Noel Lord sits down for a chat with Grahame , the Managing Director of GPS Wealth and discusses how COVID-19 has impacted the way he and his team work and engage with customers.
Noel Lord:
Good morning and welcome to the MetLife podcast series, my name's Noel Lord and our guest today has over 30 years' experience in financial services. He's held a wide variety of board positions including chairman of Australian, Canadian, Singapore, and Chinese investment and advice businesses. He's previously held senior roles such as CEO of Investments for Tower Australia, Managing Director at AMP Consultancy, and Group Managing Director of CenterPoint Wealth, and is currently the CEO of Easton Wealth. I'd like to welcome Grahame Evans to the MetLife podcast. Welcome, Grahame.
Grahame Evans:
Thanks, Noel. Great to be here.
Noel Lord:
Grahame, these certainly are challenging times that our industry has seen over the last number of months and prior to that, because change is constant in our industry. And I'm sure your 30 years of experience in our industry plus will tell us that, but I'd like to just start with a little bit of a background on how you got into our industry.
Grahame Evans:
Well actually, it was a rather unusual way of getting into the industry, Noel, I haven't been here for so long. It just so happened that person I knew was actually working at National Mutual, which is the old version of Axa for those people who are not familiar with that name. And I'd left school at the tender age of 15, my mother was actually a single mother and doing trade jobs. I left school at the end of year 10 or year four, so it was in those days.
Grahame Evans:
And having done my school, someone saw there was a job for me, a job at National Mutual and I started out there.
Noel Lord:
From small starts and small steps, great things happen. You've had a tremendous career, Grahame, and you're now currently the CEO of Eastern Wealth. Tell us a little bit about Easton Wealth.
Grahame Evans:
Well, Easton Wealth is a business which actually focuses both on the accounting profession and the advice profession as they are moving towards some form of convergence. Eastern Wealth is a combination of two licenses, one which is GBS Wealth, which started in 2012 by two guys, Greg Holman and Rob MacGregor, who are quite well-known in the industry and a business called Merit Wealth, which was started by a gentleman by the name of Greg Hayes, who is a preeminent person in the accounting profession. Now, those businesses came together in and around 2017 to form Easton Wealth and there is about 184 licensees, advisers in that group of licenses and another 400 in the limited authority space.
Grahame Evans:
Because we work both in the full advice space and the accountancy space, we do have a fair few accountants who now have unlimited authorizations to deal purely in the SNSF area. It's part of a listed Australian company, Easton Investments Limited, that's a micro-cap which also has on the other side of it, an arrangement of businesses, a business called Knowledge Shop, which provides training and education and particularly specialist training and education such as tax structuring and so on for the accounting profession.
Noel Lord:
So it's quite a diverse business and no doubt, the size of the business in dealing with potentially over 500 other business people within your network has been somewhat of a challenge in dealing with what we've had with COVID-19. How have you adjusted the Easton Wealth business to adapt to the current situation?
Grahame Evans:
Well, one of the early steps we took as a business, Noel, was to make sure that we communicated very regularly. We established a series called Ground Control, which that series was a way of communicating with those advisers and accountants as well as their clients about what was actually going on, trying to give them an understanding of what we saw as a business and what we saw from the economic perspective and also from the and human perspective, what's actually going on. So we communicated virtually from day one, made sure those communications were not only suitable to the advisers and accountants, but it was something they could actually pass on to their clients to actually do that.
Grahame Evans:
We also made sure that we had a strong definition of what was actually important at that time, to deal with those accountants and advisers. We put together a leadership process that focused on identifying different types of people that we were dealing with, the nervous Nellies, the silent worriers, the bulls at the gate, those guys who want to go out and put a lot more money into the market types of people so that we could then have the accountants and the advisers actually address them in an appropriate way rather than just going a broad approach to everybody. Because certainly as many people would have found out over the last couple of months, it was necessary to deal with different people differently. We put that program into play.
