TRAP: The Real Adviser Podcast
Four business-owning entrepreneurial knuckleheads chew the fat on the sometimes murky, always quirky, world of UK and Irish personal finance.
TRAP: The Real Adviser Podcast
99 - COLIN LAWSON: Maintaining Equilibrium When Scaling
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In this latest pile of TRAP, the Trap Pack discuss
- Topical Titbits
- Meat and Potatoes: COLIN LAWSON - Maintaining Equilibrium When Scaling
- TRAPist question from beloved TRAPist A Cooper on https://www.mandg.com/dam/pru/shared/documents/en/pruf100920001.pdf
- Culture Corner
Show links: http://tiny.cc/traplinks
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Welcome to the Real Advisor Podcast, T R A P trap. Please follow us and join in the conversation on Twitter at Advisor Podcast, where you can suggest ideas and themes you'd like the trap team to discuss. Also, remember to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and leave a six out of five star review on iTunes. Doing all this really, really helps us, which means we can do more to help you. Now, let's head over to the studio for the latest pile of trap.
Nick Lincoln:Yes, indeed, dear Trappists. Welcome back to what many people are calling episode 99 of The Real Advisor Podcast, T R A B Trap. My name is indeed Lincoln, and joining me as ever in the digital studio of Doom are the three other horsemen of
Alan Smith:the apocalypse,
Nick Lincoln:Carl the voice, De Lavochi Widger, Alan the storyteller, Smith, and Andy Ultra Heart. Now, gentlemen, we have a show packed full of absolutely nothing, so let's start unpacking it straight away with some more high energy review reads read out by my very good friend, the Right Honorable mr. Andrew Ursaine Hart.
Andy Hart:Thank you very much, Nicholas. Today we have one review, but it's a biggie. It's from Johnny Zimmerman, Five Stars in the Apple Podcast, entitled 'Thank You. I was introduced to your podcast just under three months ago. Today I have officially listened to every single episode, that's more than one episode a day on average. As a newly qualified IFA, this has given me a massive boost in growing my client bank and given the few clients that I've got the best experience. I was fortunate enough to get one of the scholarship tickets to Trap Live. It was amazing meeting you four, along with other like-minded people. I've still got so much to learn, but this has helped me avoid the mistakes that I know I would have fallen into without it. All four of you have made a massive impact on the profession. The momentum has only just got started to everyone doing full fat financial planning. Take a moment to think about how many 10s of 1000s of families who have, who have improved their lives because of you. I now feel I've written enough for Lip to get angry. I'll stop now. Thank you again, Johnny Zimmerman. It's got a cracking name, isn't it? Sounds like she's been actor or something. Thank you, Johnny.
Nick Lincoln:Johnny Zimmerman, Bob Dylan's real name, Bob Zimmerman. Yeah, just
Alan Smith:a quick follow-up on that hand raised. It proves it. This proves podcasts are a great medium, aren't they, really? Because he's just stumbled across Trap quite recently, and he's got only got like 90 now, 99 rather than something. If you, if you publish, I don't know, newsletters or blogs or something, they kind of go out a date quite quickly, and you're not going to troll through. So, podcasts are great. If you stumble across one you like, you've got a back catalog going back, in this case, four years. So, welcome, Johnny. We're of service.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, that's a lovely review. And thanks a lot, Johnny, for that. And please keep the reviews coming in. They do mean a lot to us. It really gives us a little, little, as I said many times, a shot in the arm of Philip, as you were. That's a Philip set with an F. Ultra. Okay, let's put a timestamp on episode 99 with some topical tidbits, and get this, this damn show on the road. We've launched the soft launch, the Trap Forum, really, that's that's opened up a couple of weeks ago, and the Trap Forum is an online place space where we're going to engender further this great community that Johnny Zimmerman was referring to in his review. There, you know, the Trap Live event is, is, is just, it's such a great communal event, and we're trying to replicate that in an online area that's secure, that's behind a paywall where Trappists can ask questions of each other, where we can have various things going, where the Trap Pack will occasionally throw out extra material and special things like that, and it's just a really nicely clean, cleanly designed, well-laid-out website. We'd love you to join. If you click on the link, you get a 90 day trial period, very generous, because we want to get this thing going. We want to get it buzzing. We want it to be the place to go to in financial services. If you're a full fat financial planner, we've got ongoing plans for it. It's gonna be loads more stuff coming down the line, but please do look at that. We've got people on there already. We've got some traction, the more that come on it, the better. The more the hive mind, the more people in the hive, the better the hive mind becomes. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy in that respect. So, really excited about Trap Forum. Do give it a look and join, and just kick the tires. We're all on all four of us are on there. We'll interact with you as well. So, yeah, good stuff. Anyone got any thoughts on that one's got their hands raised? I'm assuming no.
