Strategy shift: How Luke Sayers is taking on the big end of town

The launch of the fourth “vertical” in his group’s advisory and investments offering has been driven by market demand.

Luke Sayers, Chairman of Sayers Group in his offices in Melbourne, Australia. Photograph by Arsineh Houspian

Five months since the launch of its flagship strategy and deals business, Luke Sayers says his fledgling Sayers Group is trading above budget as it prepares to launch a marketing and brand advisory arm utilising the creative talents of famed adman, Russel Howcroft.

Sayers, one of the nation’s best connected business leaders following an 8-year stint as chief executive of the local arm of big four accounting giant PwC, says the launch of the fourth “vertical” in his group’s advisory and investments offering has been driven by market demand.

“The goal is to help organisations build their brand value, their brand equity and to help start-ups understand the power of brand and marketing,” Sayers, the firm’s executive chairman, tells The Weekend Australian.

“We have been approached an incredible number of times by clients and non-clients to help them with this part of their puzzle and we are responding to client need. We have started doing it informally and from the third quarter of this year it will be stand alone business in the marketplace helping clients deliver on their brand promises.”

In April the co-architect of PwC’s CMO Advisory unit (aimed at chief marketing officers) and former advertising industry executive, Justin Papps, quit the accounting giant to join Sayers Group. The move united him with Howcroft, who also helped launch the PwC CMO business and joined Sayers late last year.

Another key player in the new marketing vertical will be former Judo Bank co-founder, Kate Keenan, who joined Sayers Group last year as its chief brand officer.

The creation of the fourth leg of Sayers Group’s advisory and investments business (it also started a separate wealth business in December called Sayers Wealth) follows the launch over the past five months of its infrastructure and major projects arm and most recently, a technology and platforms operation.

Luke Sayers, who will also take over as president of the prestigious Carlton Australian Football Club next year, says Sayers Group now has 85 staff and the ambition to grow that number to 200 over the next two years across its newly established offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane.

It wants at least 40 per cent of its partners to be women.

“We have been overwhelmed by the number of people that want to leave their legacy based firms to join us and we have had terrific trading for the first six months. We are in front of our business plan for FY21 in terms of revenue and EBIT (earnings before interest and tax),’’ he declares, noting the strongest growth has come from the strategy and deals business, while wealth has been more challenging.

The early performance of Sayers Group has been keenly watched by its rivals in the accounting, advisory and wealth sectors, especially given its big name backers include the likes of Lindsay and David Fox, Jayco founder Gerry Ryan and Seek co-founder Andrew Bassat.

The firm also has the backing of a major American family office.

In recent months Sayers himself has been drawn into questions about the close relationship between the Fox family and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, given the former accounting boss is also a good friend of Mr Andrews.

Given that friendship, Sayers has also surprisingly been the subject of defamatory social media speculation relating to his alleged involvement in the holiday home accident that left Mr Andrews with a broken back and off work for more than three months.

“It’s all crazy. It’s just weird, silly stuff,’’ Sayers says of the rumour.

“The important thing to remember here is that the Premier was seriously injured and I wish him all the best as he recovers and returns to the job.”

The technology and platforms arm of the Sayers Group business is spearheaded by Deloitte’s former robotics and cognitive automation lead partner Amberjit Endow and five other former Deloitte partners who jumped ship to Sayers last December.

It already has a partnership with McLaren Strategic Ventures, a US-based business accelerator that helps tech startups in the business to business sector.

“We will be looking to bring those platforms to Australia and to partner with various home-grown platforms to expand them internationally. We are in the business of customisation of platforms to solve a specific client need or problem in the most efficient or effective way possible,’’ Sayers says.

The firm is currently modelling the creation of a so-called “Sayers Index” to measure latent technology opportunities that exist in Australia but are yet to be commercialised.

While the index will cover all industries, examining how productivity and technology is transforming them over time, it will be tailored to the sectors that Sayers Group targets with its client work: technology, public sector, infrastructure, and financial services.

The launch of the index later this year follows research work conducted by the Sayers Group team to put a number on the potential value of a greater focus on research and development to Australia’s GDP.

“Between the internet of things, big data and digital platforms - especially in the post Covid era - a 1 per cent difference would deliver over $200bn to our economy over the next decade or $20bn per year,’’ Luke Sayers declares.

The work had its foundations in a major report published by McKinsey in 2017 titled “Digital Australia: Seizing the Opportunity from the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, which first flagged a $200bn productivity benefit to the country from more investment in R&D and technology.

Sayers took the McKinsey model and extrapolated it over the next decade from 2020 to arrive at a similar number.

