Return every call
When the coronavirus sent the market into meltdown, Knight Financial Advisors director Jason Featherby had one instruction for his team.
When the coronavirus outbreak sent the market into meltdown, wiping out large chunks of the superannuation and investment portfolios of people across Australia, Knight Financial Advisors director Jason Featherby had one simple instruction for his team.
“The idea was for all my team and me to return every call by the end of every day and just start again the next day,” he tells The Deal.
“We needed to make sure no one did anything that was irrational or driven by fear or emotion that they would regret later.”
The number of calls to the group’s office, from existing clients and panicked mums and dads desperate for advice, increased tenfold. Day after day, as the crisis continued, Featherby and his colleagues continued to work the phones.
“During March we were on the phone pretty much all day, from 7.30am to 6pm. You’d finish one phone call and there were three more to answer,” he says.
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The crisis was an emphatic test of the principles Featherby and his colleagues had put together when they launched the group. Knight was created as a financial adviser division within mid-tier Perth accounting practice NKH Knight but has since gone on to become the bigger fish.
Featherby says Knight was designed around a philosophy of a hands-on, fee-for-service offering that would be available to its clients — the sort of model that has become more and more common across the sector today.
The commitment to engage with clients when needed helped put clients at ease during what Featherby says was the most “savage” fall he has experienced.
He says the coronavirus tumult, coming in the wake of the royal commission into financial services that prompted unprecedented scrutiny of the sector, will ultimately make for a far better industry.
“What we will end up with in the long term, and I don’t want to be disrespectful to the older advisers, is just a better quality of adviser all around Australia,” he says.
“The royal commission, the increased training standards, the fact the market has got hard, it means that a lot just won’t or can’t be bothered with it any more. What is left is generally younger, more educated, less transactional, more involved advisers, and I think that’s what clients want.”
Featherby also has been a highly visible presence in Perth’s media landscape, with his regular appearance on segments with two local radio stations making him and Knight increasingly recognisable names.
He says the media engagement has helped take Knight to the next level in terms of client numbers.
“The exposure that media gives you is enormous and you don’t realise that until you set foot into that area,” he says. “We’ve grown from two advisers five years ago to six today, and a lot of that is through radio and the clients we get through that.”
The firm also has become one of the most actively involved with the catastrophically injured — those who have been involved in car accidents or workplace incidents that leave them no longer able to work.
He estimates about 40 per cent of the firm’s business is linked to those clients.
While their financial objectives are similar to many other clients, they also present a new set of challenges that need to be addressed over and above how to manage their insurance payout or financial settlement.
“Those clients are immediately wealthy but they have needs far and above other clients. It’s also a counselling-type job. We look after their money like we do for able-bodied clients but we will also organise plumbers and we help buy houses and sign up builders to put in ramps and so on. It’s a far more rewarding role,” he says.
“The most important thing to understand from your adviser is whether they are self-licenced or licenced by a big institution.
“Even though the rules and laws have changed, when you go to a licensee that’s part of a big bank or a big institution, you invariably end up with more limited scope in terms of what’s available for them to give you advice on. It’s not the adviser’s fault, it’s just how it is. A self-licensed adviser should be able to offer you a broader scope of products to fit their advice, and you should genuinely be getting what’s in your best interest.”