Forty Seven were growing successfully but not as fast as they wanted

Forty Seven is a Perth based boutique family owned and operated financial planning practice backed by the licensee Garvan, who are part of NAB.  Forty Seven specialise in retirement planning with retirees and wealth creation strategies for pre-retirees and some younger families. Husband and wife team, John and Lindsay, are both highly qualified strategic advisors with a personal, caring, hands-on dedication to helping their clients realise their financial goals over the long term. Today, they service over 180 individuals.

Marketing concentrated on retirees

Forty Seven have been building their business via a successful, tried and tested regular seminar program focused on retirees. The seminars are renowned as the largest and most well attended financial planning series in Western Australia.

Comfortable with the retirement segment of their business, John and Lindsay were keen to grow their client base further by targeting ‘wealth creators:’ – that is, younger people aged 28+ with a need for longer term wealth strategies. Lindsay explains,

“We had identified the ‘wealth creator’ segment and believed it was a good market to be in, so over the last 18 months we started to look into it more. We had some ideas we wanted to explore, but we weren’t sure where to start. We felt we wanted to attract these young families via children and youth. Our priority was also to re-develop and upgrade our website.”

Lindsay continues, “We realised that to get into the wealth creator market, we would need a good web presence, but we were unclear as to what we actually needed and unsure of what to say.”

Forty Seven gained a strategic marketing partner

In the past Forty Seven had dealt with a range of suppliers, including graphic designers to assist with the original branding of the practice through to advertising agencies. Lindsay comments,

“The graphic designers were only concerned with the visual side and the advertising agency focused on finding us advertising space. We recognised we couldn’t just put ads in the newspaper – we needed to have a strategy or we were just wasting money. No one was really nailing the strategy or the marketing side of it for us.”

Taurus offered practical advice for SME’s at the MLC conference

Whilst attending the  MLC conference for financial planners in Cairns, John and Lindsay saw CEO of Taurus Marketing, Sharon Williams, speak. John explains,

“What impressed us was to see Sharon talk from the heart, not just from theory. It came across very strongly that she runs a business and has been through all of this before. We felt any advice would be very hands-on. We weren’t going to end up with some sort of airy-fairy strategy and outcome that wasn’t hard-hitting and wasted dollars.”

The Taurus tried and tested strategic process – TaurusAccelerator©

TaurusAccelerator© introduced Forty Seven to four phases including research, a strategy session, plan and implementation. Initially, Forty Seven engaged Taurus to undertake the research study of their existing clients. John explains,

“After discussions with Taurus, the first stage recommended was to get a current status quo from our clients in terms of where they thought we were.”

John admits, “For us it was a bit of a test. We had the project costed, then went ahead and part of that was also a look and see how Taurus went in that process. At the end of the research we were really pleased with what Taurus did, so that gave us confidence to move to the next stage.”

Lindsay agrees, “The research has been really powerful for us. It’s fantastic to hear from your clients what they think our strengths are and it’s helped us with ideas, thoughts and strategies for the future.”

A strategy for the future and access to the right expertise

The next stage involved a strategy session to assist with messaging and positioning for attracting the ‘wealth creators’ segment. “From the strategy session, we workshopped with the Taurus team and found that our initial thoughts on what we wanted to do were not necessarily the best decisions for our business. Taurus then provided us with their top 20 recommendations to move our marketing forward. These were all very practical, actionable suggestions completely relevant to our business,” Lindsay states.

“We now feel we have a comprehensive strategy and consistency with messaging and in everything we do. Implementation is so much easier now we have a clear plan for where we are going.”John Holland, Forty Seven Financial Planning.

Lindsay intends to continue working with Taurus. “We’ve prioritized five or six of the recommendations to do straight away, including the website, customer testimonials and some PR.”