Guardian Advice addresses advisers' business succession hurdles

Feb. 28, 2013 - PRLog -- Guardian Advice offers younger advisers a service to give them the leg up that they need to become the dealer group’s next generation of success stories.

Guardian Advice is currently working on its first cornerstone business acquisition, underpinned by the group’s new Practice Equity model.

Business succession planning remains a chronic challenge for advice practices as they struggle to smoothly transfer wealth management businesses from Baby Boomer advisers to younger generation advisers.

Guardian Advice head Simon Harris said: “The challenge with transferring wealth businesses from older to younger advisers is that many of these businesses have grown very large and successful through acquisition and organic growth - and the hurdles of business succession are too high for younger advisers to take over these practices.

“Guardian’s Practice Equity model offers principal business owners the opportunity to partner with Guardian on a minority basis to support their transition to retirement, whilst allowing younger advisers access to capital and ownership.

“Through this model younger advisers get significant benefits, including mentoring and a range of back office services administrative services (eg. free risk SOAs and outsourced functions, including book-keeping, reception and virtual offices) to achieve scale and efficiencies while reducing their overheads.”

Guardian Advice recognises the need to proactively approach advisers to facilitate acquisition opportunities at a practice level.

“We engage in proactive conversations with all of the advice practices in our network to understand where they’re at in their businesses’ lifecycle.

“From that analysis, we can see that Guardian’s network is in a very stable position in that our adviser base has a good cross-section of ages. However, over the next few years we expect to work with a handful of practice principals on business succession and acquisition strategies to help them smoothly exit and hand over their practice to the next generation.”

Guardian expects to announce the news of a new transaction in the coming months.