Alan Smith:I'm just going to add, we've made this exclusively for financial planners and well, and support people as well. So no product providers, no people pushing their own agenda, just the community of people. If you, as you say, Nick, it's like a digital version of Trap Life, where you sort of bump in. To each other digitally, ask questions, raise points, and I think a key thing is everything is then quite easily searchable with we're using this modern, very sort of professional platform. So six months from now, you sort of think there was a conversation about this there that, but I can't remember what it was. How do I quickly find it? Because something has just appeared in my agenda or my inbox. It's very easy to go back and track previous conversations, so the whole community, as it builds and develops, is going to be super valuable. There's no question about that. So, hit the link, sign up 90 days, just to test it out, see how it goes, and
Carl Widger:hopefully it's kind of like a version of a of an ideas exchange with really great people involved, and there have been only if you sign up, you'll see the high-profile members who have joined it already, and I think we're really thrilled that some of those people have joined, and thank you to them, but we're not going to disclose their names, because you have to log in and very
Nick Lincoln:good call, always be closing, like it, like it. Okay, great stuff. So, well, we'll stick with you, Wads. You've got a to call it an Irish obsession, maybe it once was an Irish obsession. Is that too harsh?
Carl Widger:No, I think it still is an Irish obsession with property, and I just.. there was.. there was two stories covered by the Business Post over the last couple of weeks, and I thought it was really interesting about, you know, property being such a sure thing. And the first one is brings us all the way back to before the financial crisis, and obviously the financial crisis here in Ireland was like almost broke the country. Well, actually it did break the country, and we needed the IMF in to help us out. But I remember around 2004 and five, what happened was the two main banks here, Bank of Ireland and AIB, started selling off their branches, and they were selling them to people predominantly with pension funds, who then were buying the branch in with, you know, 1520, and even sometimes 25 year leases, and the whole premise of this was that, like, this is the surest thing ever. Your tenant is AIV or Bank of Ireland, and they're going to absolutely pay the rent over this over the long terms of the leases, which made sense at the time, and I have to admit that I did look at a couple of these, it didn't do any of them, thank God, but I did have a look at it, and what's happened is obviously a lot of the banks are closing their branches now, so, so they're, they've, they're breaking their leases, they're not going to continue with the rent, so people are left with these properties and high streets in various locations around the country with no tenant and nobody to move into these bank buildings, so the surest property bet ever has now become defunct, and people are left with these empty big huge premises that nobody wants, and then the other one was was a student accommodation scheme, which was launched in 2018 so this isn't a financial crisis one. And there was a comment in this article from one of the investors going, I understand there's risk involved with these things, but these people have been entirely wiped out because they had to do other types of mezzanine debt, which then took precedence over the investors who moved from there was bank debt, mezzanine debt, and then they moved down to the bottom, and they've been completely wiped out. So, again, who would have thought that a property did he do in 2018 when, oh, the property market's been going great since then? Well, you know what? Just be careful of the sure thing. This was a student accommodation arrangement, and it has gone absolutely pear-shaped for the investors. This one was promoted through a company called Elkstone, who have been in the news, who I spoke about them before. They've ditched their kind of wealth and financial planning division, so obviously all not well at that firm at the moment.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, thank you for that. On a kind of a late, oh, sorry, gone on,
Alan Smith:you know, you sometimes say, Carl, that Ireland's a few years behind the UK in terms of like good things and positive things. I
Carl Widger:used to say that,
Alan Smith:but I think you're probably still in some of these schemes and investments, because the one you just described in that else, that just reminds me, I don't know if you boys can remember, but I don't know, maybe a decade ago, maybe quite a few years ago, these were all the rage in UK student accommodation funds and a ground rent fund, that was a big thing, and so on paper you couldn't lose, because you know, if you own a building and then it's got to pay ground rent, you know, for 100 years or something, so that's nailed on, that's guaranteed income, blah blah blah, and certainly student accommodation, another example, people are still going to university and college, etc. But, of course, the devil's in the detail, it depends where you sit in the order, like you say, mezzanine debt, and all the rest of it turns out that the underlying, even if the underlying investment performs reasonably well, How you. Own that asset is really, it can be really complex and structured, and I remember quite a few years ago people were piling into this, it was a really attractive, and of course it went, it went the same way as it sounds like those Irish ones are, so it really is a case
Carl Widger:like you don't look that there were tons, and the vast majority of the deals in prior to 2007 and eight did go better, but this is a bit of a strange one, like at the letter they wrote to their investors, right, said there was a couple of things contributing to this, and one of them was higher interest rates. I'm like, interest rates are 2% higher interest rates increased construction costs. It's like, would you not have built that in, you know? And rent caps, and it's like, but this is student accommodation, so rent, you know. So, so I don't know, maybe I'm totally wrong here, but it seems like a very strange one. And I think the investor that was quoted in it said it just seems it's hard to take that. Okay, I accepted the risk. I accepted there was a risk, a loss, but a loss of all of my capital. That it just seems a bit strange. All right. Yeah,
Andy Hart:again, it's my advice to any clients is trying to avoid anything that's packaged around property, if you are that way inclined, and want to buy residential, commercial property, real estate, then buy it as the direct owner, the direct landlord. Any type of packaging in poor property is going to be a complete enough disaster. At back to Adam's point, even if the asset class is performing well, and they've got charts going back for one year, two year, 3000 years. Whenever it gets packaged up, there's shenanigans going on so massively through the packaging.
