Winner of the 2024 Inspire Women – Excellence in Advice award, Deline Jacovides CFP® has always found social media important to connecting with her audience. Instagram has certainly helped build her profile and attract clients and she’s now in a position where she can take her foot off the accelerator in attracting clients and focus on the business she now has.
It’s been just three years since Deline left her role as an employed adviser to start her own business and she’s now earning more than she was in her salaried role.
Her secret weapon has been her aptitude with social media. Deline’s Instagram account has just under 10,000 followers and typically attracts a lot of single women and a lot of families. Most of her clients are in their 30s and 40s.
“They’re typically people that have a lot of competing priorities; wanting to obviously give the best to their children, without jeopardising their own futures,” she said.
“So, they’ve got these competing goals – like, do they upgrade, do they renovate? Do they just sacrifice and live where they are?
“How do they get their kids to private schooling, if that’s important, but then setting themselves up, having a comfortable life?”
Deline's journey
Deline started her advice career while still at university. “I was working for a solo adviser at the time, and I was doing some paraplanning and administration, in a client service officer role,” she said.
“I didn’t even know what financial advisers did when I took on that role. I studied finance at Uni and started working for him and that’s when I realised how amazing financial advice is and how transformative it can be to clients.”
From that experience, Deline decided to become an adviser, and 16 years later, she’s still here.
Deline’s university didn’t offer Financial Planning when she was a student, so she undertook a finance degree. She followed it with a DFP, ADFP and other specialist subjects such as SMSF. She also earned her CFP® designation because she and the organisation she was working for at the time valued it, and then she did the ethics bridging course.
“I think back when I started in financial advice, I remember I used to work with a lot of engineers that had been burnt out and then moved into financial advice. But it’s not that easy to do that anymore,” Deline said.
“And I have had engineers contact me in the last couple of years to ask is it worth the, you know, commitment in terms of time and expense to transition their career. And I’ve also heard in the media about how teachers would make great advisers.”
Her pathway to advice then led her to an industry super fund where she was providing general advice mainly to a membership primarily of teachers and nurses.
“The Super Fund was an excellent training ground to giving advice because it’s quite scoped advice – narrow in terms of the product as well as the strategies,” Deline said.
“I was there for about a year and a half and then I decided if I’m going to be an adviser, I need to go work for a financial advice firm, not work for a Super Fund that gives advice.”
Challenges of being a female in advice
As a woman, Deline says she generally felt supported through most of her career, but there have been times, particularly after falling pregnant with her first child, that things started to change.
“There was a big difference there with the way I was treated, and I think people don’t know your whole circumstances behind the scenes.”
She wasn’t given the same client access, and people started to assume she wouldn’t be there for clients in the future.
So, when she started her own business, her husband went part-time to enable her to focus on her career. “It was only fair given that I had taken unpaid leave for a period of time to have the children,” she said. “Employers don’t know what support you’ve got behind the scenes to be able to continue your career as an adviser.”
While her kids are now five and seven years old, when she started in her new business it was important to create the business to suit her lifestyle. She wanted to work full-time but found that if she was an employee she would probably be forced to work part-time.
“[Advice practices] often still expect advisers in the office for set hours,” she said.
More availability around working from home to reduce commute time and working different hours could make the profession more female-friendly, Deline said.
Deline currently has two virtual assistants offshore and she’s now thinking of hiring an associate adviser. She’s aware however that training a new employee will increase her workload so is making sure she has bandwidth before hiring.
Winning the 2024 Inspire Women - Excellence in Advice award
This is the second time Deline applied for that award, encouraged by peers. “I applied in 2022 when it was the AFA version, and that was just after I'd started my business,” Deline said.
Applying a second time gave her time to reflect on everything she’d done in the last two years. “Going through that panel interview and then subsequently now preparing my presentation for the FAAA roadshow, it really makes you stop to think like, what am I doing differently? What is unique about me?
“I strongly encourage anyone to go through the process if they're wanting to learn about themselves further and really critique themselves.
“It's definitely a daunting thing to put yourself out there for your peers to judge you, but if you're into personal development, this is the way.”
And there's more
Deline is on the Queensland Women in Super Committee as the Treasurer.
Deline has also worked with The Parenthood – a not-for-profit organisation with the mission of making Australia the best country in the world to be a parent, through advocating for universal access to early childhood education and care and extended paid parental leave to be shared between both parents. “I got sick of seeing women getting to retirement with such low super balances or big gaps in their balances compared to their male counterparts.”
And she’s also worked with the university to inspire more students to become financial advisers.
You can check out Deline’s Instagram profile here.
