Bennetts made his foray into the financial services industry in the 1980s, beginning his career with Monitor Money as a financial adviser. He cut his teeth in building a client base by picking up the phone and doorknocking for new business.
It was during his two years with the firm that Bennetts met an accountant through a friend, a meeting that sparked the idea that advisers and accountants could work together in providing advice.
After the 1987 stock market crash, he found himself moving up the ranks within a new Queensland-based firm, Adviser Research. The firm afforded him the chance to continue working with accountants, as well as allowing fate to step in.
“In 1995, ING purchased the business and the new boss and myself had a different view and his lecture to me was ‘you better go and tell these accountants they are lucky they can sell our product’,” he recalls.
“My comment back was ‘well, the accountants deal with us because we’re giving advice and it’s about providing advice to the clients and it’s about what’s in their best interest and not a particular product’.”
The confrontation left Bennetts with a new found professional mantra that selling products was not for him. It also left him on the verge of unemployment.
Fate stepped in during 1996 when Bennetts was asked to be part of a breakaway group of Adviser Research advisers and accountants.
“It was actually a financial planner, Di Pelham-Webb, who put the first meeting together of a number of planners and accountants that were with Adviser [Research] and myself and said ‘we’re not going to tolerate product flogging and we just want to stick with you and do things and let’s go and set up our own [firm]’ and that was Professional Investment Services,” he says.
“Our original goal in 1996 was to keep our losses to $200,000 in the first year, break even in the second and make a profit in the third year.
“So many people joined our model and were able to make a profit in the first year and so it’s been many goals and many achievements along the way.”
More than 10 years later, all parties involved in the breakaway group are all still with the firm, Australia’s largest dealer group with more than 1400 advisers, 1395 practices and about $16.7 billion in funds under advice.
Bennetts puts this down to the culture within PIS; a culture that is more often than not misunderstood.
“The culture is what this group is about and sometimes that is very wrongly mistaken. I think that in many ways I think there is sometimes discrimination against this group,” he says.
“As far as various products that have failed, it’s very easy to say ‘well, we had exposure to some products that haven’t worked’. But I can think, Westpoint for example, there were 65 dealer groups with exposure to that and there were only really three, maybe four, that copped any publicity and they really went for us.
“Yet as a percentage of our business it was tiny, and, of course, I wonder what they have done with the other groups – the press and the regulator – with punishing the other groups.”
It is Bennetts view that many within the industry are divided by the group.
“I think a lot of the industry either love us or hate us, though they do look to us for a little guidance,” he says.
“In so many cases we set the future and then so many groups follow what we do.”
The future for PIS and Bennetts remains a little unclear. Earlier this month, he announced he would step back from day-to-day duties within the firm.
“We’ve been restructuring here [at PIS], we’ve put in our three major pillars of the business and we’re looking forward to management stepping up now so that I can take more time working with the industry and lobby groups and helping the regulator understand what the industry is about,” he says.
For the 25-year industry veteran, the next phase of his career is in his grasp.