Carl Widger:You're so right, and like gears, the geared property funds were the ones that all went belly up back in the day, right? So they're not now calling these things geared property funds, but that's like, you know, they are geared property funds when there's gearing and mezzanine debt, right?
Andy Hart:What's the new perfect phrasing? Is it opportunity funds?
Carl Widger:Yeah, tracker bonds became structured products, you know. So, yeah, let's just call it something else, that's marketing, I guess. You know, there's a lot of pros,
Alan Smith:there's a lot of products which made sense during the ZERP era, zero interest rate era, and so you could create this and leverage up like crazy, and same as the sort of the broader sort of private equity, private credit, if you can borrow money, unlimited money at close to zero, even a 2% interest rate or 3% interest rate, all your forecast spreadsheets, you know, everything stops to make sense, and I think only now we're sort of, when did interest rates start going up? Just, it was only a couple of years ago, really. And so all these things are beginning to unravel that could have made sense if we assume that interest rates always stay at zero forever,
Andy Hart:which would be the craziest. You can
Carl Widger:never do, you can exactly.
Nick Lincoln:Well, yeah, but marketing teams will, because they ain't around when the rates go up, they've moved on. Correct.
Carl Widger:Yeah, so that's what should interest you.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, yep. So, tying into that, I listened to a podcast, The This Is Money podcast. I talk about it more in Culture Corner, you know. Treat it with care, because it is a bit shy at times, but they, the most recent episode had a thing about UK property. The first 28 minutes of the show, you can turn it off then, because it gets shy to get after that, but the first 28 minutes of the episode were about the UK market, and we know in this thing of ours that Sibby Street looks everything in nominal terms, doesn't really understand real terms, and inflation kind of how inflation distorts things, if you take inflation out of the UK property market nationwide since 2022 UK property is down around 15 to 20% and in London it's over that, it's about 21% in real terms. So we're kind of, without knowing it, and I think this is a really good thing as well, because they were due, but without knowing it, we're in a slow motion property slump in the UK, and if you're going to have one, because we haven't had one for year, we had one in the, in the early 1970s that was vicious. We had one at the tail end of the 1980s and early 1990s that was vicious. Haven't really had one. They tend to come when interest rates go really, really high, like in 1990 the base rate touched 15% very briefly, and there was a lot of negative equity, and that kind of horror. This one is a slow, it's like the air coming out of a tire very slowly, you're not noticing it, but we do need a lot of air taken out the UK property market, because it's way overvalued, and we are in a property slump now, and flats are down by more than 20% on mass over that period in time, because that's what the buy to let investors went into when buy to let was still a hot thing 10 years ago, they're now the thing that's really hard to get out of, we got the cladding issues and everything else and and rates on flats, and you know, ground rental, other kind of crud, so it's just interesting, and nobody's really talking about it, but we are definitely, and Carl, you know, in the UK, we're as much in love with properties as you guys that are over the Irish Sea, but I think this is a really good thing, I would. Make me, I think, be a much better society in the UK. You can't promote capitalism, people can't use their capital, they can't get into the system. Thanks for that, that's one nil to watch. I think it'd be really good if the property market comes down by 50% We've got to get first-time buyers back into the market, got to get them invested in the system, owning, owning some of the system, owning some capital at the minute, they're just looking up from the outside and thinking, well, this capitalism doesn't work, because I'm not taking part in anything, I'm not sharing any of the spoils. So, yeah, any thoughts on that, Andy?
