Starting Your Own Advice Business

Andrew Akuoko always wanted to be his own boss. In 2016 he stopped thinking and took action and started his own financial advice business. He talks about the challenges he continues to face by fulfilling a long held desire to work for himself…

The burning Desire...

I’ve always had a burning desire to control my own destiny and be my own boss but each time, things get in the way. After University, it was the first pay check, then came the company car and the perks. Then throughout my working life, the pay check got bigger, the perks got bigger and then the responsibilities got bigger. Did I mention that the expenses also got bigger than the pay check? Slowly that burning desire to run my own business started fading away. Each year the business plan gets updated a little just to convince myself that I’ll one day, leave the glory of the corporate world behind.

The Year of Action...

2016 is the year of action, I told myself – as you do every New Year’s resolution. So, I polished the business plans up once again but this time I took concrete actions to ensure Wealth Peak Financial Advice was born in October, 2016. In our quest to find a suitable partner to be licensed with, our criterion was simple; a licensee, big enough to provide the operational and licensee support BUT small enough to be nimble and adaptable to changes in today’s business world. Above all, we needed a licensee that understood advisers! One great thing about Total Financial Solutions (TFS) is the fact that it started with advisers for advisers. This gave us immense confidence. It meant they understood the frustrations advisers go through but also appreciate the legislative requirements in running an advice business. That mix gives TFS the opportunity to make decisions from an adviser’s view point and not head office’s.

Our Challenges...

So, we’ve got our business plan and our licensee. What next? Who are our clients? What do we stand for? How do we deliver advice – a very complicated subject with less immediate tangible benefits – to “tomorrow’s” client? How do we make advice “cool”? We knew this was always going to be challenging. Marketing was one of our biggest challenges. We were confronted with two main truths; an ageing population and an underinsured population in Australia. But we also found the third silent group of people who needed advice not to be about a product solution but about their everyday issues they’re confronted with. Issues such as, “what do I do with my extra bonus pay”? “Can we afford private school education for the kids”? “Should we buy a property to live in or invest”? The challenge for us was how we market the company to deliver advice to our target audience and make advice “cool” enough to appeal to this audience? We knew that we could have all the great strategies in the world but without a ‘bum on seat’, we literally had no business. We quickly hired a marketing team to develop a marketing strategy for the first 12 months. Yes! It’s a cost. However, for a business to succeed in today’s complex social world, you cannot just roll the dice and hope for the best.

We cannot escape the fact that you need money to run a business. Cash flow continues to be a constant challenge for a small business like us. Building a website, being active on social media, running a marketing campaign, these activities cost money! It is important to understand when you take on debt as a new business. Is the debt for expansion or just running the day to day of the business? Can you achieve that same goal using equity? Can you partner with someone else who does a particular thing better than you do and leverage their expertise, time and cost? This may mean you will forgo part of your revenue but in return, you may not have the full cost in running that part of your business. We continue to work through these points everyday.

Our 2 cents worth...

Partnership
Running a successful business is a team sport. One cannot achieve that alone. It’s important to conduct a personal SWOT analysis and find partners to enhance those strengths and minimise the weaknesses.

Milestones
Having a business plan is a good thing. However, milestones offer the opportunity to break your business plan up into smaller bites representing a significant event which defines the success or failure of the business. As you reach each milestone, you will start seeing the direction of your business.

Above all, just do it...