Latest / Financial Planner Life Podcast / Richard Mikdadi Chartered Fellow on Ultra High Net Worth Financial Planning, Why Team Work Makes the Dream Work, And a Career at Tilney.

Transcript

Richard Mikdadi Chartered Fellow on Ultra High Net Worth Financial Planning, Why Team Work Makes the Dream Work, And a Career at Tilney. · Financial Planner Life Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, and welcome to the Financial Planner Life Podcast, where we talk to professionals at varying stages in their career about what it's like working in the wonderful world of financial planning and financial advice.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is proudly sponsored by Recruit UK, a recruitment consultancy specifically focused on the financial services.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: They have a niche specialism, recruiting, within the financial planning industry.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: So check out their website for the latest job opportunities, hints and tips, and blog articles.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: And today's guest is Richard McDaddy.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Richard is a chartered fellow.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's also a partner for Tilney in Bristol.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I've known Richard now for over a decade.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: We used to work together in Aviva, and I've been following his career from trainee telephone-based financial planner for Chase DeVere all the way up to partner level high net worth and ultra high net worth financial planner for Tilney.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we do discuss the mindset required to be an ultra high net worth financial planner.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about the benefits of being a chartered fellow.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: We also look at how understanding the client's hopes, dreams, and fears makes for a better relationship.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we also talk about the benefits of teamwork and why working for Tilney for so long has been an amazing part of his career.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoy the podcast.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: And welcome to the Financial Planner Life Podcast.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Today's guest is Richard McDaddy.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Richard McDaddy is a partner at Tilney and also somebody that I've known for quite some time.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: We um we started out at Aviva together back when we were about 21, I was like 21 years old.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember how you old you were, about 41, I think.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, God, if you're saying that with grey streaks, so yeah.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: No, it was about 15 years or so ago, though, wasn't it, mate?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, about 15, yeah, so about 15 years ago on the um the joint venture between the RBS um and a viva.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it's we'll talk a little bit about that as well.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So um Rich, thanks very much for coming onto the podcast today and sharing your story about being a financial planner in the financial planning industry.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: No worries.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So um Richard, um, how have you been during the the lockdown?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: I would say the um the business side has been surprisingly easy to slot into.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and there's a there was a kind of 101 IT projects which basically we're trying to probably get to the point we're at now have got to in a few weeks.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Umworking, in terms of being able to video call with clients more.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's really just accelerated a lot of that.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: And we I think we did particularly well at just making that switch very quickly.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: And within 24 hours, we've kind of sat locked away at home, working kind of happily.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think probably the more challenging bit is keeping yourself focused and engaged and fulfilling all the other bits of work that suddenly disappeared overnight.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thing, and you're not alone there.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the companies that I'm speaking to have just seen a massive positive.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I know like people have been unwell during COVID and obviously died, and we want to say it's a positive, but we have seen positive things happening in the work arena because we've all been thinking about homework and we've all been talking about what, you know, flexible, um, you know, flexible working hours and everything.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, even things like client meetings over Zoom, so many financial planning firms were still looking to always do it on a face-to-face basis and not willing to embrace that technology.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's exactly the same with recruitment, you know.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: We you know, we always want to go and see somebody face to face or do it over the telephone.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I just think this this COVID-19 has just brought everything so much further forward, and everybody's embracing technology and everyone's having a really positive experience.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's not many financial advisors that I'm speaking to that are struggling at the moment with clients, you know, they're getting more and more meetings booked in the diary, more and more reviews, and um money's being invested.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the same for you?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think one thing it does give you it gives you back an awful lot of time, and you can funnel that time back into looking after your clients better, that kind of hour or two commuting, the kind of early morning trains up to London that I wasn't a stranger to.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: So kind of suddenly all of that becomes really functional work time.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I've been surprised, I think there'll always be a face-to-face role kind of within the business.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we're still going to want to go and sit down with clients again when we can, but actually, I think this sits quite nicely alongside it, and there's perhaps kind of one or two kind of major meetings you might have with a client over the course of the year, but this is a great way of just spending that extra half an hour with them talking about a specific issue.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've not had kind of one client yet who hasn't been able to get to grips with the video calling, get to grips with electronic signatures.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: I've got clients in their late 80s who are kind of sat there happily saying FaceTime or Zoom suit you better.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: So I think when you get to the stage that I can get my mum onto FaceTime, then I think we really have made a we've really made a kind of transition to a new world.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Made a breakthrough, yeah, absolutely.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and there's lots of stuff there which is genuinely as better for clients, not just for contact, but um we've been looking for some time at trying to do electronic signatures for as much as uh as much as is possible.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: It just gonna say speeds up, makes the process smoother for clients.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: And overnight that's given us the impetus to get all of that kind of stuff in place.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I would hope when we get through this, and I hope we do get through it as soon as possible, like everyone else, that at least there would have been some of those business benefits.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Have you seen, you know, in respect of the process of delivering financial planning, doing reviews and everything, have you seen a marked increase in the speed it takes to get these done?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you said about like implementing electronic signatures and not wet signatures.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, has that had an impact on the timescales?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: If if clients want to get something done now, uh uh and often clients will kind of act when there's a real need to get something over the line.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Some of them will give us plenty of warning, but it's not kind of uncommon, certainly, especially perhaps in in the kind of high net worth arena, that you've got clients who want to get things done today or have got to get something sorted for tax reasons.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And um suddenly that ability to kind of fire things back and forth via email, have a Zoom call, and potentially get something pretty substantial wrapped up within 24 hours is fantastic.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's also often the case that we need to, one of the challenges is less the paperwork, but getting all the right people around the table.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: So most of my clients will have kind of accountants, solicitors, business adviders, auditors, um, they might have other trustees.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that always took weeks potentially was we would say, look, we're available, they're available, but you had to find time in the diary for another five people to get on a get in a meeting and get into the centre of Bristol.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, suddenly that's become incredibly easy.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: You just need to find half an hour in the diary and get an invite out.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, some real definitely some some real positives there.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the amazing part of it.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I was talking to um Kathy Harrison, who's the um CEO of the Verve group, and they're uh an outsourced compliance um and power planning company.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we were talking about sort of the difficulty of having an outsourced power planning company where the power planner can't sit in the client meeting.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And she was saying, well, this is the thing with COVID now, you know, we're just jumping on a Zoom meeting with the client.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: We're outsourced power planning company, we're sitting in their Zoom meeting, so it looks like their power planner, the power planner can easily ask the questions and we can record the meeting, and it's just job done.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you can just see how how much smoother the and you just said there, it's just it's madness that we've gone this far without doing it.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's just um well, we found the same with new recruits coming into the business.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things we're really keen on getting people to do is just sitting on on client meetings with their agreement to see how other people operate.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I will still do it occasionally.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've all got stuff to learn from each other.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I think that is again, it's far easier to do by a video call and and often kind of slightly less obtrusive.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: You're not kind of sat quietly in the corner.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're a you're a tiny virtual window that can be swept to one side and just sit and watch.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so the new starters that we found have found that really useful.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's the sort of first I've come across that really.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really um useful tool that I'll be feeding back to some of the other clients that I work with, is to get your newbies on client meetings if they're not doing it already.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And what a great way to observe.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And also, I suppose if you are recording them and you can turn around and say, look, I've had an amazing meeting with a client, as long as the client's happy with their information being shared, then perhaps it's a great, again, it's a great learning tool.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you would be in a contact center or something and you listen back to a couple of calls or something, you know, again, it's a great opportunity.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm certainly pushing people listening to my podcast because I'm exceptional at asking questions to financial planners, and I want my I want to be a good idea.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: I want my guys to be as good as me, you know, and no, that's just uh egotistical meaning it is.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's what it's doing is is forcing everybody to be perhaps a little bit more forward-looking, a little bit more progressive, and a little bit more imaginative.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: So we had an awful lot of calls at the start of lockdown where it where we were talking about, okay, well, what are we what do we now do?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm sure kind of every everyone in business's diary was awash with these when it first started.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it really does kind of you have to use your imagination a little bit and you have to think of ways around these obstacles.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, you find a few months in that some of those workarounds that you've built perhaps work better than what you were doing previously.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: So we've moved paperless um largely for all client meetings, and for for years you had lots of advisors say, Well, I know I really I really need the following things with me in a physical pack.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got to sit with a and actually what you find.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm looking down at uh uh at a bag of papers that I have with me when I left the office, and actually you don't need any of those.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: You you can do everything remotely, and it's just forced people to do that.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's letting go of the things that the securities that you think you think you need.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was a prime example looking down at your you know your your bag of paper and it's just rubbish, isn't it?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, but you know, things like you the companies such as Two Plan, True Potential, they've always embraced that technology.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: You go along with like a you know a tablet, and when you're sitting with your client, and it's all can be online or offline, and you can go through it all with your client with a tablet.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, that's that's for that was for thinking.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it's it was amazing for me to come across companies really, and I I I don't that were still using wet signatures.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose there are still things you need it for, um, but it was amazing how many were like, oh my god, you know, we we're gonna have to go to electronic signatures.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, have you not been on electric electronic signatures for a while?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I suppose a large larger the company is, the harder it is to implement.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um as you say, I think the main obstacle was it it wasn't necessarily us.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: So there's no good in saying, look, this bit of something for us you can sign electronically, but this bit's got to go to a third party, so they want a wet signature because you haven't really saved anything.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um what it's helped us with is kind of encouraging those other companies to go paperless as well, so the whole process can go paperless because until everybody does it, you can only work to the the the slowest in the bunch, if you like, and it's uh so it's been helpful for that.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: And everyone's just like really confident on camera now, whereas before it's like, oh my god, I'm on camera.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, this is hideous, like I see myself.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And now everyone's just like bah, whatever.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just on camera having a good old chin wag now.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's um I think it's great, and I think um I'm certainly embracing it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And these podcasts it's been fantastic.