Andy Hart:Yeah, we've got some tech issues today, people to bear with us. Anyway, you summarized it very well, Nick. I'm done about Nick and Alan, but I've got at least sort of 10 clients and close friends that are trying to sell properties at the moment, and all of them are having an absolute nightmare, and a lot of my clients are now having to withdraw down on investment funds because the property hasn't sold as quickly as they thought, you know, it's that whole rush for the door, and they'll be able to renters' rights come in, you're right, the cladding problem, London flats at the moment are getting absolutely hammered. I follow a few, a few accounts on Twitter that list the prices of what it was, what it sold, now the declines, and that's in nominal terms, Nick. So, in real terms, some London flats are going down by 40% already now, so it's, it's horrendous. I mean, if it goes down by 50% Nick, I think that's slightly too harsh, but then it becomes
Alan Smith:a buyer's market. Then it's an absolute buyer's market equilibrium at some stage. If you look at the relationship between average incomes and average property prices, and first time it's just got right out of kilter. And so, yeah, that's that's that's that's where it
Nick Lincoln:up. Yeah,
Alan Smith:so many young people are disenfranchised, because even if you're earning 5060 70k a year as a 28 year old or 32 year old, you are just not buying. I think
Andy Hart:they are going to look at stamp duty again, they're going to have a whole sort of consultation in relation to that, because that is again,
Alan Smith:they keep
Andy Hart:just an absolute drain on everyone at every step of the lad up, and certainly on sizes. Why would you be a downsizer in your 70s and pay 6080, 100 grand to move to, you know, a small bundle around the corner?
Nick Lincoln:They're obsessed with maintaining the property boom, that's things like, you know, the license, the license that are there to help people build up money. That's why do we need there's another think tank this week, which come out, which has come out with something saying, "Oh, what about a scheme where people can defer their state? They can lose a year of state pension, but we'll give them money now to get a deposit on a property. It's like that's not the problem. The problem is the properties are vastly overpriced, and there's got to be a correction in the marketplace. I'll take your point, Andy, that you know, for a lot of people, a 50% drop in the value of their property will perhaps scare them, but it might scare them more than they need to be scared, because people, like, you know, our kind of age, who've got properties without mortgages or with small mortgages, that doesn't really bother me. If, say, I sell my property for 50% less than I thought it was going to get, because the property's going to move to it's 50% less, it doesn't actually, in the wash, it doesn't really matter, but what it does mean, if you get that 50% drop, is that people can get debt in the market at the bottom, that's what we haven't had for the best part of 1520 years, and it's not getting any better presently.
Andy Hart:I did read that North Watford would be severely impacted by these declines, maybe close to 80% North Watford.
Nick Lincoln:They did say that for the exclusive areas of this,
Carl Widger:they're gonna, they're gonna clip out pieces of this and use it for marketing in Ireland, so that someone will say all the value is in the UK, it'll be like the charge of the Light Brigade, the Irish will be over buying property into their pension funds. Stamp duty does need everything, you heard it here first, it's all happening in the UK, stamp
Andy Hart:duty does need addressing, Nick. It needs to come down dramatically. Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Lincoln:It's addressing it's a terribly designed tax. Thank you, Gordon Brown, for doing that stupid cliff edge thing. It's an absolutely abhorrent tax. It's so obviously needs to be resolved. They obviously will not do it. That's the point. We know it's, we know it's terrible. They ain't going to touch it. They want the money to spend on their pet projects. Okay,
Carl Widger:Reeves won't sort that now. Our good friend,
Nick Lincoln:yeah, yeah. What if there's ever the man for the job? It's her, okay? Andy, oh yeah, this is your little vexatious point here.
Andy Hart:Yeah, I don't know if Alan and Nick saw this, but there's going to be there's a consultation going on at the moment will have a huge impact on lots and lots of people in the UK, depending on what the results are. It's affecting mainly unmarried couples, and in the UK, there's apparently something like 3.5 million unmarried cohabiting couples in the UK. So, it's a huge percentage of people out there, it's more than double that it was 30 years ago, and at the moment it's quite clean and simple. If you are married, the state's involved in your relationship, and there's rules that need to be adhered to, whereas unmarried couples things were not as clear, so they've mentioned. A few things, if you've been cohabiting and living in the same house for more than three years, again, it's going to be a cliff edge situation. So that's been muted, and also, obviously, if you have children and you're in an unmarried couple, and there's going to be automatic rights for the unmarried partner on death. At the moment, it's just consultation, but there's a lot of people looking at this. As I say, at the moment it's quite clear cut. If we're not married and we live together, what I've got is mine, what you've got is yours, sort of thing. Obviously, if children get in the mix, then rightly so, there needs to be a bit of a change in the deviate dividend of it up. They are leading with, obviously, you know, mainly focused on usually the woman that is the one that is unmarried, that doesn't have the assets, so yeah, we don't know exactly what's going to come of this, but the implications of this, the unintended consequences, the second order effects are going to be absolutely massive, so whatever is decided, obviously, us as financial advisors and planners will need to know the rules. We can obviously guide and advise, you know, the clients that we look after. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see exactly what is what is decided. Yeah, did you boys read this or come across this?
