Working the local community
As a lawyer-cum-financial planner, Robert Kiddell has a foot in two worlds, and the leads to match.
Kiddell, from McMillan Financial Planning, started his career as a lawyer in 1978 but made the move into financial planning in 1992.
He now receives referrals not only from fellow lawyers, but from financial planners who tend to pass on clients who need help with wills and estates — Kiddell’s area of speciality as a lawyer.
Kiddell has established a network of about 30 fellow lawyers from whom he receives referrals, while the leads he gets from other financial planners often come from as far afield as interstate.
But that doesn’t mean Kiddell is resting on his laurels. Far from it, given the way he works his local community.
The Latrobe Valley in Victoria’s south-east is well known for its dairy farmers and academics who teach at the resident campus at Monash University.
Kiddell’s strategy for generating referrals among these two groups is simply to cultivate a genuine interest in both sectors.
“I genuinely love going to visit diary farmers, for example, and I think this is apparent to my clients, who in turn feel safe in referring me to their friends,” Kiddell says.
“To start up, you need to have a strategy to let people know you have an interest in their area, allowing two or three years to build up your credentials in the sector.”
His big tip is to never turn down an invitation to speak before a community or industry group.
One such speech by Kiddell led to an invitation by Monash University’s rural studies department to participate in a three-day business course for dairy farmers.
As part of the course, each of the farmers were given three hours of one-on-one time with a financial planner, including Kiddell.
It should come as no surprise that virtually all of the farmers “ended up as clients and also as advocates for our business”, Kiddell says.
Kiddell has other referral success stories, too.
A notable one was to have won referrals from a superannuation fund, despite the fund having an existing relationship with a prominent group of Melbourne financial planners.
The referrals began after Kiddell dealt with the fund — which has a large client presence in the Latrobe Valley — over some trust issues on behalf of a local widow.
The referrals, some for “significant amounts of business”, were an acknowledgment of his expertise in this area, Kiddell says.
“I’d been forceful in putting my view to the fund’s management about what I believed was in my client’s best interests,” he says.
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