Managed funds inflows surged five-fold in Australia in 2024, but exchange-traded funds (ETFs) left them in the dust, as investors continued to prefer the listed vehicles.
A sound investment framework and coherent plan is always advisable, but it’s particularly important when markets are gyrating.
Out of the blue, and keeping clients in the black
Marcus Nyholm certainly has a different set of life experiences to most financial advisers. The 46-year-old comes to advice after nearly two decades in Victoria Police, and the Army’s 1st Commando Regiment, a special forces unit comprising both regular and reserve soldiers. In his time wearing blue, Nyholm served in the Water Police Search and Rescue squad, the Centre for Incident and Emergency Management, the training faculty at the Victoria Police Academy and the Special Operations Group (SOG), the police force’s specialist counter-terrorist, surveillance, siege and high-risk arrest response capability.
While wearing green, Nyholm deployed with the Commandos to Timor-Leste, and twice to Afghanistan, serving more than a year in total overseas.
It sounds like an incongruous background for an adviser, but Nyholm says it is perfect – a breadth of life experience that has reinforced to him “time and again” the value of discipline, resilience and meticulous planning. “In both the army and the police, I planned and ran operations, and live-fire training. I’d say, ‘this is the plan, this is what we’re going to do. Any questions?’ If I can’t tell you what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, guess what? It’s not a very good plan, and someone is going to get hurt. In the training, you’ve got to put it in a way that makes sense to people. It’s a live-fire exercise, it’s a high-pressure, rapidly evolving environment, but if you can take something quite complex and make it simple for people, they will get it. I think that’s very relevant to financial advice.”
Of course, one doesn’t simply leave the police force and decide to become a financial adviser. Before joining the police force in 2006, Nyholm worked in financial planning for six years. “I had done my certified financial planner (CFP) qualification by the time I was at 26, but I didn’t feel ready to talk to grown-ups. I couldn’t shake that feeling off, so I joined the police,” he says.
By then, Nyholm had already been in the Army Reserve for three years. The catalyst for that was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US: driven, he says, by “a sense of patriotic duty and desire to make a difference,” he joined the Army Reserve in 2002, aged 23.
As a fit and motivated young person, he loved it so much that, one year in, he applied for Commando training.
“In 2003, I was accepted for, and completed, the Special Forces Entry Test, which back then was a five-day course to determine if you had prepared physically and had the aptitude to progress to Commando Selection. I got through that, and moved on to the Commando Selection Course. The course was 35 days long, and designed to train, and then test, if you had the traits desirable to serve in the Commandos – things such as mental fortitude, judgement, durability, controlled aggression, teamwork and ethics. Needless to say, both were very physically and mentally demanding,” he says.
But after it, Nyholm was the proud owner of the Sherwood green beret, which he wore for 14 years, until 2018, juggling Commando duty with a police career.
But while he had “as much fun as you can” in both the army and the police force, in his early 40s, it was time for a reassessment. “I had three deployments overseas, many more training trips, and I got a massive amount out of it. But I’ve also seen people killed, injured, sick, away from their kids, and that work undermines your family life. I got to a stage where I realised that there had to be some pretty big changes for me to keep the family together. The most important thing to me is being here, available, with my wife and family, with my two boys, coaching the basketball team, and all of that.”
What career change would give him that? The one he had left, obviously.
Nyholm has returned to financial planning, having completed the Graduate Diploma in Financial Planning, and undertaking his professional year (PY), which will be completed this month. “I’m a provisional financial planner, working in my own business: I’m a corporate authorised representative under supervision – I would be the only PY student in Australia that is a corporate authorised representative!”
Brett Crabtree, of Adelaide-based Crabtree Private Wealth – Nyholm’s parents’ adviser – is supporting him. “Really, I would like to reverse-engineer Brett’s business,” says Nyholm. “It’s a model I admire. I also wouldn’t be where I was without the opportunity that Luke Dean from Advice Loop, my supervising adviser, provided.”
Through his networks, Nyholm has a solid pipeline of requests from emergency services and Defence personnel looking for advice. But he wants to broaden his database and client list, as he doesn’t “want to be pigeon-holed.”
As an adviser, Nyholm says he wants to help people at any stage of life contextualise money, fight their behavioural biases, and “use his lived experience” to bring clients along. “I look at my parents and it is a big motivator to take up this career. 12 months ago, dad had a big cancer scare, and while he’s in remission now, he’s realised that he could have died with a big superannuation balance. That is such a prevalent mindset,” he says.
“I know everyone has to build wealth first, but maybe because I’ve seen death up close, my philosophy is, ‘live your life: if you can do it, take that trip now rather than later. Remember, your health might not always be good, so go and do the enjoyable things now. Do you want dollars in the bank, or a full bank of memories? My philosophy is that time is the new currency.”