Nick Lincoln:I came across it as not particularly of much interest to me,
Alan Smith:yeah. It has relevance, I guess. It is representing the more modern approach. Marriage figures are down a lot in the last couple of decades. Birth, the birth rate is reduced as well. There's a lot of things. I guess it's representing the fact that, unlike, you know, 20 3040 years ago, when most people got married, now a lot of people don't, and as that's maybe linked to a whole bunch of other things, yeah, about the property prices and all those, all those other related things. So it's fair enough. I remember years ago speaking to this client, retired lady client, who was pretty wealthy, and she had a boyfriend, she was unmarried, had a boyfriend for many, many years, never got married, and I just explained to her, well, you know, in the event of your death, then inheritance tax will be paid on your estate, so she promptly went out and got married. As a result, who says romance is dead? Getting married as a tax break,
Nick Lincoln:people do. I've got a, I've got a had a got a gay couple, and they were just in that, you know, they weren't a common law relationship, and they got - they went through the civil partnership a year and a half ago, because it would have actually screwed them on first death. Yeah, they would have - they would have to be, they would have to, without doubt, sell the family home to set to pay the inheritance tax, and now they don't. So, yeah, very romantic.
Carl Widger:Andy, just so I understand, what are the changes that are being proposed here. Well,
Andy Hart:let's say currently, if you're in a cohabiting unmarried relationship and you've lived with a person for 10 years, if the, if the relationship breaks down, you know, you take what you have and I take what I have, whereas at the moment they're saying, if you've lived together for more than three years, the unmarried, less financially capable, successful person can have a claim on potentially your income, potentially your assets, and at the moment, if you have, if you're an unmarried couple and you have children together, again, you don't have the same rights as, let's say, as if you were married, there's going to be a lot of moving parts with it, but, but it was quite clear cut, you know, fact, because was what, for example, there's a lot of maybe elderly people where young people live with them, and currently, if they're not part of the will, and you've been living there for a long time, there's no issue on death, whereas this is going to lead to situations where people are saying we were a couple, we've been together for eight years, seven years, there's lots of, you know, unloads that's going to going to happen with this nuance, and I don't know if it will lead to more marriages, less marriages, more cohabiting, less cohabiting, obviously that's to be decided to play out, and whatever the legal conclusion of this is, that's not the full story, obviously, that's just the legal conclusion, that's just the guardrails. What actually happens, you know, again, their intention might be for more people to cohabit, or more people to get married, but the outcome could be the complete opposite, as we know, with a lot of this legislation, but yeah, lawyers will be involved, financial advisors will be involved, people change their setups, they might be setting up tenancy agreements with people that live with them, just to like pay a nominal rep, we just don't know, but I think it's gonna be whatever they decide, it's gonna be some, a lot of changes from down the
Alan Smith:okay. Smithy FCA review: the FCA have just announced a review on how advisors deal with bereaved clients, so clients who pass away whilst they are obviously engaged with a financial planning company. I mean, and they've sent out a survey, I think it's to a sample, not to everyone. You guys haven't received, I don't think we've received it. So say it's a, it is a sample initially, but they're really trying to understand advisors, and there's a crucial point, which I'll come to, but some of the questions that they're asking is what training staff were given to deal with bereaved customers, how to spot how staff can spot signs of vulnerability during bereavement cases. Obviously, if someone's husband or wife has passed away, that could be an issue. Details the number of complaints the firms have relating to deceased clients, and how firms are notified of bereavement. What documents they request from relatives, and the crucial amongst all that, and the crucial thing they're asking is what do you do about fees a client passes away. I think this is a really important issue, and I spoke to Andy about it last week, actually, and everyone's got their different take on it, because so if we have a client who sadly passes away, then currently this is what we've been doing. Didn't always do this, didn't really always have a really clear policy on this. We do now, but we switch off fees. Clients deceased, clearly we've got a contractual, a great agreement with a customer or client. We switch off fees. It does present another issue, though, because if a client isn't fully invested in, let's say, a predominantly global equity portfolio, and inevitably going through that whole process, dealing with the paperwork, dealing with the executors, and the people