Wes McMaster has relinquished his position at the helm of both Bleakleys and Advisor Investment Services.
Wes McMaster has relinquished his position at the helm of both Bleakleys and Advisor Investment Services.
The former FPA chairman dropped the bombshell at last week’s Advisor confer-ence in Port Douglas, telling planners he will stand down from his position as chief executive of Austplanners, the holding company for Bleakleys and Advisor.
McMaster says the recent changes he has implemented through both the Bleakleys and Advisor networks “have effectively made me redundant”.
“Most managers build empires to make themselves irreplaceable, I have done quite the opposite and am looking forward to new challenges,” he says.
He recruited Westpac’s head of financial planning, Bruce McCreedy, earlier this year as general manager of Advisor after appointing Lyle Jones as general manager of Bleakleys late last year.
Under further restructuring, head office for the groups is also set to move to Syd-ney. The compliance, commissions, accounting and IT operations will be outsour-ced to a shared service for all Mercantile Mutual owned financial planning groups which also includes RetireInvest and Lynx. Research will remain in Melbourne, while marketing and training will stay with the individual groups.
Mercantile Mutual is also investigating the possibility of offering equity participa-tion in the dealer groups through a dilution of its ownership.
McMaster has headed up Bleakleys and Advisor for nearly two years, taking over the top job after both groups had gone through rough patches. He immediately set about restructuring both groups by building adviser loyalty and improving profit-ability. Advisor posted its first operating profit ever in the year to September last year while Bleakleys posted a massive lift in profit for the same period to just over $1 million.
McMaster has also been a stalwart of the financial planning industry. He was a fopunding member of the Financial Planning Association and went on to become the first chairman of the group to be re-elected for a second year. He is currently chairman of the finance committee of the International CFP Coucil and sits on the board of the complaints resolution scheme FICS.
McMaster says he will now be looking for a “new challenge”. He is believed to be in discussion with a number of institutions with a view to taking a management po-sition in a dealer group.
