Heffron has strengthened its position as one of the few independent SMSF service providers in the industry through a restructuring of its operations, including a number of new hires.
The firm began reviewing its business model 18 months ago, considering three likely options that would dictate the direction in which it would head in the coming years.
“We had three choices. One was to sell to a larger institution because we’d built up a brand, we are well respected and we have a reasonable business size,” Heffron SMSF Solutions managing director Martin Heffron told selfmanagedsuper.
“We could have done nothing, which would have meant the business would probably shrink slightly slowly over time.
“Or we could invest in the business and try and create an independent capability from a technology perspective as well as a human perspective, and we decided to take this course of action and it’s what we’ve been doing for the last 18 months.
“In order to have influence in the industry and distribute our services more broadly, we knew we needed to get bigger. In order to build this scale, we needed to build our technological capabilities and in order to build the technology, we needed to acquire resources we hadn’t had access to before. The first step was to recruit the right people.”
As part of the recruitment process, Paul Sarkis joined Heffron in October as its technical sales director. Most recently he was head of product at Hub24 and before that held the role of head of technical at MLC.
“Paul is a good fit for Heffron, which prides itself on its technical excellence,” Heffron said.
Prior to Sarkis’s appointment, Lee Russell took on the position of project implementation manager in September, having previously worked at Cavendish and AMP SMSF.
In August, Andrew Smith joined Heffron as its chief technology officer, with the recruiting process beginning in February with the appointment of Jenny Kerswill as chief operating officer.
The review of the business has also resulted in Meg Heffron moving away from her role as head of technical to take on the newly created position of head of customer. She will now be responsible for product development and roll out as well as customer relationship management, and sales and marketing.
Heffron is looking to build on its reputation as a provider of administration, documentation, actuarial certificates, technical support and education in the SMSF sector.
The decision to increase investment in the business was already making a difference, Heffron said.
“We’ve already seen some benefits of the technology investment, including the actuarial certificate integration with Class Super, online fund establishment tool and the online investment strategy service,” he said.
“We are building a number of internal tools to further enhance our scalability, efficiency and customer experience.”
