Ambition and drive to go the distance

It could well be a case of third time lucky for David Haintz if he decides to enter next year’s Money Management Financial Planner of the Year Award. It is the second year running the managing director and senior financial planner at Melbourne’s Haintz Financial Services (HFS) has been highly commended for the award.

And giving the award another shot would be entirely in keeping with his character. His drive and vision, matched only by his ambition, is evident in the growth of his practice in only eight years to become a highly successful boutique practice.

There’s also little doubt he also has the endurance to compete again. Earlier this year, he completed the 100km Oxfam Trailwalker run in 19 hours, raising $20,000 for charity.

An avid runner, he has also competed in the Melbourne Marathon, posting a best time of three hours and 18 minutes.

Haintz received his strongest scores for professional development on the award judges’ score card this year, but even a cursory glance at his CV and biography reveals an extraordinary concern for the wellbeing of his profession and community.

The list of his community-based activities over the years are too numerous to mention here, as indeed are his inputs into the financial planning profession. Together, however, they were sufficiently impressive, for him to be appointed a fellow of the Financial Planning Association in 2002 — one of only 35 fellows of the organisation.

This same concern for community and profession is brought to bear on his clients. He describes himself as leading the charge to critically differentiate financial planning from investment advising.

Representing a “new breed of planner”, Haintz has “emerged from an industry based on product sales, commission and soft dollar to providing advice for a fee based on the quality added to a client’s life”.

He believes planners should act as coaches to their clients, “adding real and ongoing strategic value to their lives, not just their finances”. His ultimate goal is to ensure clients have a positive cash flow for the rest of their lives, or, to put it another way, that they should “never run out of money”.

His clients obviously relate to this ethos, using the performance of his practice as a measure.

HFS has funds under management of $210 million, an increase of 840 per cent since it was established in 1997. Turnover has increased 660 per cent since then to $2 million with recurring fees of more than $1.5 million, an increase of more than 1,100 per cent. Return on investment is at 474 per cent since inception of the company, averaging 68 per cent a year.

Haintz is particularly proud that these results have all been achieved without incurring debt on the balance sheet. The same management strategy has been used to turn around the fortunes of John Bertram and Associates, which Haintz acquired in August this year. As he put it himself, he “relished the opportunity of turning around one of the biggest disasters in Australian financial services history”.

Bertram and Associates was sold by an ailing John Bertram for “many millions of dollars” to Melbourne planning group AHF Financial Planning in 2000. By the time Haintz acquired it four years later, he said, Bertram and Associates was a pale shadow of its former self, funds under advice having fallen by 66 per cent and revenue by 60 per cent. At the same time, fees to clients had increased dramatically and service levels had deteriorated significantly.

He takes it as a compliment to his fee-based operating philosophy that he has met with 80 of Bertram’s 200 clients since August, and in “every case we have provided a planning solution for them. This has been achieved entirely by unwinding structures, rebating commission and trails and charging a realistic fee unrelated to funds under advice”, he says.