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've been getting some great, great connections via it and building some really good relationships.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm sold on it all, really, to be fair.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, all right.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: So um Richard, the uh thanks for that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: The the the the sort of purpose of the podcast really is to talk about your career and and to share really your experiences and how you got into the industry to hopefully help and inspire those who are currently starting out or are thinking about becoming a financial planner.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's just really kind of an opportunity for you to share that experience, really.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what I'd love to do is go all the way back and and just uh talk about when you decided that you wanted to become a financial planner.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: When was that?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so um it it probably would have been on or around the time that I was sat a couple of desks away from you.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um I can't say uh I'd love to profess, and I've seen other people, heard other people on the podcast saying that they they knew part way through university or as soon as they got out of school that was where they were heading.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I can't profess to be one of those people.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um I did study kind of economics, but it wasn't with this grandmaster plan in place, um, and had a couple of kind of fairly standard post-university jobs whilst I found my feet to put food on the table.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and one of those was sitting near you in a kind of finance uh call center type environment.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and as anyone who would attest who's ever phoned a call center, what I found is I was sat there kind of answering queries without the first bit of knowledge about anything financial.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Is that fair to say?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to talk.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you were the exception, but that's what it felt like.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I took the opportunity to say, well, I'm not gonna waste the time here.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: I will go and get some basic qualifications to understand what I'm doing at the moment better.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I'm a kind of big believer of that whatever job that you're doing, kind of getting a bit of additional knowledge to the chap sat next to you.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: No offense if you put chap sat next to me in this example, so getting a bit of additional knowledge to the chaps sat next to you puts you in good stead.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I I I kind of went and just enrolled myself and did some of the basic FPC exams.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um and just got a bit of a a taste for it.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's what planted the seed.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I guess it was putting that together with the fact that it it combined two things which I'd always been reasonably good at.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I did have a I've always had a bit of a head for numbers uh and figures, but at the same time, I actually I kind of enjoyed this social aspect of the kind of human interaction.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: I enjoyed talking to people, working with them and problem solving.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it felt like a job that I could get into, which would combine those two elements.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: So um I kind of went off the back of that, and as you know, initially joined uh an advisor academy years ago.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Who was that then?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Which company was that?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: So that was uh with Chase Devere.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that was where I kind of started out once I decided look, that's what I want to get grounding in.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: But again, I was conscious that I kind of there was an awful lot I didn't know, and there's an awful lot more that I didn't know that I didn't know.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I wasn't, and um kind of hats off to them in a way, but I wasn't somebody who wanted to go in, go a self-employed route or anything like that without having the knowledge to know that I was doing a decent job.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and for me personally, I think that kind of academy route is a really great first stepping stone into this kind of job.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um we have we've got something very similar at Tilney now, a telephone advice team.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it is for some of them, that's what they want to do for the rest of their career.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: For a lot of them, actually, it's uh a really useful kind of building ground to move on to more complex advice.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but what they were very good at, uh, and the manager at the time, if she listens, will kind of might remember because she's she was very rigorous in terms of saying, look, you you are dealing with very simple matters in that academy, but she's very rigorous of saying that actually the process that we go through and the diligence we go through needs to still be incredibly thorough to come to the right conclusion, so and to do right by the client.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I remember there were lots of people who worked there who got hugely frustrated by that because they said, Well, I can see that they want to do X, so can I not just jump directly there?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but there is a reason that actually you you we try and understand clients a little bit better, you know, it's not a box-ticking exercise.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, what they did is give a really good grounding in in those kind of fundamental principles, huge amounts of training.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I also kind of use the opportunity while I was there to say, well, okay, at the time you need a very basic level of qualification, but that principle of saying, look, actually, I want to know more than the next guy about what I'm doing.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I again kind of proceed and got a number of exams under my belt.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, by the by the time I'd outgrown um that academy, I felt that I was in a really strong position to start doing some more complex work.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so great stuff.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because um obviously we so that was leaving Aviva, was it, and then going straight into um Chase DeVere.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's right, yeah.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: So straight into the academy.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you had a couple of FPCs under your belt at that point.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I'd I got myself the FPCs off my own back, so I kind of arrived arrived there saying, look, this is I'm serious about it.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think again, doing it on your own sometimes helps demonstrate that, that you're not just talking up to the interview, you've put some hours in.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, said look, I've already done this, but what I haven't got is is is the craft yet.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's what I want to learn in the academy.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great stuff.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, with with Chase DeVere, um the actual, you know, the the role of a financial advisor with them was always go in as an employed advisor for so many years.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was like two years or something, and then progressively you would naturally go down the self-employed route.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I assume joining you know you know Chase DeVere in their academy, where they're sort of uh teaching you the fundamentals, the basics and the behaviours, etc., surrounding financial planning, getting you through some of your qualifications as well and upskilling your knowledge, but they were hoping that you would then move more into the the route of becoming a a financial planner with um with with Chase DeVere and eventually I get, I guess, going going down that self-employed route.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um when you were in there, were you, you know, you were there for a good three and a half, you know, three and a half years at Chase.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um did you have a burning desire when you were in there to think, right, you know, what I'm gonna do is go self-employed.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Did you want to go self-employed?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um I wasn't I wasn't averse to it, but again, I wasn't desperate to.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: And um nothing wrong with the self-employed route, but often you become a kind of bit of your own car of your own castle in that respect.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you're you're paddling your own canoe.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: And again, my feeling at that time was I'd learnt an awful lot in those three three and a half years, and there were kind of lots of peers around me going directly round down that route, some of them going off and setting up on their own or starting their own practice.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and my feeling was at the time that if if you're ever going to do that, you you want to do it at a time where actually you've got all of the expertise that you need under your belt.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I just I didn't feel three and a half years in academy was enough to be able to, for me personally, to sit credibly in front of people and say, look, I'm an expert in my field.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I also still felt that there was an awful lot to learn from others.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, which is part of the reason I made the move from there um for a relatively short while to a uh a company called Alexander Forbes.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um was helping them, if you like, kind of get in place their advice, their their employee benefits mainly, and they wanted to do public client advice.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: So getting my teeth into to kind of helping get that up home running and being part of a small team working there.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you had your sort of, yeah, you're at you're at Chase DeVere, you had your head turned by an opportunity to be able to set something up within a company.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that did that sort of scratch a little bit of a an itch for you as well, that entrepreneurial side of you where you thought, well, there's an opportunity there for me on the private client side.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have anything in place right now.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is something I can get my teeth into and make it mine.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Was that your kind of thinking around that?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that was a lot, I think it was a natural kind of junction when you're moving out of that academy to say, look, I'm making a step over to face to face.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: That move, even within Chase Devere, was um was into a different building on another side of uh bath to it with a different team and a different group.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it it almost felt like a company move anyway, and it was just a very natural point to kind of stick my head above the parapet and say, okay, well, is this the right next move for me?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is this the one where I'm gonna learn the most that I can and develop as much as I can?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and for me, actually going external at that point was was um the right move.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I'm glad I've done it, especially when I think now I've been at my current place for for many, many years, actually having a variety of those experiences adds adds a bit of depth before that.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I agree.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So when you were when you were working as a trainee advisor then, were you delivering how long was it before you were delivering face-to-face financial advice on your own, before, you know, competent advisor status?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: How long did that take you to get to that level?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was I guess one of the benefits of working in that academy environment and sitting on the phone all those years ago is that the level of supervision, direct supervision can be that notch on, in that you you can look you could have you can have somebody sat at your shoulder, as you were saying earlier.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: So You within a pretty short space of time, and again, I'm not sure exactly off the top of my head, but within two or three months, I suspect, uh, you were you were up and running and delivering advice to clients, albeit with heavy supervision behind you.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that was all telephone-based, was it, Rich?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: That was all telephone based at the time, yeah.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it was only, as I said, the whole academy was telephone-based.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it was only kind of having left there, moved to the next role, that it moved to a face-to-face environment.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and actually what I found was that the face-to-face face environment was it was a good grounding for the point of view, is that if you can get those ideas across over the phone and you can articulate yourself when you've got kind of what do they say, 60-70% of that communication is non-verbal normally.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you can do it with only the kind of that small percentage at your disposal.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: Suddenly, when you're sat in front of clients, it I remember it feeling hugely hugely easy experience to make that transition.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would I definitely agree with you.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: You have to work a lot harder on a telephone to build trust, don't you?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many different things you've got to look out for.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: And um, as soon as you sit down with somebody face to face, it's completely different.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can just look into someone's eyes and give a smile, and you've got a you've got a connection, you know.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um well you can you can stand on it.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: At the moment with this hair with this wild hair, they just look at my hair like, what the hell is going on with this hair?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: But no, I um yeah, I agree.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the but the telephone-based side of it, I think, and I look back on my experience of working in like contact centres for insurance sales and um uh a vivo and from a customer service perspective, you know, answering some of those complex cases, well, they were complex to me at the time, um, around bonds, dealing with people's um concerns, worries around money.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: I felt it was a really uh really great learning experience and um definitely not dismissed the telephone route.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think um, yeah, the Tilney telephone route.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Til the Tilney desk-based financial advisor role, as a company, we've placed a few people in there, and and then that is a fantastic grinding, you know, it's a really great grinding.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Could you know much about that?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: You get involved in it.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us a little bit about the Tilney desk-based financial planning role?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, so yeah, they are uh the the team don't report them to me, but uh funnily enough, um one of the benefits is we can recruit those individuals anywhere in the country uh by definition.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but actually what we found is the the office I work out of, which is uh the Bristol office, has been a kind of really fertile breeding ground for the right kind of graduates coming out.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got uh a large number of that team sat in the same office as me.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think because I kind of hark back to my days starting in that arena, I try and do kind of everything I can to support them and like to be involved.