31 October 2021
NEWS & OPINION
Act like a planner – think like an entrepreneur BY GUY HOLWILL Chief Executive, Fairbairn Consult
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s a financial planner, you wear two hats when you are at work. The first is as a professional who advises clients, and the second is as an entrepreneur who runs a business – whether it is just you or a larger business employing many people. It’s not only about financial planning To be a successful planner, you need to work through the six steps of financial
planning where you identify your clients’ needs and implement solutions designed to help them achieve their financial goals. You obviously do this in the context of all the relevant regulations. Given the demands of your clients, and that this is how you generate income, it is no surprise that most planners spend most of their time focusing on financial planning. But I challenge you to think of any successful business, in any industry, where the people managing the business do not spend time thinking beyond the day-to-day activities of generating income.
compliance and finance (so I’ll exclude these), which leaves the following critical roles: • The CEO creates the vision for the business and oversees all the other managers. While they are ultimately accountable for everything, a good CEO gets things done through the efforts of others, rather than trying to do everything themselves. • The Chief Operating Officer ensures you have solid plans in place to recover from any disaster, is responsible for your infrastructure, systems and processes, and manages your support staff. • The HR Director hires the right people and is responsible for their ongoing Creating a shift in your business training and development. The HR To take your business to the next level, you Director also creates an environment need to ensure you are spending enough where your staff are happy, fulfilled and time thinking like an entrepreneur and deliver really great work. developing all aspects of your business. • The Marketing Director promotes the To identify all the different things you need business and your services or products, to focus on, it’s helpful to imagine a large building an aspirational brand to ensure company where there are different directors there is a steady flow of new clients. who are dedicated to specific functions. Small • The Customer Experience Director ensures businesses are the same – you just have your clients’ experience is so good that fewer people and most of them will juggle they never think about leaving and, multiple jobs. You probably outsource legal, instead, feel compelled to tell their friends
Meet the next president of the CFA Society SA STANLIB’s head of strategic investments and manager research, Jennifer Henry, has been appointed the next president of the CFA Society SA. She spoke about her new role to MoneyMarketing’s editor, Janice Roberts. What does it mean for you to be president of the CFA Society SA? Becoming president of such a prestigious organisation raises a range of emotions, but the two that stand out are feeling humbled and challenged. It is humbling to lead a board of well-experienced and respected individuals that elected me to be their president. I am also humbled by the global and local recognition from fellow CFA Charterholders and colleagues, and by the support I have received from the STANLIB Executive. Our society has a great reputation among its members for delivering member value or candidate preparation, and it will be a challenge to take the society to new heights. It’s been said that the CFA is the most brutal exam in the world of finance – fewer than 50% of people pass the first level. Would you agree with this statement, and how much did you personally have to give up to pass these notoriously gruesome exams? Exams that are credible must be challenging enough to ensure candidates acquire a deeper understanding of concepts. ‘Brutal’ may be too harsh a word to depict the level of difficulty of the exams. I believe that if you put in the work and engage with investment professionals to help you fully understand the concepts from different perspectives, you stand a better chance of passing. After completing the first two levels before I had children, I wrote the third level when my second child was just eight months old. I had to
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sacrifice a lot of personal time, for example by waking up at 4am to study, because evenings with kids are chaotic. I also had to learn to study in every spare moment, even if it was just for 20 minutes. For many students, parts of the CFA Program exams that commonly cause the most trouble are those covering Fixed Income and Derivatives. Was this part of your experience? Derivatives definitely! I think it is challenging because the questions are a lot more varied, and technical derivatives are used most often in daily portfolio management. I found the Fixed Income exams manageable. My real nemesis was the Level II accounting. I think most Charterholders who don’t have a background in accounting would have the same experience. The CFA Society SA will this month be part of the International Day of the Girl Child, by providing a free online workshop focusing on careers in the investment industry. What do you plan to tell these female Grade 10 and 11 learners about the CFA qualification and how do you plan to encourage them to embark on a career in the investment industry? First, we are going to provide these young female learners with insights and context on why the investment industry exists, and what types of jobs are available. Next, we will give guidance on subjects, qualifications and the personality
and family about you. • The Sales Director drives new business and ensures that the focus is on clients who contribute the most value. When you look at this list, are you certain that someone in your business is giving sufficient attention to each of these items? If you are responsible for all of them, are you taking enough time out from the day-to-day business of generating an income to spend time thinking about this? If you are not giving sufficient attention to all these items, you must accept you are choosing to run a business that is not as successful as it could be. Create an exit strategy for yourself Lastly, all entrepreneurs have an exit strategy. What this means is entirely up to you. It can range from handing the business over to others over several years, to selling the business and moving on to the next one. Either way, for you to remain in control of your exit, you must remember that the main goal for any entrepreneur is to develop your business to the point that you are redundant.
traits that will help individuals not only to succeed, but also to enjoy a job in finance. Then we will explain more about the CFA programme and showcase the increasing availability of support, across the world, for women in investments and finance from organisations like the CFA Institute. The CFA Society South Africa 2021 Annual virtual Investment Conference is coming up in November and its theme is Redefining Finance in a PostPandemic World. Tell us a bit about this topic. The pandemic has opened our minds to new ways of working and creative solutions. Africa needs to use this opportunity to rethink access to finance, SME acceleration, development of women in finance and promotion of innovation. Financial institutions are going to have to redefine how they measure success and re-evaluate their strategies, so that there is joint value creation and finance becomes fit for our future society. Our country was hit by the coronavirus pandemic at a time when the economy was already struggling, and in July we had the riots in KZN and Gauteng. How do you feel about South Africa’s future? The true north that has emerged from the pandemic and the riots is that South Africans are resilient and our sense of community shines through. I believe in SA’s future because of this culture. I have seen this resilience in many investment professionals, Charterholders and candidates, which fills me with confidence that we will rebuild SA to be stronger and more sustainable.
Jennifer Henry, Head: Strategic Investments & Manager Research, STANLIB
