IMPORTANT STEPS

While SMSF Association chief executive Peter Burgess is an extremely self-disciplined leader, he believes the association’s advocacy uplift for the self-managed super fund sector is due to the commitment and hard work of his team and the broader network.

- Matthew Wai

SMSF Association (SMSFA) chief executive Peter Burgess is not only a pioneer of the self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) sector but also sees the true potential in every person he’s engaged with throughout his career. Although his story appeared to have been set in stone, Burgess’ foray into the SMSF sector was quite the opposite.

Outside his current career, Burgess says he would have chosen to become a lawyer, leveraging the technical knowledge he had gained, or an anthropologist, due to his interest in the development of societies and cultures while studying at university.

So, when he was a fresh graduate completing his economics degree, he was unsure how his future would unfold — that was until he was given the opportunity to work in super.

“I was in my final year of an economics degree and National Mutual were hiring economics graduates to work in their corporate super division,” he says.

“It wasn’t my preferred career destination but at the time there weren’t many other jobs going for economics graduates, so I applied and got the job.”

The internship was an eye-opener for him, realising helping those in need was a greater fulfilment than anything else.

He was then offered a role at Tower Trust (now known as Australian Executor Trustees) with a team overseeing the small funds division.

“That was my first foray into the small fund world,” he says.

“That experience really opened some new opportunities for me. It enabled me to leverage the technical expertise and knowledge that I built over the previous decade to a whole new world of small private investor super funds.