Listing on the stock market could provide an outcome for financial planning practices that struggle with succession planning, according to Shadforth Financial Group (SFG).
"We've got three generations of people in our firm - the original founders of the various businesses and two more generations," SFG chief executive Tony Fenning said.
"The issue is that as the business has become more valuable, we are finding it hard to slowly hand over control and ownership to the younger generation."
For a small business it is hard to transfer a minority equity stake between staff members, because it cannot provide the liquidity or pricing mechanisms that a stock market has.
A public listing would enable planning practice owners to gradually sell off their holdings.
"The push for us to list is to facilitate succession and liquidity in the stock, not to raise capital," Fenning said.
SFG was established last year by merging 12 planning practices together, consisting of 130 advisers with about $6 billion in funds under management.
The group will start to operate under the single Shadforth brand from 1 July this year.
"The bigger group that we have put together will be able to deal with [succession planning] in a way that smaller businesses would not be able to," Fenning said.
But the listing of the group has been temporarily put on hold as the downturn in the market would make it impossible to get a fair price for the business, he said.
"There is no point of listing when your share price is lower than you think it is justified to be," he said.
SFG will not look at a listing again until the market recovers by a further 30 per cent from the current levels.
"That is round about the price that people would start to think about exchanging some shares," Fenning said.
