner company to NOW financial Services, Inscorp Financial Services and Kingston Capital, has plans for major changes to its distribution channels, with the group in discussions with a number of external dealer groups to join FSP as affiliates.

“What we’ve done is that we’ve got to the point now where we’ve got a very sound business model. This model is about distribution going into the next decade. And we’ve got it right,” says FSP chairman Dr Frank Wolf.

Wolf says FSP is speaking with a range of groups and will make announcements within the next few months.

FSP is also planning the development of an accounting affiliation program with 50 accounting groups slated to join the program in the next 12 months. It is also looking to expand the scope of one of its funds management businesses, Abacus Funds Management.

Abacus provides wholesale property opportunities to retail investors, and at present, has about $400 million in funds under management. The changes involve bringing out other retail investment products that are not property related, although Wolf says the details will not be released for some time.

Vital statistics: NOW Financial Services

Obtained dealer’s licence: December 1999 (Financial Services Partners)

Number of proper authority holders: 110

Funds under management: $1 billion

Key figures: Geoff Rimmer; Frank Wolf, director of NOW; Ron Lambert (founder and director); Tim d’Emdem (chairman); Frank Doran and Steve Aspland.

Research: Morningstar