With Father’s Day upon us, it’s a good time to reflect upon the role of family in the financial advice industry.
Speaking to our advisers, it’s clear that financial advice is a career that can particularly appeal to parents. There can be flexibility around working hours – and even your working location – which mean that parents are able to play a more involved and integrated role in their children’s lives, rather than only really seeing them at weekends.
This has certainly become easier in recent years, with technology allowing advisers to provide effectively a face-to-face service without actually having to spend hours on end driving up and down the country to see those clients in person.
As Mark Archer, director of MPA Financial Planning, put it: “I chose to be a parent and my role as a financial adviser allows me to be one and in a positive way.”
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a balancing act to carry out. This isn’t a 9-5 job – advisers will be only too familiar with the need to put in the hours at unsociable times, and that can have a knock-on effect on the time they have available to spend with their loved ones. There will be times when advisers have little choice but to put in that time in order to get a deal over the line before a particular deadline.
But plenty of our advisers have pointed out that the flexibility involved with financial advice means they don’t have to miss out on the likes of sports days and parents evenings, a trade off that means they enjoy a better balance than might be possible in other industries.
The next generation
That balance is not just valuable to our current crop of advisers, but also the next generation.
The truth is that as an industry we desperately need to attract new talent, young people who will be the advisers of the future. Their fresh ideas and energy will be crucial in connecting with younger clients, ensuring that they are able to build a healthier future.
That talent pool can be found rather closer to home than you might expect – the daughter of Damian Youell, director of NeedingAdvice.co.uk, has moved into financial advice herself, having seen first-hand not only the benefits advice can provide to clients, but also the work-life balance that is achievable.
It’s something I have seen up close at Rosemount too, given my son Zachary works with me as an executive at the business.
Across the industry, we can be advocates for the difference that financial advice can make not only to individual clients, but also as a career option for our loved ones.
Spreading the family feeling
While financial advice may be attractive to those with families, a family ethos can make a real difference to your own career prospects.
One of the frustrations you will commonly hear among appointed representatives is that they don’t feel valued. This is most often the case with those working with the biggest networks, where they feel that they are just a number, a cog in the machine, but it can happen with smaller networks too.
All too often the adviser was wooed into signing up, promised the world, only for that communication and ongoing support to dry up once they were on board.
We have embraced a very different attitude at Rosemount, putting in a lot of work into making sure our advisers feel like a valued part of the business. That means getting to know them as an individual business, pinpointing the specific areas of support and training that would be most beneficial to them, rather than relying on an ‘off the shelf’ approach.
Communication is absolutely core to this too. Rather than keeping advisers at a distance, and yet expect to still take a portion of their revenues, networks need to ensure that they have personal connections with the senior management team. For example, I’ve long advocated for advisers to have contact details for the CEO, head of compliance,head of support, etc of their network.
That level of accessibility, of making members feel included, is absolutely vital to winning their trust and developing a family feel across the business. That culture is not just a ‘nice to have’ either; it helps staff work more productively and positively, delivering an improved experience to clients.
Ultimately, building a business that feels like a family is in everyone’s interest, from the individual staff to the customers.
Ahmed Bawa is CEO of Rosemount Financial Solutions
