Andrew Rocks

Andrew Rocks started his business twenty-four years ago, aged just twenty-two. Raised in country NSW, he applied the home-grown philosophies around good business practices he learned as a child, from his grandfather, to build an award-winning company, helping families shape their financial future. The kind of awards he’s won is just part of this remarkable story.

Obtaining the rights to ‘Announcer’ as the business name for his company cost Andrew Rocks five cartons of beer; setting up the company to be a leader in the financial services field gave him a lifetime of invaluable lessons.

Andrew recalls “those early lessons came from my grandfather when I was just a young boy. I was learning about business without realising I was learning: I was observing what he did, and what I saw had a lasting impression on me.”

The family lived in Boggabri in Western New South Wales, and Andrew’s grandfather ran a business helping farmers with livestock nutrition. When it doesn’t rain and feed stocks are low, livestock health suffers. “Essentially, my grandfather sold vitamins for cows.”

When Andrew turned eight, he started travelling with his grandfather as he visited his clients, the farmers in the local area. He’d jump up onto the bench-seat next to him in the truck, and they’d talk for the entire journey: “the only time we’d stop talking was when he told me to get out and open and close the gates.”

That was Andrew’s first lesson: “Always leave the gates as you found them. It was a lesson in respecting people’s property, but at the time I was just doing what my grandfather said was the right thing.”

Andrew’s grandfather told him how these farmers had been his clients for twenty or thirty years. There were rich and poor ones, and he would give each the same amount of time.

Andrew fondly recalls, “the funny thing was, I hardly ever remember seeing him hand over products or receive a payment. I would say to him, ‘what happened in there granddad?’, and he would say, ‘well, the same thing as always. We talked about them, how their farm was going, their dreams for the farm and their family.’

“He made sure they felt important. My grandfather made his clients the centre of the universe, and that made them feel important: they knew he cared, and that was how he did business.”

Those trips with his grandfather continued until he was fourteen and attended boarding school in Sydney. His love of the financial world developed when he studied at Newcastle University and he knew he was always going to have his own business.

Having been exposed to small business from those days with his grandfather, “it became the way I thought – working for someone else, drawing a weekly pay-cheque was never part of my thinking.”

Andrew met his wife, Annelise, at university, and starting their own business was an automatic choice for them. Happily, “now over twenty years later the business and the marriage are both as strong as ever.”

Andrew’s first foray into the financial world was while he was still at university, helping his family sell their business. Drought and illness in the family saw the business his grandfather had started fall into hard times. Andrew worked with the banks to get the best price for the business.

At that point Andrew was twenty, and he moved to Sydney. With Annelise’s assistance the financial services business was born. It was in the nineties, and the idea of financial planning was still pretty much a cottage industry.

A wise decision at the time was that restricting the business to just tax advice wasn’t the best way to help clients, so the approach taken was that financial planning was about life goals.

Andrew took a straw poll asking people what the biggest expense in their life would be and the answers were pretty obvious: mortgage and children. As Andrew notes though, “really, the biggest expense you have is your tax bill, so I realised if I was going to be relevant to my clients I would need to handle their tax and their mortgage.”

Extrapolating from that early research and, because children are a massive expense, Andrew vowed to get to know every school in a client’s area and help them with those expenses.

Furthermore, to complete the package he would offer, the business would help them with their wills. “In a nutshell, our business would cover your financial services from the cradle to the grave, which, when you think about it, makes logical sense.”

Andrew believed integrating these services hadn’t been done because lawyers, accountants, mortgage brokers and financial planners each felt comfortable concentrating on their specialty, and never contemplated moving outside those areas. He saw the value in being a ‘one-stop shop’.

“We realised fairly early that our clients valued what we offered; the ability to get all those financial matters handled in one place and with one person they trusted.”

In a further innovation, “we even introduced a childcare facility so clients could discuss their financial concerns without being distracted. It was an outstanding success. Those were the days when your front office was your street address. It’s changed a lot over the years; your front office these days is your web address.”

The digital age has brought new challenges for Andrew, but there was one other change he made before tackling that new address. It is arguably the most important step he’s taken to ensure the growth of his business.

He gave the business a personality.

During those early years, Andrew notes, “when your business is young it revolves around you, just like it did for my grandfather. You’re the face of the business because you’re doing all the work, meeting with all the clients and setting the standards. So by default you are your business.”

As the business grows, as you employ more and more people, the workload is shared and the way people see your business changes in Andrew’s view. Perceptions of a business are then created by those people with whom the clients have most contact.

Andrew wanted the business to be the same no matter who you were dealing with, so the strategy was to work on Announcer’s ‘personality profile’.

