A whole new ball game: Moving from sport to advice

After making a name for themselves on the footy field and the tennis court, these two ex-sportsmen reflect on their journey into financial advice.

Welcoming career changers into the advice profession has been recognised as one approach to boosting the number of advisers operating in Australia.

For example, Money Management previously spoke with a former high school teacher as well as a former gym owner about their respective journeys into the advice sector.

Delving into this topic further, two former professional sportsmen have shared why they decided to become an adviser and the transferable skills they have been able to use in both industries.

Brad Symes, founder of Adelaide-based advice practice Bratton Wealth, was drafted to play AFL while he was studying a bachelor of finance.

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After spending nine years playing for Adelaide’s two major AFL clubs, Port Adelaide Football Club and the ‘Crows’ Adelaide Football Club, Symes decided to finish his finance degree and pursue a career in financial advice.

“Every player’s career comes to an end at some stage and I was 28 when mine finished. I’d always thought about what the transition and what life after would look like for me and I always knew it had a finance tilt to it,” he told Money Management.

The ex-AFL player landed a role at Morgan Stanley as a financial adviser for four years before four of his colleagues and himself decided to leave the firm to establish Stellan Capital. After running that advice business for five years, Symes left his fellow Stellan co-founders to work on his next project: co-founding Bratton Wealth with a business partner.

Meanwhile, Money Management also spoke with another professional who made the leap from the world of sport to financial advice.

Alan Poric, now financial adviser and director of Melbourne-based advice practice AP4 Wealth, started his career in tennis at the age of 15. Poric played the sport professionally overseas and ranked 30 in Australia, before he decided to look at pursuing other interests at 22 years old.

After studying accounting and finance at university, he realised financial planning was how he could make a real difference.

“I wanted to give back to people, so I thought financial planning was the next really good option when you could understand someone’s situation and actually help them achieve their goals,” Poric said.

Unlike Symes, the ex-tennis player took a more diverse path towards becoming an adviser. He gained eight years of experience working as a client services officer, as a paraplanner, then as an adviser before finally starting his own business, AP4 Wealth, some three months ago.

The lessons learnt

The two career changers reflected on what the transition from sport to advice taught them and the transferable skills they brought along with them.

For Symes, the biggest lesson he learnt was the importance of remaining focused when external factors vie for your attention.

He said: “The ability to be task-focused is something I always concentrated on in the footy days. There is a lot of noise in both worlds. When you’re playing footy, there is a lot of media and tension that you need to try to drown out and focus on training and execution in the game.

“In the finance world with the market volatility, as constant as it is, there’s always a huge amount of noise that you can get caught up in. It’s your job to drown out as much noise as possible and focus on making correct, smart decisions and investments, and then helping your client base drown that noise out as well.”

Moreover, the ability to understand people and what motivates them was something that tennis taught Poric which he has subsequently been able to use in advice.

“Although tennis is an individual sport, you have to understand your opponent and work out what they are trying to do during the game. In financial planning, it is a people’s job. When you see clients, every client is different. You have to try and understand them.

“They might say they want to take more risk in an investment but deep down, they just want to reach their goal and not take further risks. So it’s about unpacking what people want,” he described.