Happy Anniversary Leigh Mansell

Today is a pretty important day in the Heffron world – it marks 20 years since one of our most influential staff members joined us, Leigh Mansell.

I feel like Leigh and I have known each other all our adult lives. Perhaps that’s because we have – we met as fresh faced university graduates at our first grown up jobs in the early 90s. She was the new superannuation administrator in a business that provided advice and administration services to companies that ran their own in-house superannuation funds. Together, we cut our teeth on all things superannuation and she qualified as a Chartered Accountant. She vetted my new boyfriend (one of our colleagues) and it’s fortunate he passed muster since we ended up getting married and starting Heffron together several years later.

She left that business but stayed in superannuation and 20 years ago today made the crazy move to join her old colleagues as a major hire and shareholder at Heffron.

It wasn’t a simple move at the time. While living in Sydney and joining a firm based in Maitland seems straightforward now, internet connectivity was still dial up back then and there were no such things as cloud based services. She had to re-locate for 6 months (not easy for a city girl) but she took it in her stride. The work environment was also slightly tricky – she joined the two founders, two other staff members and a newborn baby all working out of a home office (well admittedly the baby wasn’t working but he made his presence felt).

She used her time in “head office” to transition from SMSF administration and accounting to expanding her technical expertise and becoming one of our lead consultants. And that technical expertise has just continued to grow. Today, there would be no doubting Leigh is a significant force in the SMSF industry – she is a leading technical expert, a nationally acclaimed educator and (in my view) the queen of practical, down to earth workshops. She has enormous respect both within Heffron and in our wider industry and has played a major role in the firm we’ve become.

She’s also been a major contributor to the technical expertise behind the Heffron Super Companion and Heffron Super Toolkit – both of which continue her important work of taking complex and extensive technical knowledge and making it simple and accessible to our clients any time, any place.

We’re proud she still calls Heffron home and all of us at Heffron congratulate her on a hugely significant 20 years with us.