Noel Lord:
Yeah, I think that's a great overview, Grahame, because the feedback to date in some of the other podcasts has been communication has been the key to not only remaining relevant to clients but to your advisers and also centers of influence. And I love the analogy of the nervous Nellies and the silent worriers and bulls at the gate, because one of the things that we know is communication needs to be tailored and I think that's a really clear message that's coming through at this time. What advice would you give to your colleagues across the industry right now?
Grahame Evans:
Well, it's interesting. This is different. You talk about me being in the industry for over 30, but it's just over 40 as a matter of fact and I've been through every major event since the advice community... Financial planning started really roundabout the beginning of the 80s. So it's only been around for a very short period of time and through that time, we had the '87 crash and that was then followed pretty quickly by a variety of things that were impacted, such as the unlisted property cost crash in sort of '90. Capital guarantee downturn we had in '91, there were a number of things. And we had the recession we had to have at that time as well in '91, and in fact, that actually made the industry.
Grahame Evans:
I'm not quite sure whether people realize but the last time we were in a recession in '91, I was explaining to a number of my family the other day, I was so busy. We were so busy actually doing seminars and presentations to organizations particularly where there were redundancies and restructures. It actually created the industry after the '87 crash. It decimated it a fair bit. One of the things that we do know is that these things move in cycle, so therefore you need to adapt your business to actually do it. It's no use being bullish and putting bravado up to say, "Yes, we will get through these things."
Grahame Evans:
If things get tougher, you do need to make decisions quickly and you do need to make decisions decisively to make sure that your business is still relevant as it goes through any sort of downturn. It's no use to the clients, you being full of bravado and then going broke the next week. Many businesses actually not only support their own family, but they support the families of their staff. And so you've got the stakeholders in the clients, you've got the stakeholders in the families of your staff and you need to therefore be conscious about when you need to make decisions to actually change your business to ensure continuity as a business. But as I say to people, we get through these things. There are education... For those of us who were around in '87 and '91, we go back to people and say, "We were here when it happened."
Grahame Evans:
And I was talking to my middle daughter who's working in London at the moment and it's very difficult in London over there, and I said to her, "You'll look back on this Lauren and say, 'I was around when COVID-19 happened.'" But we've got to make sure that we think about our businesses and think about the stakeholders we've got and make sure that we're making the decisions, the right decisions, not necessarily decisions which actually are there because we think we need to have a bit of bravado about how good things are and how we're going to get through.
Noel Lord:
I think there's some really valid points there about being very decisive and remaining relevant throughout the cycle that your business is touching from clients to the staff and then the families, and there on. It's an interesting concept, Grahame, around the number of touch points that advisers have that at times aren't necessarily seen other than the people they're seeing face-to-face. How have you adjusted with your staff for example, in their change in working habits over the last few months?
Grahame Evans:
Look, it's been an interesting process, I got to say, Noel. As always, there are people who get down and get it done and there are also times where people are... they need to actually be... their hand held a little bit. So we've identified those who are self-starters who can get things done, and then we have also identified people who do need their hand held to help them with actually saying that.
Grahame Evans:
We've also tried to make it a little bit fun as well, and I'm sure you've seen plenty of examples of this. We've had competitions where people were required to take a photo of their home office, and we were to guess who's home office it was. And there was a lot of things done to mislead people away from them. We've had competitions around who's said things and being an old person as I am, I had some old expressions like, "You old dirty rat," and people were... "Who said that?" You know?
Grahame Evans:
It's a long time since we saw black and white movies and James Cagney, but we finally found somebody after a couple of days who could actually answer that question. But we run little competitions and we keep people interested through that process. And on a Friday afternoon, like we might do in the office, when it closes down, we might have a glass of wine. We have the virtual glass of wine and chat about things. So it's been necessary to try and keep it a little real, but also from a business perspective, understanding that not everybody works the same way and therefore, just recognize who needs their hand held a little bit and actually who's a self-starter.
