RI Toowoomba Group partners with VBP to nearly double outsourced team
Nathan Jacobsen
Financial planning business, RI Toowoomba Group, has significantly expanded its relationship with outsourcing specialists, Vital Business Partners (VBP), by adding four financial planning assistants and upskilling existing senior financial planning assistants to provide paraplanning services.
Steve Browning, Chief Operating Officer, RI Toowoomba Group, said the business had grown quickly over the past year, primarily through M&A, creating a relatively urgent need for capable back-office resources to support the group’s advice team, which is spread across five locations including Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.
This led RI Toowoomba Group to engage VBP to increase its number of outsourced staff based in the Philippines to nine, up from five previously.
Locally, the business has 35 employees including thirteen advisers.
“We’ve had a strong partnership with VBP since 2018. Over that time, we had a stable team of five in Cebu but as a result of recent acquisitions, our VBP resources have almost doubled to ensure we continue to deliver reliable service and operational excellence,” Browning said.
“VBP gives us the confidence to focus on M&A opportunities and continue growing because we know they are there to support us to scale our back-office, and build and manage our offshore team.”
Nathan Jacobsen, Chief Executive Officer of VBP said advice businesses, particularly those growing quickly, needed access to a large, qualified pool of talent to perform back-office functions and free business leaders to focus on value creation and strategic initiatives.
“Advisers are time-poor and many have ambitious goals and targets so they shouldn’t be distracted by day-to-day administration,” he said.
“Demand for advice has never been higher, due to demographic changes, the increasing complexities of life, and heightened global economic and geopolitical uncertainty.”
“Advisers are working extremely hard to help clients understand their position and manage their affairs. They need a trusted, experienced partner to come alongside them to help recruit, train and manage teams, so they can focus on helping people and growing their business.”
Established in 1992, RI Toowoomba Group specialises in financial planning and retirement advice to mass affluent people living in regional Queensland.
The group’s business strategy focuses on achieving the necessary scale in key markets, expanding into new regions, and enhancing operational efficiency by streamlining processes and digitising the client experience.
“We’ve had some challenges in recent years, namely too many clients and not enough advisers, so we set out to solve that problem by acquiring like-minded businesses in areas where we had existing clients but not a local presence,” Browning said.
“We identified areas where we had large cohorts of clients and found quality businesses and people that had capacity to take care of existing clients, look after our clients in the area, and continue growing too. With VBP, we’ve been able to support those businesses and focus on executing our strategy.”