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: And we've had a number of those individuals move across to face-to-face over the years, but it is a it's a fantastic team, they're part of our direct offering.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we have um within the Tilney group, we've got the best invest brand, which is, if you like, a kind of direct-to-market um online and telephone-based advice, and it was because really we we could have saw this gap uh partly at that kind of advice gap end of the market, where there is a kind of segment of people who are still building their wealth, which I don't think are particularly well served sometimes by by a lot of our main competitors.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but actually also to recognise the fact that even if where people have got kind of larger funds, sometimes they just don't want to transact in the way that we have historically thought they should as an industry.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um and certainly you've so so having that kind of online offering alongside telephone advice has been fantastic, and that team effectively deals with individuals, kind of whatever their wealth, where they want to have a telephone and online relationship.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's uh they're really kind of highly qualified, um, more so I suspect than the academy.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not strictly speaking academy.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we want people who've got some level of knowledge there, but what they do come in is they they come in and get a grounding and all the support uh and all the technical expertise of wider business to to kind of help them become the best advisor they can and to help them transition to another area of the business if they want to.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: So absolutely, and I think that's the beautiful part about that that telephone-based advice proposition.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's allowing people that have got some experience, um, a drive and ambition to wanting to be a financial planner.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: They go in there, cut their teeth within the telephone-based environment, they still report into the likes of you, they still socialize and mix with others within the business, such as the you know, the financial planners or whoever else it might well be, power planners, get a good feel for the company and start to recognize areas where after so many years they can then progress their career.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's a great place, really, because um, you know, not every company offers that route into financial to to true face-to-face financial planning.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly, from my perspective, looking at the market, it's one of the best routes in, I personally think.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um certainly certainly something that I would consider if I was in that position, you know.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, you're always more than welcome if you want to you want a career switch.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: I come and work for Tilney, shall I?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, as I say, get the uh get the C V through and we'll have a look, Sam.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: Have a look, right.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: The great thing about that for us, though, um, as well as it being kind of a a great offering for clients in its own right, is that we we know the kind of background and the way that those advisors have been built, the structures they've got in place, the understanding they've got, the expertise they've got, because we've put it in place.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the um, and that goes kind of right through to kind of both the kind of technical side of things, but also I think kind of more importantly for me, some of the ethical side of advising.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: So getting that right, we are, and the reason I came and worked at um kind of formerly Towery and now which then became Tilney was that I made a decision a few years into the industry that I wanted to be, I wanted to spend my career being a fee-based advisor, and that wasn't the norm at the time.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that does lend itself to a different mindset um because we're bringing those people in, and from the start of their careers, for many of them, they are kind of delivering advice in that way, and I think it gives them the kind of ethical grounding that we want, and the kind of mindset that we would want when they eventually start seeing clients face to face.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you then, what type of mindset do you think best suits being a financial planner?
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I think you need there's the easy bits to get, you need the technical expertise, but you can you can put that into someone.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: As long as you've got some app to choose, um and you you've kind of got a reasonable level of reasonable head for figures, you can put that into people.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think the much harder thing is is getting the mindset in terms of getting things right for the client and not letting the business side get in the way of that.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like so, and you need to marry that with somebody who is, on the one hand, kind of proactive enough and full of energy and a problem solver who can go out and both help existing clients, but also a large bit of my job is bringing new work into the firm.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: So, kind of unassumedly, I I kind of will be out there trying to get clients to engage with us as a firm and allow us to be a person who delivers advice.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, you need to be proactive enough to do that.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: But I I have always seen things differently to a lot of people I've worked in the past, and that it's never felt like a sales job to me.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think any professional services, you need to be able to articulate what you do and why you feel you do it better than anyone else.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but when you're actually sat dealing with the client, I think it if it's a sales job at that point, for me, that's not the right career for you.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think you've got to be driven by thinking, well, actually, if I do the right thing, and I do the right thing over and over and over again for client after client, and I do the best possible job I can.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: Everything else takes care of itself, and I genuinely believe it does.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm very fortunate now, the vast majority of my clients come to me as client referrals from existing clients.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think you only get that by doing a credible job and doing the right thing for the client.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I think say short answer to your question is marrowing up enough proactivity to be able to go out, articulate your service, and get new work in, but while still shedding that sales mindset of look, I'm trying to sell a thing because you're not, you're you're trying to solve a problem.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think then that the sales, the bad sort of um mindset, if you like, within financial planning would be somebody who's just driven to sell, you know, they I've got to go out there, I've got to win some business, I've got to put some food on my food on my table, that kind of thing, you know.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe perhaps they're getting some pressure from bosses to be able to go out there and hit targets, sales targets, etc., if you like, you know, because there's a lot of firms out there that have targets and still use the bonus structure and all of that kind of thing.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think the responsibility lies with the company that you work for to create a culture that isn't sales um and is actually rewarding employees based on the quality of work that they do?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think um I think it's it's gotta be both.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's got to be the individual responsibility and the companies.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: There's got to be some sharing there.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got to have the right culture from the top, and I think if you've got the wrong culture, it it will flow down and it can lead to kind of bad outcomes to clients.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: But equally, I also think I'm a big believer in personal responsibility, and actually, you've got to, if you've got the right people in the business, regardless of the culture, they can still do the right thing.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I again I know a lot of people in the industry, uh, and some of them will say kind of by their own admission, they work for an incredibly kind of sales-driven organization, but they still do the right thing because that's that's them, that's them being hardwired.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: Ideally, though, where you want to end up is with a business where you've got, I think, kind of the right culture, the right structure, uh, a fee, a decent kind of fee-based approach.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and if you're gonna have incentives, kind of broad incentives around keeping existing clients happy, being as important as bringing new clients in, and then you've got to marry that by picking the kind of people who've got their own ethical code.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I say I didn't know all of that was bear.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Funnily enough, at university, I um I did study economics, but I did a joint honours degree and uh also studied philosophy.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of that was kind of ethics, uh, which at the time, again, as anyone who's ever done a philosophy degree will tell you, uh, you weren't expecting to ever come in useful.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think you go into philosophy for the money or because it's a useful career path.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, looking back in many ways, it's kind of as important as the economic, understanding the economics and understanding the finances, which is going in with a mindset every time of look, how do we how do we get the right outcome?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I believe that if there's a set of client affairs, if there's if they can articulate where they are, where they want to get to, there's not, it's not that there's just a single right answer to get there, but what there often is is a number of wrong ones.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I'm a bit of a purist in that I think, look, actually, if there's a right answer, it it's but you've kind of beholden to you to find that right answer.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: That is literally the point of us, and sometimes that won't mean um won't mean us investing funds, sometimes that won't mean us doing this bit of work over there here because there's a simpler solution.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: But if you don't give that advice, kind of one, I can look at myself in the mirror slash zoom call.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um but equally, giving that kind of correct advice sometimes is the thing that builds the lifelong trust with a client and gets to those referring.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, it's about building the trust, isn't it?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because the the client will inevitably see through what you're trying to do anyway.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you're fixated on, you know, getting that piece of business across the line because you want to earn some bonus or whatever, it becomes incredibly obvious when you when you put yourself into the position of the client and then what the client might be thinking and trying to help that person establish the route to the answer themselves, and you're there as a guide or a coach or a mentor to helping them do that, there's a sense of reward, isn't there, that comes um, that comes via that client.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if I you know, when I can sit there and I talk to somebody and I help them come to terms with the fact that perhaps they're in the wrong job, they work it out themselves.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I've I haven't told them, I don't need to tell them.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: I can spend an hour listening to them and then just guiding them down the path until they get to the point where it's like, oh yeah.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, well, you haven't really explored that question yet, have you?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: You haven't explored that route because everyone around you know is going to influence you in some way, you know, and that's what I love.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: I love spending that hour and or so with someone just to find out really what their motivators are and what they really want out of life.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what that life-centered financial planning is all about, isn't it?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and that's a that's a big part of it.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: But uh and my clients uh are all smart people, and they also kind of want to be involved in that decision-making process, so it isn't or it's rarely purely about me turning up and saying, I've had a look at everything, and this is a solution, because there isn't always a right and wrong.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: But what it's about redoing is kind of examining, perhaps stripping of the hundred options that are out there, stripping out 97 or 98 because they are the wrong route, and then there might be two or three which are equally viable and they've got kind of some relative pros and cons to them.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think all you can do in that situation is you can't sit with a client and say, Look, you should be doing this one.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: You need to be able to sit with them honestly and say, Look, these are the two or three things you could do.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, these are the pluses and minuses of doing each of them.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: Personally, I often say to clients, look, if it if it were me sat in your shoes, I would go down this route.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: But you've got to decide which of these is most important.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to do you want to help the kids or do you want the extra three holidays a year?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: Value judgment, that's not kind of right or wrong.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and incidentally, often it's the holiday these days in that question.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: It used to be help the kids, but increasingly it's I like the holiday police.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but it's not my job to make those decisions, it's my job to tell the client the best way of getting to where they want to.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: We touched a little bit about being ethical as an advisor and making sure that you're you know delivering the right financial planning for that client and putting the client at the heart of everything you do.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned ethical from that respect, but are you involved at all and have any interest or passion towards ethical financial advice, as in where monies are invested, ethical investments?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so we we look after kind of a substantial amount, about one and a half billion or so of uh ethical monies for clients.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's kind of all shades of all shades of green.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, so absolutely it's a key part.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: Again, I don't I'm not a believer that we we don't want to sit out, sit there with our clients forcing that on them for a minute, but I think it's increasingly kind of vital that you've got to have that as an option.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, or if you haven't got that as an option, you've got to be honest and say, look, that's not us.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: You need to go elsewhere.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um as a business, what we were always keen to do, and what the kind of Tilney vision was was to be as as broad a house in terms of what we can offer and who we can offer it to as possible, um, whilst making sure that actually we were specialists within that.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and if we got so effectively the vision is that any client can walk through the door, whether they're ethical or not ethical, whether they've just sold a business for 50 million pounds, or whether they're 18 and trying to do their first ISA, and we can get them in front of the right person.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, and I think ethical is increasingly becoming part of that offering.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: And do clients do you find that certain you're the uh we'll get onto it as well, really, because you're more of a high net worth, ultra high net worth financial planner, aren't you?
