It’s been more than 17 years since Katherine Hayes found her niche in the financial planning world – and since her focus on insurance advice she’s never looked back.
It was an unfortunate confluence of events within a six-month period that led her to insurance advice. Firstly, her husband’s mate was running in the Canberra Times fun run and dropped dead of a cardiac arrest. He was 29. Then, a friend of hers was diagnosed with breast cancer and another friend, a police officer, had a stroke while running. Of these three – the eldest was 32.
“I actually ended up carrying a lot of guilt around. These are people I cared about. I hadn’t had the conversations about personal insurance with them because I’d put my comfort in front of what I should have done to look after them,” Katherine said.
Despite them being friends and family rather than clients, she felt she needed to help people like this and so made the decision she was going to focus on making sure she never had to deal with the guilt again. “That was a pivotal moment, and I’ve been a pure risk adviser for a number of years now,” Katherine said.
After telling the practice she was working for that she really wanted to focus on risk advice only, they had to manage their first risk client who had a stroke. Katherine processed the claim, and fortunately the client (aged in his 40s) had a bit of cover in place, but it motivated the business to send an email to their full client base suggesting they needed to review their cover.
“I was booked out crazy for the next 12 months, just helping clients who had been rattled by that scenario and I then spent five years working on that niche.”
This cemented Katherine’s resolve to work solely on risk. “But I felt like I needed to move on to continue growing,” she said. She worked at another practice, mostly working with mortgage brokers, where equity was on the cards, and she eventually bought out the mortgage brokers and formed her own business – Hayes & Co.
A book and a podcast
Around the same time, Katherine wrote “Make Money Your Bitch: A Woman’s Roadmap to Financial Freedom” with Amber Parr, and together they made the podcast Money Madams from 2019 to 2024.
The podcast was designed to provide insights and practical ideas for improving women’s finances through discussions with guests to help rid listeners of the shame and fear we have around money.
Clients came in through listening to the podcasts, becoming educated on finances and saying they wanted Katherine to look after their life insurance. “They came in highly educated on the insurance side of things. Even though the podcast was 155 episodes with only five of them relating to insurance, the stories we told would prompt people to take action or at least reach out.”
Equal numbers of men and women contacted her and were typically people with a full plate – working and with young families.
“There’s a lot going on for them and they don’t have time for waffle, but they want really good information, and they want some humour because, you know, that’s what you need,” she said.
And although the podcast stopped in September 2024, Katherine says she still gets new clients from it, and from podcasts where she has been a guest for other people.
Making a niche market profitable
After Katherine bought her practice, she made some forward projections knowing the way she wanted to operate. She believed it would take five to seven years to be a profitable business.
In the first year she allowed herself a wage of $70,000 and the rest of the business’s turnover had to cover both an admin person and all the other running costs.
“I figured on hybrid commissions from the get-go and so obviously every three years that you work, you know what you’re effectively achieving and in year four you effectively should be doing double what you did in year one if you do the same activity because you’ve got three years’ worth of trail.
“At that point, there becomes some serious profit in it.”
After being in the business over 10 years, Katherine says there’s a very healthy profit margin for her business – sitting in the 40-50% profit range.
Aside from the profitability, moving away from comprehensive advice means not having to worry about too many BDM meetings, keeping abreast of all changes to the same level, and also being able to provide shorter SOAs.
Initial client meetings are typically between 45-60 minutes, and another bonus is that clients are often coming through referrals, so they’re don’t need convincing about the insurance they’re coming in for because they’re ready for it.
However, not every client will eventually take out insurance. Sometimes there are surprises with underwriting and occasionally the client is uninsurable – but Katherine says this is rare.
“Managing the client expectations is probably the biggest thing there is because you can get an offer but if it’s not what the clients expecting, then there’s no point having that offer on the table. So, we don’t write statements of advice unless we know the client wants to go ahead with the terms that we’re expecting to get and that it’s going to be pretty close to the mark.”