Noel Lord:
Yeah, I don't think that's a really important point you make, Grahame, that we as business leaders, you've had to adapt to get the best out of your people and also that if you like, the mental mindset awareness of that people react to situations in different ways. I love the idea of the competition of who said what, and we at MetLife, we've had funny hat days and different sort of things in some of our WebX meetings just to lighten it up as you said, which I think is really important.
Noel Lord:
Moving forward as we go through COVID-19 and then beyond and we've still got face other things that our industry is facing. Where are you focusing your business in the next 30, 60, 90 days?
Grahame Evans:
So in the next 30 days, I think more communication but it's actually we're changing, and we're slightly moving away from what COVID-19's been about more to about starting to look at the future of how things... how people will be impacted and how we may deal with those. So trying to paint pictures for clients as well as for our advisers and accountants about what the world might look like going forward. So, very, very important.
Grahame Evans:
I've also had my senior team look a little bit more at what the structure of the business might look like. Will we be doing more working from home? What type of technology did we find that we were missing or needed during COVID-19? One of the things that we're actually learning and have learnt through this process, that we can now make our businesses more effective, more efficient and delivering a better outcome for our clients and our staff in that process as well. I've been not a great fan of working from home.
Grahame Evans:
Over the years, I think the social need of staff to interact and to have some communication with them, with each other, is an important part of the emotional side of being employed. We will be however looking to see okay, where can we use a little more working from home and where we can't, and on the way back out, I suppose the other part when I get out to 60 and 90 days is now looking more at how we delivered services to clients in the past and how they may want them delivered, considering what we've been doing as a matter of necessity during COVID-19 and being able to actually communicate to clients now and say, "Okay, we've been through this process. In the future, how would you like us to deal with it? What do you want from us?"
Grahame Evans:
And I think whilst it's fresh in their minds and it's fresh in our minds, we really need to think about how we communicate with the clients, particularly in the way that they wish to be communicated and what levels of service they like again, which will probably set us up for many years to come.
Noel Lord:
Yeah, I think that's a great point, Grahame, that you make there. While social interaction is important to people's mindsets and the way we operate, challenging the status quo to remain effective and efficient for our clients, and I love the fact that wanting to continue the Eastern Wealth solutions by involving your offering around what the clients want. So the learnings out of this, what's been a difficult period, is that the lights are still on. The business is going well, the industry's got a really strong proposition for clients in the marketplace, and as long as we can be adaptive in our approach and our attitude determines our direction, we can come through this better businesses at the other end.
Grahame Evans:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that as I said, out of that 40 years, something, Noel, I have learned is that make sure you do understand what's gone on, what you do learn from it, and re-calibrate your business to benefit from those learnings.
Noel Lord:
That's a great way to sum it up and I really appreciate your time. I've only got one other question and I think it's an interesting one to pose. If you had your time again, is there anything you'd do differently?
Grahame Evans:
Anything I'd do differently? Look, I suppose I'm a great believer in when you communicate, don't hide behind an anonymous situation but communicate when you have something to actually say. I've been probably involved with some of the change that's gone on in the industry, but I would think that over the years, I would have liked to have been more heavily involved in lobbying with both government and the regulator to ensure that a process of change was actually evolution, not revolution. And I suppose that was the little challenge. In 2008, when we were asked to put submissions into the Inquiry, there was no support for the advice industry from many of the major players at that time. I'm talking about the major providers of that time.
Grahame Evans:
It was a difficult one. I would have liked to try to bring together more of the licensees and to think logically about what an evolution look like rather than a revolution.
Noel Lord:
Yeah, that's a really good point. And Grahame, we thank you very much for your time. You are an industry icon. You've been a significant contributor to not only the Eastern Wealth, but every business you've worked in and certainly a great supporter of the product providers, MetLife and others across this industry, where you've been supportive of us and giving us insights to how to better work with your businesses. So we really appreciate your time this morning and we wish you all the best for the future.
Grahame Evans:
Thanks, Noel. You're most welcome.
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