Meld of art and science grows boutique

Tynan Mackenzie chief executive Tony Fenning is a little relieved. In the space of a month he has announced the recruitment of senior staff and after a number of months of planning has also been able to announce the opening of a Melbourne office.

The move into the Victorian capital represents the culmination of many months of work for the group, including the relocation of Queensland adviser Rod Hayes to Melbourne, resulting in a presence in each of the east coast capitals as well as Wollongong.

The reason for Fenning’s relief is that the news comes two weeks after the group announced it had rolled out its own wrap service exclusively to its client base, clearing the decks for the group to brace itself for more growth.

Fenning says the growth that has prompted these moves is not something the group is actively seeking but rather it is an organic growth in response to the service offering from Tynan Mackenzie.

“We are happy to say we are experiencing an ever increasing demand for our services as retirement income and tax becomes more complex,” Fenning says.

Fenning likes to describe the people who come through the doors of the group as successful Australians, including high level public servants, corporate executives and professionals and small to medium-enterprise business people.

“This group tends to have average net investable assets of half a million dollars and while it sounds odd they are a group that is not adequately serviced by independent advisers,” Fenning says.

“There are many product providers pitching at them but there are much less people giving the high-end, high-touch advice.”

This target market has remained unchanged since the group formed in 1995 when David Tynan and James Mackenzie left the Bain Group to start out on their own.

Fenning says at that stage the two were known in the industry as servicing a focused market and the group attributes its success to sticking with that strategy.

Fenning joined the group just over two years ago, making the move from St George where he was the head of private banking.

Shortly after, he recruited Tony Nash from St George Financial Planning to join the group. Nash is now the head of training and the investment committee at Tynan Mackenzie.

The two have a long working history together and apart from working at Tynan Mackenzie as well as St George the two have also worked at Godrey Pembroke and came together when Pembroke and Godrey Weston joined operations.

At present the 22 advisers with the group deal with 1,500 client groups, such as family groups and trusts, self-managed superannuation funds and estates, with a total of more than $1 billion in funds under advice. Of this number nearly $200 million has come through the wrap account in just over two months since it began operating.

The wrap is a badged BT Portfolio Services product and carries the label of the Personal Financial Service and provides clients with access to a range of listed securities and wholesale managed funds.

Most new business comes on the strength of referrals and networks the group has established through its client base.

“This is something David and James have been doing for 12 years but we also coach advisers on how to get referrals and generate new business,” Fenning says.

The group is steered by a board made up of Tynan and Mackenzie as well as Fenning and chief financial officer Mark Hogdson. In conjunction with an option plan for equity in the business for advisers, the four are also owners of the firm.

Outside the planning staff the group has 28 other staff whose main roles are in client support, including three senior paraplanners.

Staff are trained through the usual gamut of seminars and training days, but Fenning says the group has also built its internal culture and training on strategy meetings.

At these meetings, advisers, paraplanners and technical staff will thrash out real case studies to seek the best course of action for clients.

“We feel this is actually the best training because it supplies access to the best minds in the business and creates a positive peer pressure for staff to know what they are doing,” Fenning says.

After this stage, the paraplanning and technical staff document the plan for implementation before rolling it out to the planners, who Fenning says operate on two equal but separate tiers.

One tier is that of planners actively seeking business from clients and driving the growth of the business while the other is the ongoing handling and maintenance of clients after they have come on board.

Any recruits to the business will normally start in the second group and Fenning says ideally they have a solid tax and chartered accountancy background.

In fact, the first recruits after the group began operations were from accounting and legal backgrounds and that experience is still highly represented in the group.

“Interested planners do not need to bring a client base but rather solid technical skills and empathy. We also consider high calibre technical and investment staff because we feel we can work with each of them to build a client base,” Fenning says.

According to Fenning, around 25 per cent of his time is actually spent finding and maintaining suitable staff.

Those that are chosen to work with the group come on board as employees, with the group reluctant to adopt other models.

“We feel there are flaws with models such as franchises and we are trying to avoid repeating the errors of the past. At the moment we have one team with a collaborative approach and the danger of franchises is a fractured delivery model,” Fenning says.

“There is one business and one set of standards. We leave the art of planning to the advisers and if they use our strategies, the advice is delivered in a scientific environment without wild investments.”

“Our people are happy to compromise on that and so we all tinker with the same model only.”