who are managing the estate, there's a lot, there potentially is a lot of volatility, and if you have, so some people move the client, the bereaved, the deceased client's portfolio, move it to cash, but at that point you haven't gotten an agreement with the client, that has now come to an end. So you don't really have, I would argue, you don't really have authority to move that to cash. So your alternative is you leave it fully invested as is, and you know Sod's Law, there's a temporary market correction of 20% and you've got, you know the children, grandchildren, whoever, coming in. Say, hang on a minute. I was expecting to receive inheritance of X, and I got X minus Y. So, I think this is quite an interesting area. And the FCA are obviously paying a bit of attention, and they want advisors to respond in terms of what their current processes are, how they deal with a whole range of things, as I say, including how staff are trained to deal with bereaved clients, but also around the fee options and what you actually do, and I think it's worthy of further exploration. I know, I know, Andy, we chatted about this last week at the,
Andy Hart:yeah, so we have spoken about some of this podcast before, and we spoke about it last week. I wonder if this might be the trap effect, maybe the FCA is listening and thinks there's a bit of a hole in an advisor's processes. It's quite clear that they don't agree on something, which is great, you know. If they are listening, these are these are genuine things that we struggle with or run into problems with with real life, real client situations. And it was also brought up last week in a room of 35 of us, and again, there was no cohesive agreement between us. I switch off the fees. I've dealt with a dealing with the clients. A client of mine passed away in October 2025 I've just about finalized everything, moved the money to their partner, and that's quite a quick one. So, I've been dealing with this for 10 eight months, eight nine months, I haven't been paid for dealing with the deceased estate I was dealing with. I did look after him for 10 years previous. I feel like I owe him and his estate a duty to do that work, but everyone's different. So I turn off my fees and I moved it all to cash. Of course, there are exceptions that apply. I certainly don't want to ask 1234, children what their thoughts are on asset allocation for their passed away father or mother. So, by default, I might be taking a professional risk, but I think it's got a lot of common sense behind it. So, I'm happy to turn off my fees and move all the portfolio to cash. Carl, I think, is next.
Carl Widger:Yeah, yeah. As you all know, I've been through this sad men phase recently, and so first thing to say, I hope the FCA are sending this to the banks also, right? Because trying to deal with the banks through this process is horrendous and stressful and condescending. I would say to a large extent. Are they doing it to the big, say, the large DB houses? Right? Are they are they are they talking the same language to those people? I would say, right, if if, if it was me, and I was in, and I had an advisor, and it was like left to my kids to try and sort it out, right? I would proactively talk to my advisor and say, under no circumstances, turn off the fees. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to stay engaged, and I want. You to make sure that it's absolutely looked after. I think we've spoken about the run into cash all if you are going to do these things. I don't think there's a right and a wrong way of doing it, but the way to bring this up with your clients is to put it in your terms of business, so that for me is the only way that you can absolutely nail on this is what our firm do, and if you would like something else, you need to put it in writing to us to do something else, but calling out just advisors on this, and you know whether advisors charge fees, you're missing the big point here, right? There's people who are very, very vulnerable, you know, at their lowest ebb, and making this shit hard is why we do what we do, because I can tell you some of the stuff that I was asked to do to confirm that I was an executor of the will, or whatever. Right, I can tell you if it was through an advisor, the advisor wouldn't even tell me, but the advisor would have found ways and means to make sure that I wasn't asked all those shitty horrible questions, and then stuff getting rejected, because blah blah blah blah, so I would say, yeah, you should, you should, you should have your whatever you decide is right for your firm, which, and there are no right or wrong answers from a compliance point of view, to tick a box with the FCA, put it in your terms of business, and then in the terms of business, you can discuss it with your clients, and if you had that client for 10 years, Andy, right, and you looked after him, and if he was with you for 10 years, you clearly did look after him, he didn't want you to turn off the fees, he just wanted you to make sure that his family were going to be okay, so I would really take exception with the FCA calling out advisor firms if they're not doing exactly the same with banks and all other financial institutions, because the process is horrendous and it's just not fair on people who are, as I say, at their lower step.
