Tom Momsen is a business owner and financial planner within an industry with a strong focus on the future. As a founder of Armcrest Financial Advice his visionary nature helps his clients decide, control and drive their futures.

Tom’s authentic, creative and inspiring nature helps clients to set clear and easy to follow paths to their brightest futures. Being in and around small business his whole life Tom’s focus is small and medium sized business owners.

One of Tom’s personal goals is to travel to a different country each year so as to experience many different cultures.

• What career path led you to where you are now?

Going through school I was always a numbers guy and dealing with people so I left school and started a Commerce degree and quickly worked out I didn’t want to go down the traditional accounting path.  I was doing some investing for myself and that’s how I sort of got into financial planning – really organically into the industry.  That’s how I began in this career path.

• What has been your biggest learning curve in your career?

I think by far and away is how big the learning curve actually is.

The old saying of the more you know the more you realise you don’t know rings true nearly every day. By far and away that is probably the biggest thing is that it is one big massive learning curve that continues to grow.

• As a younger business owner, what advice do you have for others that may be considering branching out?

I would definitely say patience and persistence. If you think it is going to take you two years, allow four.

I daresay that has been the biggest learning curve for me is patience and persistence and it does pay off in the long term.  If you do it consistently and you do it consistently well it will come around and it will start to move – it might be slowly but just get that snowball rolling and continue that and never let it stop moving.

• Where would you like to be in 10 years?

I’d love to have a few more people working for me and continue to grow the business from where it is now with some younger people and really being a mentor to the next generation.

I think is a major part of giving back and a number of people have really helped me over the years and so being able to pass that mentorship on would be an honourable thing to be able to do. So I would really enjoy being able to pass it on to the next generation of planners coming through.

• Have you had any significant Hunter-based mentors during your career that inspire you?

Definitely.  I’ve probably had five. My old man has definitely been a massive one for me and then I’ve got three other friends who are a bit older than me. They are all self-employed business owners and they have really been a major help to me just having a sounding board to be able to bounce things off, particularly when the times aren’t going well to get their feedback has been a major thing.

Also, I started using a business coach about 18 months ago and that’s been phenomenal so those five people have all been   very instrumental for where I am today and I can’t thank them enough.