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Do you find that the clients that you work with and advise, do you find that they are asking you more about ethical investments?
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is has that been an increase as we're becoming more woke?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it it's gradually uh on the increase over the years.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've seen that, seen that fairly steady increase for as long as I've been in the industry now.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think what is encouraging is that if that's a route that you want to go down, there are far less compromises to be made than there were 15 years ago, 15, 20 years ago.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: So um I remember speaking to clients uh about this kind of a decade and a half ago, and what you need to make to make them aware is look, if you want to be ethical, there are lots of things um that actually are gonna be outside of your investment universe.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: You can't go for it in those, and that is gonna have an effect on kind of the risk that you're taking and the growth that you might expect.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think anyone saying otherwise, you can't you're just not being honest.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: If you've got a small investment universe, that's a desertruism.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: And what we see over the years is just the more people are interested in ethical investing, the more fund launches you have, the more companies that have kind of decent uh ESG credentials, so the wider that universe becomes.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's got to the stage now where you can sit with the client and say, look, okay, you might not have quite the same investment universe as as Bob over there, who hasn't got any of those criteria, but we can very easily build you a hugely diversified portfolio that still works, does everything you want at any risk level, and you don't have to make those compromises as much anymore.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that virtuous circle will continue because that now suddenly encourages some of those clients who had an interest but weren't willing to kind of compromise on the growth or the risk or the volatility.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: I say, well, actually, I have a compromise.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I do want to go down that route for some of all of my money.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because I was always whenever I sometimes I'm doing this job for years as a recruitment consultant for financial planners, I always kind of thought if I was to become a financial planner, I'd like to I would like to market myself as like an ethical financial planner.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what I deal with is you know in things like impact investing, you know, looking at the companies that we actually, you know, helping companies grow via your investment, the um the positive impact to to to the world, to the earth and to the environment or whatever it might well be.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I always kind of looked at that, but I then at the same time it's like profits, people like profits, don't they?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they want to be able to see that it, you know, their investment is profitable.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I wondered, I always thought like how challenging is it to try to it's like trying to turn somebody vegan, isn't it?
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Almost.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and and I would I would never well, I never like encourage anyone to go ethical who didn't want to, in the same way as I rarely encourage people to go vegan if they don't want to.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I I think all you can do, as with any of the other item areas, is is kind of lay out what the consequence is of that decision.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and if you lay it out, actually, I find that any client out there, uh, even uh those clients who are kind of not as financially astute when they come to us, if one of the main things you need to be able to do with this job is articulate things in a way and act as that buffer between all of this technical knowledge on the one hand and the client on the other, you're there to translate that to them.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: So any decision, whether to go ethical, whether to invest at all, uh, whether to use certain tax planning vehicles, that's down to your ability to explain to somebody and put them in a position that they can make an informed choice about it.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um, again, yeah, exactly that, leading them down the the route to explore it within their mind of what's really important to them.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, people often think, you know, I've got this money here and um I've also got a couple of grandchildren, you know, and I want them to have a really nice and a really nice, you know, world to be living in a bit further down the line.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I just think it's a nice, I think I think it would be it's a nice way for a financial planner to be talking to clients and and and how the investments do it.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I can imagine from my perspective, you know, certain clients might diversify their portfolios a bit, whereas before they didn't really care so much, whereas now they actually do.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they're probably investing a little bit more in invest in in in ethical investments than they ever were.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um you have that split then, don't you?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's become a lot more nuanced.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: So you will have people saying, look, okay, this is the big pot, and I and I I want to be ethical to some extent with it, but I'm happy to have some kind of ethically neutral areas.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_02: So kind of gold might be an example of something actually which is it isn't necessarily one or other.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh guilt.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm happy to have those areas, but I really do need the diversification in this portfolio.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, I'm really interested in ethical investments, and for this other pot over there, actually, I Be much darker green, and I want to be impacting investing, and I want to be they're making a positive influence on the life uh on the future.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: And they might even have smaller pots for the grandkids to say, I've had one client in the past say, Look, actually, um, my grandkids uh are already little eco-warriers themselves.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: So actually, uh they're darker green than I am already, uh, and I want to kind of pass the money to them, therefore.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: And for their bit, I want to be really dark green.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: For my bit, actually, I'm happy to be kind of somewhere in between.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, again, giving the clients these options and saying, look, there's lots of different ways of cutting it.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is this is everything that's out there.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, this is it narrowed down to the two or three things that would work for you.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's the day job.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Nice, I like it.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the part about financial planning that I think is really interesting.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you're somebody that really likes people and helping people and getting them to come to decisions themselves around their future and um and also things around like um their personal stresses and fears and worries, because I can imagine it's almost like on one hand, you're kind of like you're trying to predict the future with them a little bit, but at the same time, you're trying to sort out their present.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you are trying to make them feel more comfortable in the present, knowing that their future is taken care of.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think and imagine with a lot of with a lot of people, especially I I've experienced this myself, is that when I when I do look at something which causes me fear, and then it's usually quite not it's sometimes it could be quite hard for me to comprehend it and to understand it, but when someone explains it to me, the fear drops away, doesn't it?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: And especially around like like money, and um and I think that could be with someone who's got bugger all money to someone who's got loads of money.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think the fear is still the same, isn't it?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: And a big part of being a financial planner, which I'm starting to understand, is is that you are there to help and um you know calm the nerves of people, regardless of if they're an ultra high net worth or a high net worth, it's all kind of it's all kind of relative, isn't it?
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a big big skill in the job.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: I've worked with people before who were kind of hugely technical uh and and felt like that was enough.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the trouble is you if you can't speak to a client in a way which enables them to talk about some of those hopes and dreams and fears for the future uh and helps them to kind of quantify that and face some of them, you've only got half the puzzle anyway, and you can't, doesn't matter, all the technical knowledge in the world isn't going to help you come to a solution if you don't know what it is you're trying to solve.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that that was that combination I was talking about earlier about having that level of expertise, but also being able to communicate with people.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I would much rather, if we were recruiting someone tomorrow, that we took on somebody who was an incredible communicator, but needed some help getting the technical exams up to scratch because we can say that's far easier to put in than the other bit.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sort of high high high levels of that, you know, we you know, emotional intelligence, isn't it, as well?
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of ability to understand and pick up when somebody is feeling um you know worried or fearful, or you know, empathizing with somebody in their situation that they're in and being able to articulate what that feeling might feel like when they resolve that problem um and building a picture for them to understand it and and teasing out of them in the first place, often it's always kind of a little bit surprising to me how little people have given any thought about the future often.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I deal with an awful lot of um uh business sales on the one hand, where actually all of the energy and the focus has been on building a business for years and years and years, and there has been next to nothing in terms of thought about what happens when I am actually successful, building this business, sell it on, and they're suddenly and and getting them to think about that early and explaining why it's a good idea to think about it now.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh actually say you're going on that journey with them, that's the interesting bit.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: And they're often sat with you in a room for the first time as you're challenging them and saying, Okay, well, yep, you said you you just want to have enough money to go off and sail into the sunset, but what does it look like over the horizon once you get to the sunset?
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: And um is is say particularly kind of rewarding, but does take a certain quite specific skill.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, similarly with the work I do, I work with uh lottery winners.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: So we we um are one of the show surprisers for Camelots.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, if you if you're kind of lucky enough to get the phone call in the future, Sam.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um I can see you, I will.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: You'll be hugely disappointed to suddenly find yourself kind of stuck in uh stuck in a room with myself, um, and with those initial meetings though, and it's that's a really extreme example of somebody who, even if they've thought about the future, they haven't thought about it in this way before.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all changed, it's all kind of turned on his head, and you've got to be able to communicate and help people get to grips with that that kind of softer bit of what am I gonna do in the future?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: What kind of things might come up, or what do I need to think about now?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and also to ground as well, isn't it?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, I've got 10 million quid, I'm gonna go and buy this, gonna buy that.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, when you like as I could, you know, you need yes, go and spend a bit of that money because that's you've just won a one 10 million quid, but let's look at what we can do with the rest to be able to give you and your family and your legacy and income for for some time.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, and I yeah, that I love I love the sound of that.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: That that you know, I when when you talk about financial planning, right?