“Post pandemic is the best time for organisations to get after this opportunity. A lot of organisations have gone very low on the cost curve with regard to headcount. When things start to come back (post-Covid), finding automated ways of solving those business problems through technology rather than just bringing on headcount is what the future is about. There is a big opportunity for Australia and business off the back of digitising their workplaces,’’ Luke Sayers says.

“Australia also needs to be far more aggressive with investment into new and emerging technology. There is a war chest of capital out there, whether that be through super funds, private equity or family offices. More and more of those organisations are looking to bet on tech. But still not enough. How do we join the capital providers to the ideas and the creators such that we have a match to really supercharge investment into platform-based companies?”

Sayers Group wants to position itself to provide the link between innovators and entrepreneurs with capital providers and government.

Last year it took a strategic stake in Melbourne technology company Elenium Automation, which has developed a multifunctional health screening device for Covid-19 and other potential illnesses.

With Sayers’ advice and support, Elenium has been able to break into industries dominated by legacy systems and enable mass health screening at self-service touch points, including the Fox family-backed Avalon Airport west of Melbourne.

Elenium CEO Aaron Hornlimann thinks the $200 billion in GDP growth identified by Sayers is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

“If we look beyond IoT, big data, and digital automation platforms and consider other technologies and the broader positive knock on effects for Australian and global companies, the opportunities are endless,’’ he says.

Sayers Group has also partnered with other technology providers including artificial intelligence company Cleareye.ai, compliance platform 6clicks, automation company Clear Dynamics and artificial intelligence and blockchain start-up Accubits.

In May the firm recruited former Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer as a consultant. While he is assisting Sayers Wealth CEO Neville Azzopardi and Advisory and Investments boss Sammy Kumar with firm’s strategy, he is also playing a key role in the evolution of its data and analytics functions.

Last November Azzopardi, a former JBWere advisor, was joined in the wealth operation by two other former JBWere execs, James Wright and Jason Chequer.

Sayers Wealth has teamed with a Melbourne-based fintech known as MyProsperity to offer clients a real-time “whole of wealth”, balance-sheet snapshot of an individual or family’s finances.

“It has definitely been slower. I am not sure I would say it is harder,’’ Luke Sayers says of the first 6 months of trading for the business.

“We feel we have a very good differentiated offering. But the time it takes to engage with families and individuals and for them to transition their portfolios across to Sayers, onto our new platform, the time that takes is significant. So that has been much longer. We are having really good success in converting clients across, it is just a timely endeavour. When it is married up with the strategy and investments part of our business, those clients will get access to unique deals that those with a lot of the stand-alone wealth organisations will not.”

The breadth of the Sayers Group’s tailored operations are the biggest selling point to clients, even if some rivals are sceptical the firm may be trying to do too much, too early.

The signing of big-name hires such as Russel Howcroft, Brian Hartzer, Sammy Kumar and Nicole Scurrah - a former chief of staff to former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh - has also prompted questions as to whether the firm can generate the revenue to justify its cost base.

All partners have been given equity in the firm.

“The revenue is coming based on the client demand and we are all on the tools. We are not proposing to be a big pyramid shop like a lot of advisory firms. We have a different model, a different leverage ratio. It is a one to four kind of model - one partner to three people that support them, rather than the 1 to 10 or 1 to 12 you see in the big firms,’’ Sayers says.

“The way we price reflects a different model. The way we potentially take equity in our clients is a different model. It is hard to compare traditional pyramid models to what we are doing here. We are more a value-creation model.”

In May Sayers was appointed president-elect of the Carlton Football Club, continuing the recent trend of accountants and consultants heading AFL club boards.

A member of the Carlton board since 2012, he will replace Mark LoGiudice as president.

His appointment, which has been long speculated, has also led to questions about his workload.

Carlton, long backed by the billionaire Pratt family, is now at the crossroads after inconsistent performances in 2021 under current coach David Teague, and Sayers is currently leading a review of the club’s entire football department.

But the new president declares his total confidence in his ability to oversee the transformation of his beloved Blues, while also building his advisory business from scratch across a series of highly competitive markets. His big-name backers in football and in business are watching on closely.

“There are three passions in my life outside of family. One being my wife’s charity, two being the Carlton Football Club and three being starting this awesome investment advisory business. It is a full schedule but I feel absolutely I can lead and do a good job of all three,” he says.

“There is a very capable CEO at the Inclusion Foundation (his wife Cate’s charity), at Carlton and here at Sayers I have two wonderful CEO’s, one who runs the advisory and investments business and the other the wealth business. It is not like I am the CEO of all three.”