William Mills’ Story

I established this practice in April 1983 in the Marketplace Shopping Centre at Pennant Hills, Sydney. Many of our clients today, became clients in those early years and we still enjoy very close relationships on an ongoing basis. Many of our accounting clients have became our financial planning clients.

In October 1987, we witnessed a major sharemarket crash that caused many of my friends and clients to lose substantial amounts of hard earned savings in what amounted to an unprecedented orgy of greed. It was particularly sad for me to see my clients’ investments in unlisted managed funds not only suffering a substantial loss of capital but also losing access to their remaining depleted funds.

Reflecting on the incident, I realised my own investments did not suffer this fate. Why? I had no advance knowledge of the crash coming, but I had taken profit and was fortunate enough to have 80% in cash on the day and hence my exposure was very small. I did well because I controlled the risk of those investments more effectively. At that time my clients only had access to unlisted managed funds and we could not offer direct listed securities or term deposits as we can today.

The lesson, I learnt out of 1987 that risk can be controlled and proactively managed.

In the mid 1990’s, I began to develop a system of applying the same strategy as I did with my own portfolio in 1987. By applying this strategy, I was able to manage my clients’ investments and thus achieve the same effective outcomes for them.

Today, our clients enjoy the benefits of this knowledge as we have fine tuned our strategies to ensure our clients’ losses are limited in the event of a major sharemarket correction. After the correction has passed, we take advantage of the opportunities of buying heavily discounted quality assets.

We are a licensed professional financial planning practice. Our clients are very important to us as is the relationship we form in meeting your needs and understanding what you seek from us. Everyone wants something different and we need to understand what is important to you.

Protecting your capital is our passion.