The obvious choice was to hire consultants, but ‘obvious’ doesn’t sit well with Andrew Rocks. If he was going give Announcer a personality profile it would have to come from the personalities within the company.

“We did some exercises with everyone in our team and worked out the type of people we were; not just in the business context, but in family and social areas as well. The ideals that stood out amongst our group were: caring, friendly and inspirational, so we drew those together and had some hard conversations on how to transfer those ideals into representing Announcer.”

Over a period of time they developed a filter through which all correspondence must pass and that’s how Announcer’s personality profile came into being.

Andrew now believes “we’ve become inspirational to aspirational people.”

As the financial planning world has grown, Andrew accepts there are lot of people who do what he does, but he believes it’s HOW his team does it that sets them apart.

It’s “the personal connection we build with our clients which is our difference. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I know that’s a common catch-cry these days, but I seriously believe it’s our point of difference.”

You only have to spend time with anyone from Andrew’s team to understand how deeply this philosophy is embedded in the company culture.

Importantly, Andrew mentions that this philosophy extends to all areas of the business.
“You can’t profess to care about your clients if you don’t care about those who work with you first. If Announcer’s personality profile is genuinely going to work it has to be obvious and that can only happen if everyone believes in it.”

In line with that, there are aspects of the Announcer environment which might seem flamboyant or even extravagant: yet they’re pivotal to the company’s philosophy.

Time management is something often talked about these days, but Andrew believes “that’s a hangover from the industrial revolution. I’m a big campaigner for energy management: if you’re still preoccupied with time management I think you’ve missed the boat.”

To illustrate, Andrew recounts, “if you can give me a great period of energy then you are going to get the most highly productive output. We’re human beings, we’re not robots, and how we operate dips every day between two and four o’clock. There are two ways of remedying that. Most will grab their three o’clock sugar fix with a doughnut and coffee, but I worked out if I could get my staff out of the office and into some form of exercise that would be far more beneficial.”

Clearly that’s a far healthier option and people come back to work rejuvenated and fresh: “basically they’re having two days in one, they return to work and are more effective with clients and even when they go home to their families after work, they are more focused.”

That leads Andrew into an area of which he’s most proud: the personal relationships of those who work for him.

Proudly, Andrew notes that in over twenty years there has not been a staff member who has been separated or divorced. As he comments, “that’s unbelievable these days. We can’t take all the credit for that, but I believe in allowing people to do that little bit of physical activity during their work day seriously makes them better people; it gives them a better balance.”

That workout break takes different forms at Announcer – it can be a session at the gym, a run around the park or forming teams and playing in ‘lunchtime’ competitions which has become a quite popular option.

Announcer has basketball and indoor soccer teams and these regularly turn into vehicles to raise money and awareness for charities.

The next step for Andrew is to have staff spend at least one day a week out of the office.

Staying current is important for Andrew. “The only way to stay relevant with clients is to make sure you’re living a similar lifestyle. Until recently our clients would come in here to the office and this is where we’d do business. But we don’t do anything now that is not transferable onto a smartphone.”

“These days, people are consuming information differently and we understand clients are time-poor. Often the only time during the day some people have the opportunity to review what we’ve proposed is between eight and ten o’clock at night, on their couch.”

ADVICE

Most importantly, “you have to expose yourself to the potential fear of failure in order to succeed in life.”

Andrew strongly believes, that although “this is a common piece of advice heard from every person who has achieved anything they’ve desperately wanted, so many fail to achieve because they can’t handle failure.”

Andrew also comments that he could probably write a book about the things he’s done wrong in business. However, he has very few regrets because he’s learnt from every situation. “If I spent five minutes with you outlining my top 10 mistakes that would be as valuable as any university degree.

“The younger you are the easier it is to take risks, so go for it, because the older you get the harder it is to bounce back. The older you are, the more commitments you have and the risks appear to be greater, so make the mistakes while you’re young.”

One thing on that list is Andrew’s recognition that he didn’t reach out to business mentors when he was young. His grandfather taught him many valuable lessons, especially in the area of relationships with people, but the actual art of building business was a trial and error process without any input from mentors.

In retrospect, “I wish I had reached out more: I would have made fewer mistakes. It’s so much easier these days to be mentored because of the access to the internet and technology. You can learn from the likes of Bill Gates and Richard Branson just by tapping a button on your computer. Their advice, stories and podcasts are available to everyone if you’re prepared to open your computer.”

Ironically, Andrew says “the real value of mentorship has hit home more recently as people ask me for advice. Almost by default I find myself mentoring, especially those who work for me and it’s very satisfying to see they value it.”