Steve Holmes
(Feedsy)
Donuts and professional development don’t really have that much in common, but I was looking for an analogy. “Why?” you might ask. Well, you will have to read on.
Financial Advisers often work in isolation from other advisers, and they need that opportunity to share ideas and to form communities. After all, this is how some awesome partnerships, referral opportunities, and life-long friendships are formed.
Back to my very weak analogy for a moment, donuts do go well with coffee and Professional Development Days have some invaluable breakout sessions providing an opportunity to catch up with your colleagues.
As you know Professional Development Days also have a lot of highly technical content on strategy and legislation and much of this goes over my head. Thank God I value advice and have my own trusted Financial Planner, Accountant and Insurance Broker.
Professional Development Days just provide the ideal learning platform
As some of you would know I have been in Financial Services for 30 years now, and I have been attending PD days for 25 years. I’ve been to many with AMP Financial Planning and more recently with Elders, Centrepoint Alliance and the Institute of Public Accountants.
The two most valuable take-outs in my opinion are:
- Ongoing education from your Group
- Catching up with your colleagues to share ideas
… and of-course your ongoing professional education points.
The two most enjoyable parts of PD Days in my opinion are:
- Catching up with your colleagues to share ideas
- Coffee and donuts 🙂
As you know a successful financial future does not happen by chance – it requires planning and regular reviews to make sure you’re on the right path to achieving your goals.
This does not happen without quality advice and lots of hard work dedicated to ongoing professional development and self-improvement. So this is a big shout out to all of the advisers out there doing some great things for their clients.
In the last few weeks we have attended the Elders PD days in Adelaide, Melbourne & Brisbane and the Institute of Public Accountants (IPA) Victorian Congress. In fact, the IPA Congress is where we sponsored these awesome donuts and the reason I just had to find analogy.
Over the next few months we are also attending the following conferences:
WA – IPA State Conference – 23rd-24th March
Darwin – IPA Professional Accounting Forum – 24-27th May
NSW & ACT – IPA My Public Accountant Symposium – 4th-5th April
This whole experience reminded me why I love what I do
I love this industry, always have, I get to work with professionals, listen to what is happening in their business and have a coffee and or donut with them 🙂
Importantly, and If I am fortunate enough, I get to work with advisers to help solve some problems or create something pretty cool for their clients. Happy to say some great friendships are formed along the way.
Cheers,
Steve Holmes
Co-Founder – Feedsy
