Wayne Wanders – The Wealth Navigator

Wayne Wanders, The Wealth Navigator has been a fully qualified Chartered Accountant for over 30 years.

Wayne originally worked for one of the “Big 8” (as they were then) audit firms in Australia and London. During this time Wayne was often seconded out to work directly in various client’s business. One of Wayne’s last secondments was to go into Optus in the early 1990’s and help set up their finance function.

Wayne ended up working directly for Optus for six years. At Optus, amongst other things, Wayne developed the management reporting, product profitability reporting, budgeting and forecasting systems to allow Optus to grow from a business with less than 300 staff when Wayne started to over 8,000 staff when he left.

After Optus, Wayne was the Australian CFO of an American Telecommunications company setting up in Australia. However, Wayne got frustrated by the lack of ability to profitably influence the business as nearly everything had to be referred through several layers in the business till it finally reached the USA.

Why Wayne set up his CFO business

So based on this frustration, Wayne decided that he only wanted to work directly with people who could make decisions. These were the business owners and CEO’s of small and medium businesses.

Wayne realised that:

very few of these businesses could afford to employ someone of Wayne’s natural talent, core strengths, skills and experience on a full basis; and,
there was often not enough work to keep a full time CFO occupied.

So that’s when in 2000, Wayne set up his own CFO business. Offering his CFO talents, strengths, skills and experience on a part time basis to start-ups, small and medium businesses, for a fraction of the cost of a full time employee.

Since then Wayne has worked with many start-ups, small and medium business as their CFO. Including being CFO and Company Secretary of two ASX listed businesses in Australia. This has sometimes morphed into full time roles taking on some operational responsibilities as well as the CFO work.

And this work with business owners and CEO’s ranges from high level strategic thinking down to “street level” tactical activities.

Why Wayne wrote his book and created the Wealth Ignite Program

One of Wayne’s recent CFO clients was an investment property marketing company, where Wayne was responsible to oversee the preparation of the projected retirement incomes of hundreds of typical Australian families.

What Wayne saw astounded him.

Time and time again, Wayne saw people still believing in the old ways. Remember when all you needed to do was finish school, get a job, turn up to work, get the gold watch and enjoy the pension.

But this is no longer the case. What Wayne found was that about 95% of the families would stop working on less than 25% of what they wanted

Here were people who:

Thought because of superannuation that they would be alright when the time came to retire.
Were starting to financially assist their parents and thinking that they would not be the same burden on their kids.
Did not realise that their current lifestyle was seriously impacting on their retirement lifestyle. Wayne saw many people whose mortgage was so large it would not be repaid by the time they wanted to retire.

Here was Wayne, a kid from the western suburbs of Sydney with typical working class parents, who was in a now in a comfortable position with a house paid off, investment properties and a holiday house.

This made Wayne realise that:

the system is rigged and most people are on the treadmill to work till they drop.
that Wayne and his family were the exception, not the rule.
that Wayne could take they had done and help people get off this treadmill.

And that’s when Wayne wrote his book Avoid the Poverty Trap, and developed the Wealth Ignite Program to help others to improve the health of their wealth so they can get off the treadmill of working till they drop