The importance of a plan - and how that relates to self-managed super.

What’s your business’s strategy when it comes to self managed super. And I don’t mean “well we always try to get our clients to use a corporate trustee.”

What I mean is, what’s your BUSINESS strategy. For instance: Which segments of the market are you concentrating on? Are there enough of these people to make you a decent income? What are you offering them? And how are you attracting them?

As the quote goes, strategy without tactics is slowest route to victory. Oh yes, you laugh. But how about the corollary – tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Hmm. That’s not so pretty is it.

There’s a few issues though when it comes to working out your SMSF strategy. The first is that it’s complicated! By the time you consider trustees, accountants, administrators, financial planners, lawyers, document providers, software providers, your head will be spinning.

The other issue, which I’ve written about a few times before, is that exaggeration is rife in SMSF! If you added up all the SMSFs that everyone claims to be responsible for, you would end up with a number WAY bigger than the truth of 560,000. And that’s just one angle.

And then we’ve got all the conflicting research. There’s numerous high quality research houses looking at SMSF, but the answers they come up with always seem to be different? How are you supposed to make sense of that?

The other key issue, especially for large businesses is that SMSF isn’t a product or segment, but more of an opportunity. And generally speaking, large businesses are set up along product or segment lines. So if you try to have an SMSF team, it can be very tricky to know where to put them, who they should report to, where their funding should come from etc.

So in the end, maybe it’s easier just to put SMSF in the too hard basket and look at other clients. But then, you come back to the numbers – more than 1 million Australians have an SMSF. There are 30,000 accountants involved. And of course, there’s more than $500 billion in assets, just crying out for better management.

And back and forward we go.

Personally, I think the time for ignoring it is long gone. And most of the people that I speak to agree (although this could well be confirmation bias as I do spend a lot of time talking to other SMSF-focused businesses!)

So now we’re back at ‘get an SMSF strategy’. Which is good.

So the first step of any strategy, is to know where you are up to now. Then decide where you want to go, and then figure out how to get there.

To determine where you’re up to now, get into the data. And when you start digging into the data, all kinds of interesting things appear. But that only tells you part of the story. You also need to understand, and I mean DEEPLY understand where your customers are up to. Either of these without the other can lead you down the garden path in no time.

Then looking externally, determine where the opportunities are now, and where you think they will be in the future. By combining the external view AND the internal view, you can make decisions about where to focus time, effort and resources. And once you know that, the tactics often become quite straight forward.

Simple.

But as they say, just because something is simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy! Not surprisingly, most businesses don’t have SMSF strategy specialists on staff. These aren’t the people that you need every day. So if you’re serious about your SMSF strategy, you’re almost definitely going to need outside help. And really, there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s like going to see a financial planner, they are experts at financial planning, and you probably aren’t.

So if you are ready to get serious about SMSF (blatant plug coming!) give us a call. SMSF business strategy is at the heart of what Mayflower is about, and we’d love to talk to you about getting some SMSF clarity and strategy for your business. So you can spend your time getting on with it, and not worrying that you might be missing out on your share of the SMSF juggernaut.

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