Meet Sam Caton

Sam is our Customer Support Manager working within the Financial Planning team, and ensures the smooth running of the team’s day-to-day activities.

Transcript

My name is Sam and I’m the Admin Manager for the Financial Planning Team. I started working at Empower Wealth about nine and a half years ago now. It was just me and two advisors at the time when I started. We’re now six advisors and I now manage five admin staff myself. Empower Wealth has certainly grown quite a lot over the years.

As the Customer Service Manager of the Financial Planning team, my main job is to make sure that the admin team and the advisors are working day to day as smoothly as possible so that all clients can have the best experience possible as they go through the process with us.

Another one of my role is to ensure that all the systems and processes that we have in place are up to date. I’m always looking for room for improvement. How can we make things better? How can we make things go faster? How can the process be improved? I like to ensure that the admin team and the advisors are all across all of the systems and processes the whole time to once again ensure that everyone is working together harmoniously to get that right outcome for our clients.

What is it like for a client on the Financial Planning Journey?

The Financial Planning process is actually pretty simple, but I think people find it very daunting. The first step is once you’ve had your initial consultation with the advisor at that meeting, you kind of talk about how the advisor might be able to help in your situation. What things can we do?

Do you have multiple super accounts that need to be consolidated? Are you under-insured? What are those strategies that we can potentially put in place to ensure that you are in a position where you’re better off? ‘

After the initial discussion, the advisor will send the client a letter of engagement just to engage our services. They will request a bunch of information and third party authorities which allow us, the admin team to go ahead and find out all the information about your existing policies.

After that, the advisor gets to work on the strategy and actually putting together the Statement of Advice. That process can be quite lengthy just because of the amount of time it takes to find all that data, for the advisor to do all the research, and then for the paraplanner to actually write the document. This part of the process can take a number of weeks.

Once you’ve had the Statement of Advice presented, you’re happy with all of the recommendations and you’d like to proceed, there will be another authority to sign off. And then that’s when the process comes back to the admin team and we step in to assist with putting all of those recommendations into place.

Why should someone engage a Financial Planner?

There are so many reasons and benefits as to why you should engage with a Financial Planner. They can look at so many areas of your financial wellbeing that maybe you haven’t even thought about such as superannuation, particularly where you have multiple accounts or a high a balance that maybe isn’t working as hard for you as it really could be. Debt consolidation and cashflow management as well if you’re really looking to try and cut down on your spending and trying to save money. There are just so many areas that they have expertise in.

And so even just having an initial consultation with an advisor to get an idea of how you’re on the right track, what sorts of things could you potentially be doing to improve your situation before you’re potentially at a point to actually go ahead and purchase property or things like that? We can still assist.

What’s one of your most memorable moments with a client?

I do have really fond memories of this one client in particular. I was helping her with her super, so she had just retired. They had one final payment that they needed to make to her, so I had to open an account and then have it closed down again so that she could have the money paid out for her.

But throughout the process, you know, I held her hand and explained exactly what needed to be done and why. And at the end of it, these are her actual words to me.

Thank you again for your super fast response to my emails. Appreciate your fabulous work and dedication. If you ever need someone to put in a good word, I’m here for you. I really mean it.

So when I receive emails like that from clients who are obviously just so grateful for the help that I’ve been able to provide, it just brings absolute warm fuzzies to my heart and it really just makes my day. And that’s why I’m here, is just to help clients with the everyday, mundane banality of superannuation and insurance paperwork.

But if that’s what makes a difference in someone’s life, well then I’ve made an achievement.

You can learn more about Sam Caton here. Or if you’d like to book an initial consultation with our Financial Planners, simply fill in the form below and we’ll email you the next steps.