GRAHAM BURNARD
Senior Consultant
Over the past 25 years Graham has held senior leadership roles across the financial services industry, developing a wealth of knowledge and experience of how successful advice businesses grow and prosper.
He brings a depth of experience to his firms, combining his skills in business growth and human performance with learnings from leading a number of large scale business transformation and integration projects as well as launching a range of product and service offers for Insurance, Funds Management, Platform and SMSF businesses.
An expert business strategist, Graham has honed his skills over time as he has built and worked with a wide range of advice businesses to help them implement new strategies for growth. Graham’s clients love his innate ability to get to the heart of what’s happening in a business, to reduce friction and fear and guide great decision making and accountability.
Areas of Specialty
With extensive experience and a great passion for client engagement and sales skills, Graham has a particular knack at helping advisers to improve the way they engage with new and existing clients, and take their ‘people skills’ to another level to deepen their client relationships and the outcomes they can help their clients achieve.
Above all, he enjoys working with advisers who are looking to turn today’s business challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities by adapting their businesses to suit their client’s needs while achieving their personal and business vision.
When not working, Graham enjoys spending time with his wife and when possible a game of golf with his two sons who are both at university.
A word from Graham’s clients
“Having just passed the FASEA exam, I set Graham Burnard the almost unachievable task of helping me rebuild my financial planning practice to conform to the modern environment with a three month deadline. So we put in place a CRM, a virtual assistant, a complete redraft of my compliance documents, adoption of Zoom and Docusign technology, an external compliance officer and a new website. True to Graham’s mantra, we achieved it by taking it all “one mouthful at a time. His input was invaluable in so many ways but the key benefits were:
- Every time I needed to employ an external contractor to help with the rebuild, Graham was there with a ready list of useful contacts and a brief run down on their strengths and weaknesses
- More it was clear with every contractor we dealt with, that having Graham as part of the team, they weren’t just working with one small financial planning practice, they were showcasing their abilities to someone from one of Australia’s leading consultants in the financial industry. I through that made a big difference in how seriously they took the work, the priority they gave it and their pricing
- The savings I made in terms of my time and the pricing I was able to achieve with these third parties more than made up for the cost of employing Graham.”
“When we started working with Elixir it was all about all the new compliance requirements coming into play; we weren’t sure how that was going to affect the business and what the cost to serve clients was going to be. We’re always busy throughout the day, so working on the business planning stuff wasn’t happening as often as it should. They helped us with a plan on how best to change our fee structure. We went from asset-based fees to flat fees, and they helped us with how to best present that to clients and how to make is as fair as possible for clients. Together we came up with a detailed plan, but at the end of the day, the plan is only as good as the implementation, and I think that’s where the real value is.
Graham was able to, every month, make sure we were doing what we’re supposed to be doing and forced us to keep on track with the plan. I’m happy to say most of that has been done successfully, and since then, there’s new issues that we need help with. We’re optimistic about what lies ahead, and that we will have another successful year, as we did last year.”
Location & Contact
Graham is based in Sydney and services clients in New South Wales and other States by agreement. You can connect with Graham on LinkedIn here.
If you would like to schedule a brief chat with Graham to discuss any of Elixir Consulting’s services, please use the button to the right and enter your details to confirm your appointment.
Or, if you already know how awesome Graham is and you’d just like to book a meeting with him on ad-hoc consulting rates, you can book straight into his diary using the below button. (Don’t forget, if you’re an Evolve Alliance member, or you’re booking additional services with Graham over and above your existing coaching engagement, be sure to use your coupon code to get client rates).