I recently received the third and final instalment of payment for my shares in Fiveways Financial Planning, the IFA business I set up with four colleagues in 2012.
This is the end of my involvement with providing advice, though I hope to go on receiving it for many years.
My journey started in 1974 when I became a part-time financial adviser in Cambridge after leaving London and the Financial Times.
I shall miss the many people who proved that money and fun could go together
That didn’t last long — freelance financial journalism was an easier way to make a living, and was more fun. As well as writing for newspapers including the Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph, I wrote four books on personal finance and investment, including one called Personal Financial Planning — the first on the subject aimed at the general reader. Soon I was contributing regularly to BBC Radio 4’s Moneybox.
In the mad 1980s I launched What Investment magazine in time for the great privatisation boom. The magazine should have been insanely profitable but my business partners and I were too undisciplined to stick to our knitting.
That said, we were the first to spot that newly privatised British Telecom was legally obliged to sell us a list of its shareholders, which it did by providing us not with the electronic record we had requested but with a printout that filled two Transit vans.
I shan’t miss the Kafka-esque insanity called compliance
We had the data recoded in Hong Kong and soon rented it, as part of our British Investors Database, to almost every Tom, Dick and Harry in the then-booming business of direct selling to retail investors.
TV and punters
TV got in on the money scene in the 1980s and I was one of the team fronting eight series of Channel 4’s Moneyspinners show, recorded with real punters at venues across the UK. We got a surprisingly large audience.
As a journalist, it was entirely necessary for many of my evenings to be spent in City pubs and wine bars. The ebb and flow of financial markets has an almost addictive quality and a fresh scandal, fraud or scam was always just over the horizon.
This is the end of my involvement with providing advice, though I hope to go on receiving it for many years
In the 1990s, What Investment hit the rocks. I felt it was time for a change of tack. I spent a couple of years learning how not to manage IFA businesses at IFA network provider Burns-Anderson. I did some consultancy for investment managers and ended up with a share in an IFA business set up by someone who walked away with a big fat bonus.
That was a part-time job and, when the internet came calling in 2003, I had to have a go with an online financial site called Everyinvestor. It took a while to fail.
But, in 2012, four experienced advisers who wanted to leave their existing IFA business asked me to join them in a new firm.
With the help of Kean Seager at Whitechurch, whose adviser network we joined, Fiveways Financial Planning was up and running in a couple of months and we never looked back.
The pandemic has, in one important way, improved the profitability of advice businesses: advisers spend far fewer days out of the office meeting clients
We became independently authorised as soon as we could, developed our own investment solutions and grew steadily into a business with £2m of fee income.
We did that by focusing on the quality and consistency of advice, giving paraplanners a bigger role and ensuring clients all received the annual reviews they were paying for.
Pandemic profit
The pandemic has, in one important way, improved the profitability of advice businesses: advisers now spend far fewer days out of the office meeting clients. On-screen meetings save time and more clients come into the office.
The magazine should have been insanely profitable but my business partners and I were too undisciplined to stick to our knitting
That means advisers can look after more clients, especially if they have top-notch paraplanning and administration teams backing them up. A firm like ours pays paraplanners and administrators much better than we used to and, over time, it will pay advisers less well — but they won’t mind if they are shareholders in the business.
It’s very satisfying that the business we set up in 2012 can now begin to buy out retiring directors while pursuing the costly — but by far the best — strategy of ‘growing your own’ advisers. This makes for a happy end to my money career.
After more than 50 years in financial services, it’s time to move on. I shan’t miss the Kafka-esque insanity called compliance. I shall miss the challenge of persuading people to invest sensibly, while constantly redefining what ‘sensibly’ means.
The ebb and flow of financial markets has an almost addictive quality
I’m sure I will struggle to stop looking at markets and the value of my investments more often than I ought to. And I shall miss the many people who proved that money and fun could go together.
Chris Gilchrist is a former director of Fiveways Financial Planning
This article featured in the May 2023 edition of MM.
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