Nick Lincoln:So, do platforms turn off fees automatically if you tell them that someone has passed away? Fundamentally, do they do that? You know what? Transact,
Andy Hart:that's a good point, Nick. That was Rob in the room last week. I don't believe Transac. Do you have to inform them? I think maybe Quilter, do again, I could be wrong, and it might only be the Quilter Pension, not the ISA, again, again, I'm just guessing. So the platforms don't have some, you know, consistent ways of dealing with it. I don't know what the FMs do, I don't know what banks do, and advisors all have different things. So, in actual fact, the FCA taking a stab at this is is welcome. So, it will be - I'll be - I think they're just going to come up with best practice. I don't think they're going to tell you to turn your fees off, move to cash, for example. So, I think there's going to come up with best practices, but again, I could be wrong. I
Nick Lincoln:do take on board Carl's point that the deceased person would want you to give the very best service you can to those that he or she has left behind on this planet, and would want you recompense for your time, but I can also see it from an outsider's point of view that people can go hold on, Joe Bloggs is dead, you're not providing a financial planning service to Joe Bloggs, so it's a real tension point, I get that as well, and also this thing about going to cash for once, because you know my beyond regulation is make it light touch. I wouldn't mind the FCA telling us, Cart, when a client dies, you go to cash, immediate cash, you know, you go to cash, or they don't mind the client's not dead to authorize it. We understand that we're telling you as a regulatory thing, go to the point you made at the start of this, this section, Andy, if Alan, just rather, if the fund goes up by 10 15% the beneficiaries aren't even going to notice, right? But if it goes down by 20%
Andy Hart:you're on the hook,
Nick Lincoln:you're on the hook, and we're trying to be on the hook for
Andy Hart:2% you'll be on the hook for 2% not 20%
Nick Lincoln:And also, this thing about, so if a client dies, Andy, and, and you're told the client dies, do you sell the CGT down and just take it as verbatim? I'm going to sell it today, even though I'm not in death certificate, because obviously that's a CGT event when you sell out the GIA, so okay, okay, yeah, big thing, you might have a million pounds, you know, GIA with a massive pregnant game, it's
Andy Hart:already been crystallized, because the person's died, so the uplift has already happened, either changes in
Nick Lincoln:email, you haven't had any confirmation or anything like that. Make
Andy Hart:sure the market
Nick Lincoln:falls by 20% the next day, while you're waiting for the.. there's always other stuff. Yeah, there's always the only
Alan Smith:way you can really navigate this is as Carl's just said, is you document this and you say whatever, whatever it is. If it's we will immediately switch off fees, or we won't, we'll continue to charge fees, but it will be chargeable to the executors, although that in itself will need another terms of business or fee equipment.
Andy Hart:Apparently, some people do have executive fee agreements or executive client agreements, which I think is probably a good thing. I don't currently, but something to be looked at. I'm excited to see what the FCA come up with. Excited,
Carl Widger:I'm told I don't subscribe to the notion that fees need to be turned off at
Andy Hart:all.
Carl Widger:Look, if you're dealing with the client for your 10 year old client, Andy, right, you can relate a lot of work at the at the.. it's just the
Andy Hart:start I've taken again, that's it's the whole art of this business, we're not told what to do, so that's the start I've taken.
Carl Widger:Surely it gets actually very, very busy when some.. when there's
Andy Hart:a lot going on, and I'll step up and do the work for nothing. Why
Carl Widger:should we? Why should we, as advisors, be expected to work for nothing? We're going to work actually in our client's favor with a whole, a whole lot more empathy than any of the larger financial institutions. I don't subscribe to, we shouldn't get paid. I think we should do the best that we can for our clients and continue to get paid until the business leaves.
Andy Hart:The doing the best and stepping up goes without saying, it's just a price thing. I've decided
Carl Widger:to, that's fine, I strongly disagree with, I think, the three of you here. I don't, I'm not saying
Alan Smith:you automatically should document it, because the actual, the legal fee agreement you've got effectively ceases to exist at that point. Obviously, it's different if it's a married couple and it passes across to the surviving spouse, but if it's an individual by definition, that person is long, no longer contractually available to engage in that arrangement. So, you, this fee should be, I, my view, I'm no lawyer, but my view is that has to be switched off, because the person is no longer alive. But I would, I agree with you, and we have done this in the past. We identify who the executors are, administrators, we say, I'll send you across our fee agreement, and we'll continue to work. Now, you might choose to work that on an hourly rate or still a percentage of assets, or whatever way you want to do it, but I agree with you, Carl. It is not unreasonable, because there is a lot of work to be done, and you want to deliver a highly professional service
Carl Widger:with empathy, and at a level and a standard, so far above what the big institutions do, but why are we the ones turning off our fees? That will be my argument.
