From a garage office to industry leader, Meg Heffron reflects on 25 years
When Meg Heffron and her late husband, Martin, started their business 25 years ago, they worked from their garage and employed one administration assistant.
After leaving corporate jobs in Sydney, they decided to establish a business to service ‘excluded funds’ – as SMSFs were then known – and their ambitions extended to being able to support their family and employ one person.
As it marks its 25th anniversary, Heffron has established itself as one of the country’s largest independently owned firms specialising in SMSF advisory services. With approximately 100 dedicated employees and offices located in Adelaide, Brisbane, and Maitland, Heffron diligently manages the administration of roughly 5,000 SMSFs.
It is also the third-largest actuarial business in Australia.
Ms Heffron has seen the SMSF sector grow from a niche option, mainly used by small business owners, to a major player in the superannuation landscape, innovating policies that are now being used by large industry and retail funds.
Heffron was born out of the desire of Ms and Mr Heffron, who both worked in corporate super in Sydney, to get back to their country roots.
“Martin was an accountant and I was an actuary. I knew it would be hard to find work in my field, so we thought we would set up our own business and work with what was then called excluded funds,” she recalled.
Ms Heffron said 25 years ago, SMSFs were considered “the wild west” in superannuation products, and accounting firms and financial advisers did not have much experience with them.
“Martin and I joined at a time when all of the changes to the SMSF sector were just starting to happen,” she said.
“Advisers were finding there were a lot of strategies they could put in place for SMSFs that couldn’t be done for industry funds.
“At that time advisers and accountants were a bit nervous about specialising in SMSFs as they imagined that they were only for small business owners.”
One of the initial areas of specialisation for Ms and Mr Heffron was assisting advisers to set up SMSFs, with a particular focus on those in the pension phase.
“Back then in retail funds you had to pay CGT and transitioning to retirement was treated like a shift to a new fund so having an SMSF was great because clients could move into the retirement phase without CGT,” she said.
“Advisers realised they had to get clients into SMSFs before retirement to take advantage of all the tax advantages, and that’s when they started looking more into developing strategies for their SMSF clients.”
Heffron was established before the SMSFA and Ms Heffron jokes she and her husband were probably the association’s first two members.
She said once the SMSFA began operations, and businesses such as BGL and Class entered the sector, change began to happen at a much greater pace.
“We used to do the administration of SMSFs on a DOS-based system,” Ms Heffron said.
“Then BGL came in with the first really good accounting system and about 10 years later Class revolutionised SMSF with data feeds, so that catapulted SMSFs to being just as good as the retail funds in timely reporting.”
Ms Heffron said there have been a number of important changes in the sector since Heffron opened its doors 25 years ago.
“Some of them have been gradual but when I look back I can see how big they really were,” she said.
“The gradual professionalism of the industry as a whole is one of those, and the SMSFA can take a huge amount of credit for that.”
She mentioned that another notable transformation within the sector has been the continuous innovation it has embraced.
“Those innovations have been followed by the big funds, so even if you never have an SMSF you are still getting the benefits of the growth in the sector,” she said.
There have also been huge legislative changes, she said, and while many thought they would be the end of SMSFs, she believes they have been instrumental in the sector’s resilience.
One of her proudest achievements is Heffron’s evolution into an educational institution, and it is in this area that she intends to concentrate her efforts in the future.
“When we first started Heffron it was a consulting business, then we started doing administration work, but we realised that people were looking for SMSF specialist knowledge to understand strategies,” she said.
“We could have taken the path to control all this knowledge but one of the things we got a kick out of early on was teaching other people how to do what we did.
“We wanted to make that knowledge widely available to anyone at an affordable price.”
Ms Heffron says when she first left school she was deciding between being a maths teacher or an actuary but chose the latter because she didn’t think she had the confidence to stand in front of a classroom of students.
“The irony is that is what I do all the time now,” she said.
“It’s been an amazing time to be part of this industry as it has grown.”
