The Future of Francois du Toit Consulting and Technology
When you combine your financial planning and tax experience obtained since 1998 with a passion for learning, technology and business, you quickly find yourself in an overwhelming position. One where you can offer and help financial professionals with anything and everything they need.
And then you try to do exactly that.
I recently published a video and an article on the “Biggest Mistake I Made in 2019” where I talk about this in great detail as well as the learnings from these mistakes. However, in this article, I want to talk about the future of my business and what decisions we made.
2020 and beyond
The first decision we made, is to focus on our core. On what we are truly about.
And that is training.
It is what we love, it is how we influence, it is how we help and it is how we live out our purpose of playing our small role in professionalising the industry.
Our training offering
We are focused on providing practical and impactful content in our areas of expertise and that offer CPD points to those who need it. Our uniqueness lies in how we deliver the content and the support we provide on the back of the training.
From 2015 to 2016 we created a variety of content that financial advisors and planners would be interested in. Then from 2017 to 2019, we focused on creating deep and comprehensive content covering all areas of financial planning.
During 2019 we launched our premium CPD offering called “Ignite” which has caught the attention of many financial advisors and planners. As part of the offering, we started creating shorter content that can be used in combination with the deep and comprehensive content.
How we deliver our training
Our CPD accredited training is available in both a face-to-face and an online format.
Face-to-face
Courses
Our premier face-to-face offering is our courses. We offer the following CPD accredited courses in 2020:
- Income Tax for Financial Planning
- Capital Gains Tax
- Estate Planning
- Business Succession Planning (Business Assurance)
- PCE (Board Exam) Preparation (Not eligible for CPD)
These courses will be presented in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. Dates have been set for Johannesburg and will be published on our website. Cape Town and Durban to follow soon.
Ignite members pay a significantly reduced fee for these courses.
Workshops
Corporates, franchises and FSPs can book us for workshops. We offer fixed fees regardless of how many people attend the workshop. Attendees will earn CPD and we will administer the CPD.
Workshops are typically 2 to 5 hours depending on the topic and format.
Online
We offer CPD accredited online content for all areas of financial planning covering tax, estate planning, investment planning, trusts, retirement planning, business assurance and a variety of recorded webinars.
Each program or recorded webinar can be purchased individually or full access to all content can be purchased for the current CPD cycle.
Ignite members receive full access to all our online content.
Live Online Sessions
We offer monthly live online sessions. As part of our drive and commitment to help, anyone can watch these online sessions live at no cost.
However, if you want to claim the CPD points attached to each session, you must either be an Ignite member or you would need to purchase the online assessment.
Purchase our online content
Corporates, franchises and FSPs can purchase our online content for hosting on their own internal Learner Management System (LMS). You are responsible to have the content accredited for CPD and for administering the CPD yourself.
You will receive a license to use the content, CPD application templates and the assessments.
New Training
After working with most of the well-known financial planning systems in South Africa over the last 15 years, we identified clear gaps as far as advanced or next-level training is concerned.
We will shortly introduce our unique approach and offering to help you use your system to its fullest potential.
That is everything with regards to training and what we offer.
Our advisor support offering
We launched our advisor support services in July 2019. After running this for the remainder of 2019, we quickly learned what works and what doesn’t. What is profitable and, you guessed it, what is not.
It is important in business that one does not get romantic and emotional about ideas, services and the time that has been invested into something. We must be able to make hard decisions. Quickly.
This is what we did and this is the part of the business where we are making the changes.
What we are continuing with
It is in our heart and our soul to support financial professionals. This will never change. However, we learned in 2019 that we cannot support everyone with everything.
So after careful consideration, we will continue with the following support services:
- Independent Trust Compliance Reviews
- Hello Advisor
Independent Trust Compliance Reviews
We developed a service and a process to review trusts from a legal, accounting, tax and financial planning perspective.
We put a team in place that combined has 67 years of experience in the fields of trusts, accounting and financial planning.
We also offer assistance with changes that must be made such as appointing or removing trustees, updating or replacing trust deeds and creating new trusts.
We offer a referral fee for this service.
Hello Advisor
From experience, we know that it is a lonely world out there for most financial advisors and planners. It is hard to know who to phone and who to trust when you need guidance, information and technical information you can count on.
With Hello Advisor you can call, email or Whatsapp us.
You have a choice between the pay-per-use option or you can sign up for our retainer option. Whatever suits you best.
With Hello Advisor you can ask us questions, bounce off ideas, have us check your FNAs and check calculations before you include them in your planning.
What we are cutting
We are stopping our paraplanning and FNA service with immediate effect.
We will no longer be offering preparation of FNAs, cash flows, scenario planning, investment analysis and writing of reports.
The business model for this does not work for us and combined with the low uptake we made the decision to cut these services from our support offering immediately.
PROpulsion Media
All our content marketing will be housed under PROpulsion Media, which will be responsible for:
The Tax Tool
We continue to build and enhance The Tax Tool in 2020.
The Tax Tool will be enhanced and the new updated version released in March 2020 after we’ve had the budget speech in February 2020. Exciting new functionality has been planned!
Speaking
I am actively seeking speaking opportunities in 2020 and beyond. Topics I speak about include:
- The future of financial planning and the financial planner
- Financial planning for global citizens
- 7 Powerful habits to build a legendary practice
- Technology and its impact on the financial planning profession
- The new marketing for financial planning professionals
I am available to speak at conferences, events and meetings.
Accounting and Tax
We brought Ida Sonnekus in as a partner during 2019 to build the accounting and tax practice.
The Accountables has been growing significantly in the last few months and we are excited to grow it further in 2020.
The Accountables offer full business accounting, payroll and tax services.
That’s it!
That is what we will focus on in 2020 and what we will no longer be offering.
To summarise, we only do two things:
- Training in all areas of financial planning; and
- Advisor support to help you be your best.
That is it.
Thank you for reading to the end, it is highly appreciated.
You can contact us here. Please also consider signing up for our VIP Mailing List here.