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: I can see from your perspective that you love what you do and you love the uh behavioural side of it, like the behavioral science side of it, and like that probably stems back from doing your philosophy degree and being more of a being a people person.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas sometimes when I speak to some financial advisors, it can be really kind of quite uh technical.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, and this is where you kind of weigh up, weighing it, weighing it, weighing it up, isn't it?
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: Of what you especially from my perspective, when I'm looking to help companies build their build you know build their financial advisors, um, is that what are you looking at here?
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: Are you looking at technical knowledge or are you looking at somebody who's got a brilliant ability to get the best out of a client and build amazing, amazing relationships?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because ultimately financial planning is it's a relationship game.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you can sit in front of somebody, you're gonna bore them to tears if you know the insides of a inside out of fun, don't you?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, well, it's no one really gives a shit.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: But if you can, if you can, you know, sit there and talk about their their their fears, their worries, you know, what they want from the future, what's lacking, and get on a level with them that's real, really honest and trustworthy, you know, they're a they're a client for life, aren't they?
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think there's probably way, I mean what I'd say is there's probably kind of space in the industry to some extent for for people who are stronger at one or other of those things.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, but and you've just got to you've got to find the right the right slot for you.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got really technical advisors here who love the technical side and they want to do lots of that.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's fine.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_02: We we might find a specialism which enables them to do that, uh, perhaps that enables them to deal with other professionals rather than clients, uh, or that enables them to kind of deal with an element of the advice for someone else's clients, and they can spend all day being hugely technical.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, equally, if you've got a kind of fantastic person articulating as long as their knowledge is sufficient, while having a big business, you you can bring in other people to fill those gaps if necessary.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny you should you say about the specialisms because I made quite a bit of success um a few years back actually, placing clinical negligence and personal injury financial advisors into Towery at the time.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you guys still do that under Tilney, clinical negligence and PI?
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we still have uh PI and Clint as a as a specialism, and we've got again it for us, it's one of those areas that you you need to specialise in.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, do it.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_02: You can there's some pretty catastrophic stuff you get we can get wrong, as you can imagine.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: You definitely specialise in that area.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so uh, and actually there's some very specific technical bits that if you don't know them, you will potentially get that advice role.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, we absolutely do it.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's not an area that I work in personally, but we've got a uh couple of individuals in Bristol who that's all they do.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so a step you have to be step accredited, don't you?
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, all the sort of pre- and post-court and putting everything together.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: If someone was to be unwell for quite some time due to some negligence, you have to kind of work out what the why they're disadvantaged, for how long they'll be disadvantaged, how much money they're going to need for the I found all that really interesting.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was speaking to the advisors, and you know, yeah, that was a real kind of eye-opener to an area of financial planning which was a specific skill set or an expertise.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then you get somebody that's heavily, you know, heavily interested in pensions, you know, the the the complete technical, you know, side of pensions, all these different cure ops and all this sort of stuff, and they were really, really deep and into that and in tack, people that love tax.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, interestingly, because a lot of those, a lot of those guys tend to then move more into like you see like the power planning route and the financial advisor route.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I kind of think if you're very technical focused, that's not to say that somebody's not technical focused can't sit in front of a client and articulate it, because I can imagine some of your clients absolutely love to know the ins and outs of how something works.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it's about matching those two to the right the right people, isn't it?
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um making sure they're right.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: But the power planning route's great, I think, for somebody that has a real interest in the technical nuances side of it and perhaps less about the relationship side because they find the relationship side actually quite difficult because they find it you know pressured to them to be something perhaps they're not.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas down power plan is like, oh, brilliant, you know, I can just redo the research and the technical one, I can really wow the client based on my knowledge, or I can I can support that financial planner that way as well.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um, that's the beauty of having those two routes now, isn't it?
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I would agree with you in the main.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, I think that again there is still a route in, if you're a hugely technical person, I think there's still a route into advice, but you would probably need to find your niche.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also a big believer, a little bit, as they say with people and they're looking at their dogs looking at their owners sometimes.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm not sure which way around it is here, but it's um that actually often people find clients a little bit like themselves.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I um if any of them listen to this, I might disagree, but I think I get on really well with all my clients.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um part of the reason for that is that over time, I think genuinely that the people that resonate with you and you resonate with them become clients, and by definition, actually, if people don't see to eye at all, they're probably not going to become a client of yours.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um so you build, and I think I therefore think if you are a really kind of technical advisor and that's what you major in, well, actually, there are probably some clients who um want pure technical, want to delve into detail all day, every day.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they want to be the people who become your clients.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think ideally, if you want to be at the kind of top of your game, what I've been always really keen on is I wanted, I don't feel comfortable going into a meeting unless I know the detail and understand the detail.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't mean I need to talk to every client about it in in in kind of microscopic detail, because I don't think they want that.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_02: But I I need to understand it enough to kind of highlight those points.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and if there are areas I don't know, I need to know where to turn.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: Turn to.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's the beauty, isn't it, of having a good solid company behind you that employs people from different backgrounds and different levels of skill set and understanding and expertise because you can turn to those people.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: And a challenge you have as a self-employed advisor, for example, you think, well, I'm gonna go and do this on my own, because perhaps you're driven by money because you know you can get a lion's share of the business that you write.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: But what you then lack is that ability to turn around and deal with some real serious professionals that can give you those that level of expertise by turning your head, you know, and speaking to them.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that that was the initial attraction, as I said, to when I came on board the business I've been at for a decade or so now was um initially it was firstly because there were a lot of people I wanted to learn from, uh, and and it was that self-knowledge that I didn't know it all.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know it all after five years, I didn't know it all after ten years, after twenty years, I don't know it all.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I don't think you ever well, I remember them making the jump.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that impressed me when I walked into my first um first team meeting at Towery at the time, was I remember sitting there being a bit intimidated because you just had all these kind of guys and girls with 30 or 40 years experience, everybody in the uh office was chartered.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: I suddenly wasn't the most qualified person in the room.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and rather than being put off, I just thought that was fantastic.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_02: You just thought, well, okay, this is this is the place to learn your craft, and yeah, I want to be sat next to the P.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: I Clint Ned guy because it's a comfort to know he's there if that kind of thing comes up, but also I can learn a bit of that.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_02: I want to be sat with our non-resident specialists so I can learn a bit of that.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's it's taught me a massive amount in the 10 years, and it also means I can genuinely still sit face to face with new clients and say, look, kind of pretty much whatever the problem is, we can help or I can help directly because I'm confident in the level of knowledge I've got of financial planning.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_02: If there's something particularly niche, um, we had a kind of a UAE tax matter come up this week, but you know, actually, look, you can turn to our UAE financial planning specialist, bring him into the room for a specific tax query, turn to the client's account and get all of those people, and you can you can solve the problem and do it the right way.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, fantastic.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it's all about, isn't it?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's yeah, that's that's you in a nutshell, really, that's the benefit of joining a company such as Tilney, of the size of the company, the power in who they employ, the types of people they've got in the business, um, and the complex cases they can bill for um in respect of the client.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you are really that sort of company that can do everything, that can do a bit of everything for a client.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: And um as a financial planner, you know, that gives you confidence, doesn't it?
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's good to know as well.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to hear that, you know, when you went in there, that small fish, big pond mentality that you you had was like you weren't like looking around thinking, oh god, these people have got way more experience than me.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, yes, wicked, these are these are people that I can definitely learn of.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's um that's quite um refreshing.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, um, if you're definitely an ambitious person who doesn't have a massive ego, then you know, I love that learning from others as well.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I love being being able to look at somebody else and and just like listen and just listen to what they're doing, or you know, if they're doing, I could imagine within financial panel, if they're like, Can I come in into a meeting or something just to hear what it is they do and how they do it?
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because you just learn so much from listening to it to expertise.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the problems I have, for example, if I could bring it back to me for it's like in the situation because I can imagine a lot of advisors are like that.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: When you're a business owner, you know, yes, I've got some great guys around me who work for me, but I'm the most experienced person in the room, and it can be quite lonely to not be able to have those like a team of 10 people around me who've maybe got five or 10 years experience on me.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I can't get that that that that that increase every single day of knowledge.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: And um not to turn the table on you and start asking the questions.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's it's a struggle sometimes because you just have to go off your gut and do what you do.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: But what I tend to do a lot of is read, I read a lot.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll I'll read a lot of books.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'll I'll I'll listen to a lot of podcasts.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and a lot of what I do is I exactly what I'm doing here on this podcast is that I will put myself out there and I'll talk to people and I won't be afraid to ask them questions.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: I get out the mindset that I need to be somebody who knows absolutely everything before I speak to somebody.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Doing a podcast taught me a massive lesson, right?
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: I would sit there and the first thing that it taught me was you don't it's not about you, Sam.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's about that other person.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, um don't worry what you don't know, but just ask good questions and get the information out of that person because your listeners are gonna learn and you're gonna learn.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's my that's always been my philosophy throughout throughout life, really, is to not don't think you need to know it all, just ask a good question and someone will happily give you the answer.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're not gonna sit there and go, God, you don't know that.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: What why am I even talking to you?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: No one thinks that everybody wants to give you the information.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's my strategy, really, is to just to put my ego aside, um, my pride aside, and um be humble and ask for people's honest um answers to questions.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I've that's how I've always learned.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an experiential learner, that's how I do it.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's interesting.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think most of the best people are.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: You've got if you it would be incredibly dull for me if you stop learning one day.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think, but one of the things that you've clearly got, and I've I've worked hard to put over the years, is is that network of the right people to ask the right question to.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I spend a kind of reasonable amount of time both with people out in the kind of accountants, solicitors, um, in the community, other professionals, also talking to kind of senior people at some of our our kind of peers and our peer group, our competitors out there, because actually they're going through the same kind of challenges, especially at the moment.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's really interesting to.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_02: I've got one this Friday actually with an old uh friend of mine who's who's a partner of another advice firm.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_02: I can't wait to kind of talk a little bit about what what kind of things are they doing?
