Meg Heffron
Managing Director
April started in the best possible way at Heffron. For the first time in nearly a year, we were able to hold a company wide event with all of us in the same place. We were lucky to squeeze it in during a what now feels like a very brief dry spell. When the weather is good, having a function with the Newcastle beaches as your backdrop takes some beating.
It was also a great reminder to me that while I really do love everything Covid has taught us about making better use of the tools we have to engage online, I will always hanker for the occasional “whole team get together in person”.
The office has been bursting at the seams and buzzing all week. A number of us met face to face for the first time after months on Teams, others who hadn’t seen each other in years reconnected and even those who work in the same office were actually able to enjoy a social catch up for a change. And it never ceases to amaze me how the casual conversations that spring up around events like these mean we connect dots, solve problems or even just find those informal networks that really make a company hum in ways that don’t quite happen when we’re all online.
It’s probably whet my appetite even more for the SMSF Association National Conference in Adelaide later this month (20-22 April).
If you’re attending, please drop by our stand to say hello – we’ll be there in force. Leigh Mansell and I are both presenting sessions on topics dear to our hearts on Thursday 21st and we’ll have a large contingent attending the conference. I’m really looking forward to catching up with so many clients and industry colleagues that I haven’t seen in 2 years. My last major industry conference was the SMSFA 2020 on the Gold Coast and that certainly feels like a lifetime ago.
And we’ll have more exciting things to show – spoiler alert, our next major leap forward with the Heffron Super Toolkit will be released before the conference. We’ve created a tool to help you document your clients’ instructions about how they classify the payments they draw from their SMSF in the coming year. We’ve built in some of the important checks and balances we use in our own practice and included some industry first features – for example the ability to provide shared instructions for couples. It’s been another labour of love for us and we hope it will be a huge value add to you and your clients.
Although there is one thing I’m slightly nervous about. At our own event this week we had an excellent guest speaker (Dr Louise Mahler) who talked to us about communication and in particular, all the signals we’re sending with where we put our hands, how we use our voice and what we do when it comes to eye contact. I have not been able to participate in a meeting without being acutely self conscious about my wavey hands and tone of my voice since. It possibly didn’t help that she’s an ex-opera singer and so had a beautiful voice even when she wasn’t singing to us. If you’re going to the SMSF Association National Conference, don’t worry, there’s absolutely no chance that I will burst into song. But I do hope I remember not to wave my hands around so much.
The Heffron Super Toolkit is available for $220/month per user for Professional level subscription, allowing users to enjoy all of the available functionality including integration with BGL 360 and Class. For more information, click here.
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