When Wayne Baxter hears about a good idea, he likes to act on it. So when the senior associate and financial advisor at Investment Planning Counsel in Toronto got wind of a marketing strategy that had proved successful for an advisor in the U.S., he wasted no time in giving it a try.

The American advisor had placed a fishbowl in a local retail business asking for business cards and offering a raffle prize. The advisor ended up with a stack of phone numbers of people who turned out to be excellent prospects.

“One thing I’m known for is: I implement,” Baxter says. “A lot of people have great ideas but don’t do anything. If I hear a great idea, I’ll go out and try it.”

Baxter got permission to put his own fishbowl in a local dry cleaner, with a label advertising his services and promising a chance to win free dry cleaning. The bowl filled with cards, each card representing a prospective client. (Some of the people he called from the first batch of cards were surprised to hear from him. Now, he always posts a warning that all entrants should expect a call from his office.)

Flush with success, he expanded the program to restaurants, golf clubs, sporting-goods stores — businesses frequented by the affluent people he seeks as clients. He offered credit certificates from each of the establishments as monthly draw prizes, and all entrants were eligible for an annual grand prize of a $500 travel voucher.

But by the time Baxter was operating eight fish bowls, he found the program was taking up too much of his time. He hired Leigh Ann McGenerty to expand the program and run it full-time. McGenerty has extended the program to 50 bowls and, in its first two years, it brought in $4 million in new assets.

Although this type of marketing program reaches a broad audience, it fits well with Baxter’s philosophy of offering a specific kind of financial services to a specific type of client. “We don’t want people who don’t need my help,” he says. “If the person comes in, I’ll give him or her two hours of my time. We’ll get acquainted and I’ll find out what his or her situation is. If it’s a problem I can fix, we’ll take it from there.”

Most of Baxter’s clients are upper middle-class, white-collar workers with about $200,000 in investible assets. Most require a retirement analysis because most are saving for retirement, he says: “They’re trying to ensure they don’t outlive their money, or they have enough to put their kids through school.

“I don’t want to be known as ‘Wayne the Investment Guy’,” he adds. “And I don’t take on clients who are speculators.”

Baxter insists every client has to have a plan. Everything he does with a client is based on achieving that plan, and nothing is done before the plan is in place.

“We’ve chased a few people out the door because we run our business the way we do,” he says. “When people come in here wanting to speculate or wanting to take a lot more risk, I am not interested.”

He also believes in investment policy statements, which detail all the risks associated with investing and list the portfolio managers that are used for each client.

“Most people come in and tell us they have been seduced by returns,” he says. “That’s the last thing we want anything to do with. We try to determine how much risk the person is comfortable with, and talk about rate of return as a byproduct of what they’re comfortable with.”

While Baxter is a stickler for planning, it was his penchant for marketing that got him into the investment business in the first place.

In 1994, IPC founder Chris Reynolds was running the practice that became Baxter’s. Reynolds needed a corporate marketing specialist to make arrangements with corporations to allow him to go in and do financial planning seminars for the firms’ employees. A friend recommended Baxter, who was hired after a five-minute interview. “My job was to call up and meet with the CFO or human resources personnel to set up a workshop series,” Baxter explains.

While doing that job, Baxter acquired his mutual and life insurance licences. He started picking up some of his own clients and eventually moved out of marketing support to become a full-time advisor. He has since added the elder planning counsellor designation.

@page_break@By 1999, Reynolds was getting more involved in the management at IPC as the company expanded. Reynolds moved to full-time management, selling most of his book to Baxter. “I pride myself in saying I basically run the founding practice of IPC,” Baxter says.

Now Baxter’s book includes more than 300 families, with assets under management of $70 million. His average client has assets of about $200,000. “When we first started, the criteria for becoming a client was the ability to fog a mirror,” Baxter says with a laugh. “And if they had a social insurance number and a cheque, they were in.”

He has become considerably more selective. His minimum asset level for new clients was $100,000 until this summer. He’s now raising it to $200,000 to ensure he can maintain a high level of service, including review meetings twice a year, for all clients. “Otherwise, I would just sit here all day and see new clients,” he says.

And that would leave less time for his weekend job. Baxter hosts a Saturday-morning radio show on Toronto-based AM740. He discusses financial issues with expert guests, such as Craig Alexander, vice president and deputy chief economist at TD Bank Financial Group, and IPC chief investment officer Rana Chauhan, and fields questions from listeners. The show is so popular Baxter has hired a full-time assistant to handle the inquiries it generates.

Born in Bear River, N.S., Baxter, 46, was poor as a child. When Baxter was 10, his father died; his mother raised him and a sister on a veteran’s allowance. He went to high school in Annapolis Royal — Canada’s oldest settlement, he proudly points out — and ventured west to Banff to look for work at age 20. In 1986, he arrived in Toronto, where he later joined IPC.

He was adopted as a baby and, one weekend three years ago, decided to look up his birth mother through an agency he found on the Internet. Three days later, he was sitting across from her at her home in nearby Burlington, Ont.

In his spare time, Baxter likes to spend as much time as he can with his wife, Susan and their two children, Acadia, 8 and Kaleb, 5. His newest hobby is playing guitar. He started taking lessons a year ago, and has taken to collecting classic instruments. An avid Neil Young fan, he owns a 1954 Les Paul and a Gretsch White Falcon, both models favoured by Young. He also has a B.C. Rich Warlock and an acoustic.

“Taking up the guitar is one of the best things I ever did,” Baxter says. “This business can swallow you up. I go home at night and, when the kids are in bed, I go into the rec room and plunk away on my guitar.” IE



Plan starts with the client



Wayne Baxter is a great believer in planning, but insists the plan should start with the client, not the advisor.

“It’s not our role to tell people what they should do,” the senior associate and financial advisor at Investment Planning Council in Toronto, says. “Our job is to say, ‘What do you want,’ and take it from there.”

He sees his role as somewhat like that of a guide and educator. “My job is to help people make intelligent choices with their money and know the consequences of their choices,” he says.