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_02: What are they thinking about the challenges?
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: How are they overcoming them?
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and similarly from accountants and services have a slightly different vision to us, a slightly different lens when they look at client matters.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_02: So talking to them about what would you be, what would you be thinking about, and it's completely different to the thing that jumps to the right mind.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_02: Not neither is right or wrong.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: But I think we want all of that.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the more questions you ask, the more you kind of immerse yourself in that, and the more network you've got around you, the more you build it.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: Try not to put people on a pedestal, basically, I think is a is a is another one as well.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like I always say that to people is that you know, don't think that somebody's better than you.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when you work within, so say, for example, in recruiting into the financial planning industry, somebody might be giving financial advice to clients who've got 50k's worth of investable assets.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: Someone might be giving advice to somebody who's got 120 million, you know, investable assets.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: And my, you know, it's about kind of from my perspective, and this is hopefully we'll get an insight into this now, really, around high net worth and ultra high net worth financial advice.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've always kind of, if I speak to an advisor that gives ultra high net worth advice, in the early days, I'd be like a bit nervous.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'd be treat that advisor slightly differently, like I'd put them on a pedestal up against, say, a financial advisor for HSBC.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: And as I kind of progressed and I got to know these people, it it didn't, it's not like that at all.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like everyone's pretty much very similar.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: They just got different different skill sets, um, and they work in different streams, if you like, or different niches.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that was something that I definitely learned was don't put people on pedestals.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and but but actually that limiting belief can sometimes be detrimental to people's careers.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, it's often that I come across like a financial advisor who's like, you know, I I they struggle to win client relationships, for example.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that might be perhaps because they don't know, they don't think they're they're they're good enough to be say networking with solicitors or accountants to be able to generate referrals.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's something that I've come across.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you, you know, we've kind of gone off tangent really because I want to talk about your career, but at the same time, this is the realities of being a financial advisor, and I'm loving the chat.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_01: So you've kind of come in at Towery, you've progressed through Towery, you're now a you know a director within Tilney, you're you're delivering financial advice, you always have done.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: You've had some involvement within the business and the structure of it and and and and the Bristol office, but you ultimately you're a financial planner, aren't you?
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: You are a you know, you're a financial planner giving financial planning advice to high net worth and ultra high net worth clients.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um absolutely.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I again one of the things that does keep me interested is that I do I do have my hand in some of those other areas in terms of kind of propositional bits or helping build the Bristol office, um, being involved in various projects over the years, and that stuff's kind of interesting to get underneath the hood.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I also kind of manage um uh some of financial planners in the team now.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: And again, that's that I kind of find that really rewarding.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_02: But at heart, the biggest part of the day job, and I was keen to keep it this way, was clients dealing with existing clients, putting on board new clients.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_02: So that is absolutely the majority of the day job.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you shouldn't if it gets to the stage where it's not the majority of the day job, then I think I'd be unhappy for it to be any of the day job.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that you need to keep close enough to the coal face that you you know what's going on.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and and absolutely, and and and this is what I've been enjoying about COVID, really, this whole lockdown situation, putting myself on to podcasts and getting the picking the phone up again, business developing again and having something to talk about.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's been brilliant.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in like when you're running a business, you kind of forget the actual part you did enjoy, which is the client interaction, and you get so much reward out of talking to people and helping people and and again learning and recognizing like some of the connections that I've had from from speaking to more people is amazing.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like so many little opportunities are coming up for me that it's like if I didn't do that and put myself out there, I wouldn't have got it back.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's that whole law of attractions thing, isn't it?
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you if you and some people don't want to do it, I get it, and they want to.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sit and be a manager and are happy to sit there and and and and and and and also are skilled at that as well.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and um yeah, I like I like I I like the people side of the job, I think.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_02: Would you um I'll say I think you lose something as well if you're not the benefit of having people who are involved in all of those other areas in the business, involved in managing uh teams of financial plans, involved in project, but also spending most of their time doing client work, is you've got to understand it means that you start everything, all of those other projects.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_02: I know everything's a bit of a cliche saying kind of starting it from the point of view of the client.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, every kind of project that we've been on starts like that, but actually, you've got people who are the ones sat eye to eye with clients building some of the stuff for the business.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's really powerful because you you can be that one in the room who says, Look, I know that all looks fantastic on paper, but when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking of my clients, and they wouldn't like it, they wouldn't want X, you need to do this slightly differently, they want to be able to do Y.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that's really useful and grounding rather than having everything done centrally by someone who hasn't seen a client for five years.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, and and again, that was an area for you, wasn't it, with Tilney?
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is that not only then were you financial planning, you've gone into like a management role as well, but also being involved from a consultative perspective by helping build CRMs, etc., to make the process more effective for both the advisor and the client, um, and being that person on the ground that can test that as well to say, look, you know, that works, that doesn't work.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: And um, was that is that the sort of thing you've been up to?
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_02: So that was uh, I mean, it was it was a few years ago now, but generally, when we whenever we've got one of these bigger projects on, we want to have at least a kind of three or four subject matter experts feeding into it.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, not sitting there doing the coding day to day.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thank goodness, because it would you wouldn't, I don't know what you would have got, but it wouldn't have been our existing CRM system.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody who can kind of sit there, speak to me about the software developers and say, right, okay, I understand what you're building, but this is what it's got to do, this is what it's gonna look like for me as an advisor to adopt this and use it.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: This is what it's got to look like from a client point of view for them, because I'm a I'm a client of Tilney's as well as an advisor, there, as you would expect.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so I look at it through both beers, and if I if I get something by email from Tilney and I'm not it, it's really useful to be able to say, look, okay, from a client and advice point, that's not what we want.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: What we want is this, it's slightly different.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and one of the things that's kept me here for 11 years odd, um, was that kind of throughout my career, not just since I'd made partner a few years ago, but throughout my career, is that you could give that feedback and things would change.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying they've got every single decision right and then no business does, but what they do do is try and get everything right and listen to feedback when it's not right and try and change it.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you can be part of that um think tank and implement the changes and they're listening to it, that's the the key thing because a huge amount of people do feel kind of slightly frustrated when they're working for a company that doesn't listen to the feedback of how a process works, because again, they're not at the receipt, you know, they're not at the beginning of the process.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: They might be looking at the end of the how much money's being made, and that's all they kind of focus on, whereas actually the journey is what it's about, isn't it?
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because you can lose so many people, whether they're employees or clients along that journey.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's not right, and if it's not singing all the right songs, then um, you know, eventually that's going to have an impact on um profits.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I suspect that uh that maybe what puts some people uh off the that kind of fully employed bigger business route uh is the lack of kind of control or the lack of input.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I'm not saying for a moment it's like a self-employed business.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: There are there are there are structures around you and they're there, kind of in my opinion, for pretty good reasons for client benefit.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_02: But what I've never found is that you can't feed stuff that you that you can't be involved in how that business evolves.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_02: It just means that it's not just going to be you inputting to that, and that's probably not a bad thing.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because having a few different voices in the room, you you can come to kind of a sensible answer often.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_02: But I've always found that if you want to get involved, if you want to join a business, if it's the right business, I think I found it to be someone who I could approach with any idea, whether it's an entrepreneurial one or a business structure one and say, look, I think we can do this thing better.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and if it's a sound idea, then it's something that will get taken forward.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_02: So it still encourages that kind of entrepreneurial approach, despite having kind of a bigger company behind you.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_01: So with your journey, then you've eventually by you know through Towery and being uh in Tilney, obviously, prior to that, you were wanting to work more complex, more interesting cases with more interesting clients.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And naturally, I think everybody progressively wants to move up and deal with perhaps a smaller amount of clients, but with more technical, higher net worth and ultra-high net worth.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um with your sort of journey then taking you that that way, how powerful is it to have a brand behind you, such as Tilney, in helping you win new high net worth or ultra high net worth clients?
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think you get you get to a certain level, and it's I'm not saying it can't be done if you haven't got a big decent kind of larger brand behind you, but it it absolutely helps, it helps on two fronts in that actually a lot of those clients at the kind of high to ultra-high net worth end do have particularly complicated affairs, do want you to look after the wider family group as a whole, and within that you have kind of a number of different people who have really different circumstances, and to sit there saying that you're an expert in all of them, I think could be a challenge.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've got kind of one client who's got kind of children um in four different completely different areas of the world, and he part of his planning overlaps with theirs, as you'd often expect, and he wants a bit of that kind of advice, he wants it to be joined up and he expects us to understand all of those things.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think anyone could do that as an island.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think you need a wider support network to do that.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it enables you to go in and speak to those higher net worth clients and say, look, we're not gonna we're not gonna cherry pick, we're not gonna say we can only do this strand, but we can't do this, we're not gonna not look after any of the members of your family, we can do all of it, and that's pretty compelling.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think it also means that you can do some of the more complex work that's needed for those higher net worth clients.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not not saying it's always more complicated.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_02: You you some clients have a lot of money and pretty simple affairs, but often the higher up the value chain you go, those areas of kind of complexity creep in.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_02: So your your toolkit, if you like, needs to be a bit bigger than it used to be when I first started financial planning and it consisted of an ICE.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_02: You need a little bit more in there, it's not going to solve a lot of problems.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_02: So having that bigger toolkit, I think it is essential, and having a big company behind you, less so from the brand point of view, more so from a practical, we've got expertise in all of this stuff, and real gets in all of it, is is really important.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_01: From a personal development perspective, um, you yourself are chartered, you're a chartered fellow.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: How do you think being a chartered fellow is a necessity to being a high net worth or ultra high net worth financial planner?
