No room for the captain in a commercial practice

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday July 21, 2009

In the wake of the global financial crisis there is plenty of poor financial planning advice and industry calamity to write about, but Stuart Washington betrays a Captain Peacock era understanding of modern corporate commerciality ("Are you being served?", July 18-19).Disgruntled ANZ employees confess the team was "pushed for more activity to find new leads". This is simply good middle management for any services business, hardly evidence to impugn an entire industry. An earlier article ("The dirty secrets of financial planners", smh.com.au, July 8) revealed "the need to increase revenues is included in financial planners' key performance indicators or in their job descriptions". Both pieces list supposedly alarming remuneration structures. It would be remarkable if an employer did not have profitability performance hurdles before paying its employee bonuses.I provide fee-based financial planning advice, and I, too, am guilty of setting activity or "sales" goals for my advisers, as well as qualitative assessments. If a client will benefit from more than one service, or more comprehensive work needs to be done, they are "up-sold" to these services. Fiona Bateman, the forensic accountant referred to in the more recent story, probably does the same if she runs her business properly, and so too a doctor who manages an efficient practice.Commercially minded professionals do not get in a lather about people buying and being sold services. Product implementation is often part of the solution too. The problems have occurred when incentives have been structured to encourage inappropriate commission-based product flogging, and that indeed is an issue for our industry to remedy.Greg Cook Pymble