Financial Wisdom has increased the size of its dealer group significantly, with a total of 410 financial advisers now under its umbrella.
“It’s a significant milestone in so far as it represents the high point for us. It’s the highest adviser number that we’ve had. If you cast your mind back to March 2004, our numbers were around the 360 mark, so it’s significant in that context,” Financial Wisdom general manager Paul Barrett explained.
He said the growth the dealer group has experienced has been the result of a regeneration process it implemented that has seen more than 50 people join the organisation since March 2004.
However, Barrett explained that the group has deliberately not set any specific targets in terms of the total number of planners it would like to eventually incorporate.
“We have financial objectives to which adviser numbers are clearly a driver, but don’t really have a hard and fast adviser number target. The reason we don’t is because when you do that and you put specific recruitment targets in front of your people it can actually have the opposite impact, because people will recruit for recruitment sake, and we don’t want to do that,” he explained.
Many of the new planners the group has been able to attract in the Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australian areas have been from rural areas, and this is a trend that is expected to continue.
“We actually had a reasonable rural exposure to start with, and what’s happening is our planner [numbers] in those regions are starting to expand. They’re also seeing opportunities where a planner across town might be unhappy with their particular offering, and they’re actually introducing and referring people to us. So we’re actually now at a level where our own planners are referring other planners to us, which is good,” Barrett said.