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um I my answer would be it for me, it feels like a necessity, but for not for the reasons that people would think.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I I have never found, and I don't find this substantively different at the kind of high net worth, ultralet worth end.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've never found that it's the thing that the client is looking for.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think there is an assumption for most clients, rightly or wrongly, that look, if I'm dealing with somebody, they they know what they're talking about.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I never thought clients particularly are clear on diplomas, charters, fellowship, or anything else.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it might be a small comfort, but I don't think it's the be all and end all any more than it is any other thing at any other level.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think where it becomes a necessity is you need, frankly, you need that level of knowledge of some of those complex areas to be the one that the client wants to deal with them.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think those clients often are kind of demanding, I don't mean that negatively, but just they have got that they're obviously kind of time pressure people often, there's a lot of things to be done, and they expect you when you advise them to know the full breadth of your craft.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's what getting all of those exams under your belt does.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think yeah, important, and you need it there from a personal point of view for me to know what you're doing when you speak to clients, less important to have the letters after your name from a client point of view, I've always felt.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's more around the knowledge, your understanding of your craft.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and also I suppose from a financial planner perspective, you is the confidence in knowing what you're talking about.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yes, there's a few letters after your name.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's nice to have that badge, and there's an element of prestige there.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Less so important to the client, more so important is you know what the hell you're talking about.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a really great point you make about the confidence as well, though, because I I think that comes across to clients.
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody wants to feel like that they're dealing with someone who's training on the job as they look after their millions.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_02: They want to feel like somebody who's who's done the work before and knows kind of all elements of it.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think for me, I would struggle doing the work I do if I wasn't confident in going into every meeting, kind of knowing that I knew what I was talking about.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it is also the thing that addresses what you were talking about a little bit earlier about not being afraid to ask.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not for a minute that I know kind of every element of financial planning out there.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_02: No, nobody does.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_02: But what I do know and I've built up over the over the kind of 20 years, is put up enough exams and enough client experience to know that look, if I if I don't know it, it's probably pretty niche and it's entirely reasonable to sit with a client and say, okay, actually that area's not one of my specialisms, but so I'm going to bring in so and so.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's all they deal with.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_02: This particular kind of trust is something they deal with day in, day out.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Let's bring them into the meeting.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I think sometimes less experienced, less qualified advisors struggle to have the have that confidence.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_02: They don't know what they should know.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_02: So they and the most dangerous thing is getting into a situation where they are kind of trying to trying to fake it.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_02: You need that level of confidence to be able to do that.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, people see through blagging, don't they?
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's obvious if someone's trying to to to fake it till they make it or or or blag somebody.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, as you said, it's always better to say, I think I don't know.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I tell you what, I've got some pretty amazing guys in my team.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let me just ask them and I'll come back to you.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you yourself then, okay.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you're you're a you're a financial planner, you work in that high net worth and what I would consider to be ultra high net worth.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_01: My first question, then, actually, I ask anybody who works within who says they work in that arena.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: What what what's the criteria to be an ultra high net worth client?
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so there's there is there's no kind of official definition as far as everyone seems to have their own arbitrary number picked out, whether it's three million, ten million, a hundred million.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_02: It depends on on the kind of firm you're dealing with and the individual you're speaking to and the day you catch them sometimes.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I would say kind of once once you're beyond a million, often that will be kind of broadly considered for most people to be kind of high and high net worth territory.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if I had to put a number on it, I can go perhaps beyond 10 million or so ultra high net worth.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I don't think sometimes it's usually useful putting those kind of labels.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_02: I know it's a necessity, but especially the line of work that you you do, um you need to be able to have some ranges there.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_02: But I think for me, all I tend to say is that I I kind of deal with clients whose affairs are a bit more complicated and therefore they kind of necessitate a partner checking them on.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_02: And some of those I've got had a collective clients in the past who haven't got a penny with us, we're not managing any money for them.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and by that kind of definition, they're not high worth net worth at all.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um but what we do know is that they've got a lot of tied up in businesses, property portfolios, they're managing that themselves, and what they need is really involved financial planning.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we're happy to do that.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_02: And when the time comes, if the time comes, deal with the asset worth.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I tend to look at it as just a as a kind of more of a complexity question.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes then you're not even putting any money under management, you're not investing their money, you are just literally they're paying for financial planning advice, these these types of clients.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and this is uh this is why I'd always said I I think fee-based financial planning was really important to me because it it allows you to do that kind of genuine work.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now, don't get me wrong, an awful lot of what we do, the vast majority of our clients, we are managing funds for them in some shape or form.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's not a necessity, and we will have kind of clients regularly come or refer other people to us who say, Look, I don't need any of this stuff at the moment.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_02: What I need is a one-off bit of advice, uh, and I just want you to charge for your time, and we can absolutely do that.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_02: Similarly, as I said, we've got some kind of very wealthy clients who haven't got any or barely any liquid funds because they're sat there waiting on a business to sale to go in a few years, and I think often we find that's really valuable to us because others will go into that situation and say, This is who we are.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Give us a call in five years' time when you sell the business, and we'll talk then.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas what we could say is that there's loads of stuff that you can still do now on the planning front.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_02: There might be a bit of cash flow work, it might be helping them exit think about the exit value by quantifying whether they need one million, three million, or ten million.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um all things that we can think about doing now might be about kind of extracting money from the business now, setting up pensions, where all things we can do now, which are really valuable, and then sure, when the sale goes, it's great for them because they've got a relationship with somebody, but it's also actually speaking handly, it's it's really good for us because we've spent five years proving our worth.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_01: When it comes to winning high net worth clients, I'm not asking for Tilney's uh book of how to win holding high net worth or ultra high net worth clients, but what advice would you give an aspiring financial advisor who wants to build a high net worth or an ultra high net worth client book?
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_01: What advice would you give them to help them perhaps better improve their ability to win those types of clients?
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I would say um first thing I would say is you don't want to put yourself in that line of work before you're ready.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's not me trying to kind of brush off the competition by reducing the number of people out there speaking to high network clients.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Genuinely, what that what really alarms me sometimes in any of the fields of financial planning is that kind of sales mentality of winning work at any cost.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_02: And sure, it can sound really attractive if you're just starting out and you're six months into your first position in an academy somewhere or self-employed, and you say, I've stumbled across someone with 10 million pounds.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, then probably the right thing to do at that stage is say, This isn't me.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think building to it gradually so that you when you when you're there, when you're sat in something that fun of that kind of high-deck with client, you can genuinely say hand on heart, look, I I do deal with people like you.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_02: This is what I do.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's the first thing.
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_02: So gonna don't do it if it's not you and build to it slowly.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think once you um get there, I think experience, so evolving yourself.
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_02: I know you can't do that if you haven't one of the clients yet, but involving yourself in other people's meetings, other people's affairs, whatever else, observing colleagues, friends, talking to those who work in this sector about it, and getting a feel for what those clients' affairs look like and the kind of things people do for them.
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Because again, in terms of winning that work, nobody wants to be a test case.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we get a we're kind of very successful in terms of dealing with senior partners in in um law firms or business sale owners, because we can sit there, or I can sit there and say that genuinely everybody who I look after looks like you.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so the next best thing if they don't look like those individuals who's observing other people do it initially and immersing yourself in that world a little bit.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, other than that, I would say you've just got to get over the intimidation factors really interesting.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_02: When you were talking earlier about speaking to advisors um who deal with high net worth individuals, uh, I didn't know we were an intimidating bunch.
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um obviously not anymore, as far as you're concerned, but I think the same applies when people walk in and have a meeting with a client who is uh is kind of larger than they have done in the past.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think what you've got to get over is actually, yes, there's a bit more complexity.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of yes, they might be slightly more demanding.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, some of the solutions will look different, but the principles are kind of no different to any other client.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_02: They they are the kind of people who've been successful in doing whatever they're doing, but they've still got some financial affairs sat behind them, they've still got some hopes and aspirations ahead of them, uh, they've still got things they're worried about.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't sadly kind of go away.
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, hate to kind of spoil anyone's illusions, but you win 10 million on the lottery.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's not that all of your fears go away.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they just get replaced with a different set, and hopefully that's easier to solve with 10 million behind you.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um you still have all of those things after you have an awful lot of money, and the job is still very much the same, understanding all of that, understanding where they are and where they want to get to, and using the tools at your disposal to get them from A to B to take away some of those fears and to make sure that they do meet all of those goals.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, cool.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned a little bit there about like sitting down in front of, say, a uh a partner of a law firm, for example.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in that situation, I assume the partner of the law firm becomes a client, um, and you treat that person as your client and you and you give them financial planning, perhaps you invest some money for them.
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_01: That then I assume helps you open up opportunities to um receive client referrals back from um that partner, perhaps, or perhaps perhaps a relationship between the firm.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Is that uh right, or is that is that how you you also build your client?
