About

Thirty-five years where money meets human behaviour.

Johann Maree has spent more than thirty-five years in financial advice across South Africa and Australia. He has led national strategy for a major licensee, managed advisers and support teams across several states, redesigned fee models and rebuilt client engagement processes.

He trained in the United States with Money Quotient and the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, and designed a behavioural finance program for Central Queensland University.

Get in touch Read the books

Credentials

Certified Behavioural Financial Adviser
Herrmann certified practitioner
BA and LLB
Advanced Diploma in Financial Planning (Australia)
Certificate IV in Compliance and Risk Management (Australia)
Finalist, South African Financial Planner of the Year
Author of four books for the advice profession

Why Countique exists

Great advice does not build a great advice business.

Thirty-five years of sitting in practices on four continents produces a fairly short list of observations. The technical work is rarely the problem. The problem is the business around it, the principal with fifteen years in and no business plan, the founder whose heart attack revealed that his life's work was worth nothing without him, the practice where every process lives in one person's head.

None of that is a failure of intelligence or effort. It is a failure of training. Advisers are taught to advise. Nobody teaches them to build the company that delivers the advice, and then holds them accountable for its plan, its margin, its people and its continuity.

Countique was built to close that gap, with a framework, a set of tools that already exist, and someone who will stay in the room while they go in. And because the numbers underneath a business have to be right before anything built on them can be trusted, we do the bookkeeping too.

Making your business count.

How we work

Four principles

Measure first

No recommendation without a baseline. If we cannot show you the number now, we cannot prove the change later.

Stay in the room

A report is not a result. We work alongside your team until the thing is actually in place and being used.

Australian by default

Written for this regulatory world. In Australia, compliance and excellence are the same discipline.

Say the price

Fixed scope, fixed fee, published where we can. You should not need a sales call to find out what something costs.

The written work

The books, hundreds of tools, every source checked

The books are not marketing. They are the framework written down, with the self-assessments, templates and procedures that go with each part of it, and every claim traced back to a source that can be verified.

12 Disciplines of Business Excellence

Australian edition. The complete business management system for advice practices, twelve disciplines that work like a flywheel, built for Australia's regulatory world.

12 Disciplines of Business Performance

South African edition, with Marius Vermeulen. Built on South African law for the COFI era, 79 practical tools and a fifteen-point COFI readiness framework.

Two further titles, 2027

Two more books are in production, scheduled for the first and second quarters of 2027. Titles are announced once the manuscript is with the publisher, not before, the bookshop carries the release dates.

Visit the bookshop

Countique Pty Ltd

An Australian management consultancy specialising in financial services. Business management, business planning, tools and assessments, bookkeeping, speaking and workshops.

Start a conversation