To celebrate 10 years of Catapult Wealth, Director Tony Catt has written a series of blogs capturing the last 10 years as a business.
The growth of Catapult Wealth over the last 10 years has basically been built on a couple of key planks.
Organic Growth of Catapult Wealth
Firstly, we built our growth with relationships with some major and significant accounting firms around Adelaide. As part of Catapult Wealth’s clear messaging, we like to emphasise the importance of working as a team with accounts. Making sure everyone is always on the same page is important. We want to make sure the clients feel there is a team around them and that they’re heading in the same direction. It makes it easier for clients to make decisions and get actions done.
It’s been fantastic to build the strong relationship that we have with Jarrad Newbold and Michael Van Dyk in McLaren Vale. They’ve been a big part of the growth of Catapult Wealth in the last 10 years. There’s been a number of other accounting firms around Adelaide that we’ve retained very strategic and collaborative relationships with which has also been very positive.
Another real key plank of our organic growth over the last 10 years has been our client service. We have maintained a Net Promotor Score of between 60 and 70 which is classified as ‘World Class’ in financial services. We’re now getting between 120 and 160 referrals a year, so client satisfaction is really paramount for us. We know we’re not perfect and mistakes occasionally happen, but we certainly pride ourselves on our client service and hopefully, this is reflected in our clients wanting to refer others to the firm.
We have also made a couple of acquisitions. We bought another financial planning firm during the journey and that has helped create a bit of critical mass in the business. It has brought on some more clients and also team members which have contributed significantly to the growth of Catapult Wealth over the last 10 years.
One major acquisition was a firm called Maven Wealth, which was a significant transaction in our history and brought with it a lot of learnings. Shifting clients from one relationship to another is never easy. We had to make sure we earned the faith and trust of the clients and our team made sure the transition was as smooth as possible from a client perspective. Certainly, there were lots of lessons learnt going through an acquisition like that. It has set us up to keep improving for the next time we do it.
I have learnt a lot through our business growth, where we have grown from 2 people to nearly 20 people in the wealth management team. I think one of the major things is that when increasing the size of the team and the client base, you’ve just got to reinvent your systems and processes over and over and over again. That takes time, it takes effort and often takes money as well. Reinventing those things leads to a lot of good people around you and people that are willing to change. That’s been the great thing about our team with its organic growth – our team have been willing to change as we go and continue to have the energy to continue to make it happen. I think the team has been a major factor in our growth over the last 10 years.