FSP’s ambitious growth plan

The FSP Group has unveiled its ambitions for growth at its prestige partner meeting, declaring an aspiration to double the value of the business by September 2008.

However, the strategy behind achieving this goal will not involve any changes to the existing dealer group remuneration arrangement or ‘splits’.

“For us to ensure the dealer can provide all of the services it wants to … we need to collect more margin than we did last year,” Financial Services Partners chief executive Geoff Rimmer said.

“To do this we had two choices. One was to put the splits up, or we could work really hard with practices to increase their incomes. We all voted to increase the incomes in the firms and leave the splits where they are,” he added.

The group has targeted a 15 per cent increase in margins, which translates to a total of $5.1 million, up from the existing total of $4.4 million.

“We also want to have a big year in FSP inflows. We think we can shoot the lights out at $350 million,” Rimmer predicted.

A specific activity the FSP Group will be focusing on in regard to this growth policy is expansion of its existing affiliation strategies.

Rimmer was quick to point out that this didn’t mean the dealer group would accept any practice into its fold to help achieve its ultimate goal.

“Unless a firm fits and aspires to the quality of what we’ve created at FSP then we’re not interested. So we’re going to recruit by referral only and focus all of our efforts on growing the value of the firms that are here now,” he explained.

Rimmer stressed that underpinning the growth initiative was the need for the distribution or advisory arm of the group to operate and be financially independent from product support in general.

“We want to continue to provide outstanding products and services for our clients, but the advice model in being financially independent means that they know we’re not recommending them to go down any path because we need to be sustained out of the products that we own,” he said.