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I always speak to financial advisors, I always ask, you know, what introducer relationships do you hold?
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the ones that tend to have better clients and you know, relationships with all but better clients within their portfolio tend to have accountancy, solicitor, or some form of professional introducer.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think um the one thing it, I mean, we wouldn't expect any work by virtue of the fact that we we just in isolation that we look after them, but the one thing we all spend an awful lot of time doing networking, and networking is kind of mainly around trying to get other people to understand what it is that you do, and none of us are great at it, we think we know what an accountant does, we think we know what a solicitor does, they think we know what we do, but but but none of us are kind of fantastic at it unless they've really gone under the bonnet and and seen it.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_02: I can't articulate what KPMG do as well as their KPMG partner can.
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think the difference is once you start dealing with some of those people in their own affairs, they've seen kind of first time some of those bits of work, first hand, some of those bits of work that you've done.
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it suddenly becomes Much easier for them to go to their clients and say, Look, I've had one of these.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard of cash flow planning?
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_02: I had one that's really good.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_02: You should speak to this guy because they've seen it firsthand.
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that that's for me, that's the big benefit of kind of dealing with some of those individuals.
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the reason we deal with it, we deal with them because they are sort of good clients and um and they kind of they fit the kind of profile of clients that I would look after.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a it's a nice side benefit, if you like, that they've seen it all stand.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think it also what it also does do is it grows their confidence in you as a person.
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, company people are referring to Tilde when they refer to me, but first and foremost they're referring to me or whoever their designated advisor is.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I think people can feel far more confident when they've dealt with you themselves personally.
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_02: I know he's good because he does my finances.
• 1:29:08
  SPEAKER_02: You should go and uh you should definitely go and speak to them.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, definitely useful benefit.
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is there any training or is there any books or anything at all that you would recommend, say, to an aspiring financial advisor, perhaps around behavioural psychology or or whatever?
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_02: You would expect, given everything I said, that I was an avid reader of books in this area, like I know you are.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but actually, I don't in my spare time I don't read, I read the technical stuff I have to my job, but I don't read an awful lot in terms of the day job outside of work.
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so everything I've kind of learnt with um dealing with introduced students to accountants and solicitors has been kind of hard won through many years being out and about working with them.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think the tips I would give personally to to kind of people just moving into this for the first time is kind of one, get out there an awful lot.
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_02: So just just do it to start with.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_02: Go out and meet as many people as you can, do exactly what you were saying earlier and ask them lots of questions about what they do.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Don't be intimidated out of asking the questions you need to understand what they do properly.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, again, a mistake that I'm sure I made and others have made is they might have started speaking to accountants, asked the one question, not understood it and felt that they should have done, and then therefore shut up.
• 1:30:35
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, look, there's no reason that you should understand the absolute ins and outs of what an accountant does any more than they understand everything about what we do.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I like to say I have great connections with accountants and law firms now, where I'm saying, look, we're working on cases together, and I say, Look, I I really want to understand it.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what about that?
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_02: But why you why do you and asking all of those questions is great for understanding what they do, it's great then for using other firms to say, look, we do get what you do better than most, but it's also kind of really useful for then dealing with your clients in the future, yeah.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, actually understand what might practically happen when they press this button on their tax return instead of this one because you've spent years speaking to accountants about it.
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_01: And often it's just like you know, you pick up, say, you ask I always say, like, you know, ask the same question to different people, and you'll get some different sort of variations of the answer.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And what it tends to be is that you should kind of have like in your arsenal three or four things that are that cover that area of expertise.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_01: And more than often it's usually enough for someone to kind of build that rapport with you and trust that you understand what you're talking about.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think at the same time, as well, if as you were saying, you know, just keep learning is keep keep learning as you go along, isn't it?
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is the main thing.
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, you know, and I read stuff, I wouldn't say I'm just sit there like, oh, I'm gonna get all my expertise from a book, because like everybody else, I think when you read a book, you know, about how to be a better salesperson, it's usually been rewritten about another book and another book and another book.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I think learning on the job and being that that sort of activist, if you like, as opposed to being a hundred percent theorist, is that yeah, learn on the job, isn't it?
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_01: And learn and and get stuck into it.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the advice I give people who join my business is like don't, you know, if you've got a question, you can ask me, don't be afraid to ask me.
• 1:32:24
  SPEAKER_01: But phone up 20 people and ask these five questions.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_01: By the end of it, you're gonna know a lot about the companies they work for and a lot about what they dislike and like about their jobs, you know?
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just just do it.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Just fact-finding, isn't it?
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_02: It is, it's exactly fact-finding, and you can't you can't do it with too many people, and you can't get too many points of view.
• 1:32:43
  SPEAKER_02: And what emerges out of that by the end of it is your own point of view.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_02: So you you don't end up if you get five different views from an accountant, actually, once you by the end of it, you probably understood the problem, and you say, Well, actually, for me, I'm somewhere between accountant and two and three solution, because I think that's too risky and that's not, and I think that's that's great.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's when you can start being an expert in what you're talking about.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you've got your own personality to it, your own slant to it, don't you?
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think I also think the dealing with getting good at the area that you deal with and the kind of nice deal with and finding others that work in that area, because then you do actually know what you're talking about.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think when you said that people can kind of can spot it if you're faking it, I think if you try and be a jack of all trades, then certainly if you're trying to kind of fake not tax knowledge in front of an accountant, you're gonna get found out pretty quickly.
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, you stick to kind of the area you know and you speak to other people who work in the same set of business sales, as I said, is an uh an area I deal with an awful lot.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_02: So going out there and speaking to accountants, they like the fact that you understand not their job, you understand their job to some extent, but you understand the life cycle as a business sale to some extent.
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_02: You're speaking to corporate finance, you understand their role in it, you understand the things and the types of people who sell a business and the things that they're terrified of and the things that they want to achieve.
• 1:34:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that you're then speaking the same language as the person that you're um you're trying to connect with.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 1:34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, listen, um Rich, you know, I don't want to take so much of your more of your time because I know that you've got another meeting at two o'clock.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, really appreciate you sharing today um your, you know, your opinion of the industry, your, you know, honesty around what you do in your job, um, and really your career today.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's very inspiring.
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think someone listening to this should should be picking up and learning a lot.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because I know today that I sure did.
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and um, and I think, you know, one of the main things I'm taking from this as well is that, you know, when you go down the route of being a financial advisor, being surrounded by people that have different skill sets within, say, a larger company, like an employed model, it can be hugely beneficial to your own personal development and learning.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the one of the major things here that I that I am that I am picking up from and being in a company such as such as Tilney.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the opportunity that's within it, but also because you've obviously you've progressed from being a trainee advisor at Chase all the way up to being now a partner at Tilney, you know, and and and that's because of the what you said was that you're surrounded by people that inspire you.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's a big, you know, that's a big part of um having a happy, successful career.
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_01: And also really love the, you know, your your you know, the behavioural side of how you operate and how you work and the client interaction and being ethical and ensuring that you yourself are somebody that if you're gonna deliver some financial advice that you truly believe what you're saying, not believe because you believe in the hype, but actually genuinely believe that the client is gonna be um looked after the right in the right way.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, and thanks for sharing your your you know your advice around how to win high net worth clients and also the relationships and um of accountancy firms and and solicitors and what part they play in it.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I think it's um an inspiring journey and certainly one that isn't you know ready to end right now.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're a young man going into, you know, going into the next stage of your life, aren't you?
• 1:36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's going to be some fantastic things ahead for you.
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_01: So really appreciate your your time today, Rich.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_02: No problem.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_02: And any Zoom call that ends with me being called a young man, I'm more than happy with Sam.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's been a pleasure.
• 1:36:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're not younger than me though.
• 1:36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Are we young?
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_01: How who's the oldest that?
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm 38 now, I am.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, all right, I think we should end the uh podcast evening.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think we've got time to get to my age.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_02: Now I've I've passed the I've passed the big birthday, I'm afraid.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm 49, yeah.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, kind of past 40 and past something is beyond 40.
• 1:36:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I um although I'm not counting the birthdays held in lockdown, I think they should be they should be written off really due to a lack of celebration.
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think 40s is a great I th I'm going into my 40s with, you know, probably the fittest and the healthiest I've ever been.
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I I have this mindset and I'm uh I that I want to be the the thing for me is fit in my 40s.
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's mentally fit, that's physically fit, financially fit, because I can see my 40s as being like it's like to me, it's like my my my 30s, that's the way I'm looking at it.
• 1:37:23
  SPEAKER_01: I want to go in my 40s, 50s, 60s.
• 1:37:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a fantastic period of period of your life where you're kind of cross, you you're you know, you you you can com you can communicate at all levels, can't you?
• 1:37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's gonna be a huge amount of opportunity there.
• 1:37:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's it is uh for me, it's often kind of is is is the big career decade.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:37:42
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got a enough that you anyone actually watching this can see enough of the grey hairs to acknowledge to be credible, but you've still got a got plenty of energy and enthusiasm, and uh so yeah, you've got to make the most of it.
• 1:37:55
  SPEAKER_02: So keep up those early morning runs.
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's more, yeah.
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's more.
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll have to go, we'll have to hook up and go for a run, I think, because um that that'll be nice up around Ashton Court.
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_01: That'll be good, mate.
• 1:38:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'll try and keep up for the first 5k at least, and then you can you can keep it at the back end.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_01: Kraken, thanks so much, Rich.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much.
• 1:38:12
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_02: Cheers, Sam.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.