Nick Lincoln:Yep. Okay. Well, that's obviously an interesting watch. This space might be interesting to see how this FCA review goes out. I haven't had the survey, don't think you have Alan, and you haven't either, Andy. So that would be one that I would take part in, and I'd be interested in seeing the results on that, because I think it's, you know, it becomes more and more prescient in front of mine, because we're not getting any younger, and other art clients, so this ain't going to go away. Okay, and we've got two back-to-back ones from you, Alan, because you didn't organize the slate in a way that makes any kind of flow
Alan Smith:well on the subject of fees. I'm just going to flag this up, that we get messages, I think, quite regularly from people. I just want to flag this up. I received an email a little while ago from an avid Trappist, trap listener, a lady who's a financial planner, who named, whose name I won't mention, but she, you know, she really embraces, she's relatively new startup in her own business, but she was working for a historical what I would call what they self describe as a wealth manager, and we all know the connotation sometimes that that involves, but she sent me an email just for my thoughts and feedback. She's got a friend of hers who's still a client of her ex employer, a wealth manager, and she was just mentioning to the client, to her friend, just be careful about the fees that you're paying, because what she knows, one of the reasons that she's left this firm is there are very actively traded, you know, single line, single stock items, trading portfolios in and out, zero financial planning, and she said, I think they're quite expensive, so the friend of hers asked for what a fee was. She was told initially she's talking a phone call, 1% She asked a bit more, and she was, she was given a schedule of fees and charges showing 1.3% so 1% to the DFM, 0.3 for custody. She was quite happy with that, and then with the proper Trappist person saying no, I believe it's more than that. Push back, push back. She's eventually given a full statement, which showed total ongoing of 2.4% So she started to ask three separate times. She's asked to ask multiple times, and only because she had a good financial planner in her corner saying don't believe that, don't believe that, push back, and then there's a big long caveat that comes with it, saying something along the lines of investment trusts, the charges are included within it, or so, though you know the sort of, there's some just kind of bullshit, really, because, by the way, this client doesn't own any investment trust, but they're sort of trying to, and the advisor is saying to me, isn't it? How can this operate? Aren't they breaking rules around treating customers fairly? Customer, what do you call it? Consumer duty fee disclosure, every rule. Now, I mean, this is.. I'm not going to mention their name, but you know, there are significant other, certainly part of a very significant national business part. And and they're kind of just lying to people, so that is if somebody on their fee disclosure they're disclosing maybe
Carl Widger:initials, you boys don't,
Andy Hart:don't, don't, don't, don't, no, I'm not
Alan Smith:gonna, and I've, in fact, in fact, funnily enough, this same company comes up regularly, because maybe a year, two years ago I mentioned, I didn't mention them either, but they've come up again, because we take, we took a client from them, and again, this, it was a, it was a battle, because the client was comparing what our fees were going to be versus what she was paying, and she said, well, they're actually about the same fee as you, and I just knew they weren't, so that was a battle for us as experienced professionals, never mind a client that they've got, but only because this particular client of theirs has got a good friend who is a financial planner, so the point being their disclosure is ignoring at least 50% of the total fees and costs, and as I said, zero financial planning. They're basically investment managers buying and selling stocks and different funds, and in and out of the market all the time.
Nick Lincoln:Terrible,
Alan Smith:isn't it awful? And this stuff, it's hidden in plain sight, and all the things that we talk about. I know we do bang on about this a bit. It comes up reasonably regularly, but the point is, without with all this consumer duty, and countless millions and billions spent, and I think we've also said in the past the FCA broadly are doing a reasonable job, and we're just talking about this bereavement thing. I think that's generally positive, but yet this stuff goes on. How can this be allowed to persist? It's mad, it's infuriating. Actually, it pisses me off.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, absolutely, it's enraging. Yeah,
Andy Hart:sorry, there must be different rules, Alan, that apply to DFMS and investment managers, because all the financial advice there must be because all of the large financial advice like SJP, they've got all their charges pretty much to the penny listed on their main website, and I don't think they would do that unless they had to. These DFMS, I mean, I've seen 40 page reports, it says section nine, see the fees is blank.
Alan Smith:Yeah,
Andy Hart:and then you've got to ask them 16 times, whereas we transacs got to do that annual thing. We've got to do the annual thing. We've got to tell them like six times across the union
Alan Smith:in percentage and actual different
Andy Hart:rules apply to investment managers and DFMs. There has to be, if anyone's listening to this, that knows his space well. Please do drop us, drop one of us a line. Yeah, try and explain an awesome handbook that applies to them.
Alan Smith:If the FCA are listening, which I think they do now, tune in, go and have a look at it. Go and go, no, go, go and investigate, because you're right. Because if I don't believe that's, I don't believe that's true. I believe the all this is retail investment advice. It is all governed by broadly the same rules, so there wouldn't be anything that they would be able to get away with officially.
Andy Hart:I've seen emails from DFMS, like the client said, just to let you know that, and let me know what I'm paying. They reply back and say 1% stuff. It's like they also say 1% plus VAT, and they don't say there's custodian, they don't even say there's, yeah, it's the loosest reply that I've seen in my, I suppose
Nick Lincoln:they will say the clients asking me, what are we, you know, what are your charges, and they're saying these are our charges, because they've been very bendy with the truth, there aren't they, the clients asking how much am I paying in, but surely Nick,
Alan Smith:they have there is a compliance requirement that all of us have to adhere to, which is an annual full disclosure. I'm sure they'll
Nick Lincoln:send that out, that may, that'll be on page 87 after all the nice pretty graphs on the, you know, and, and, yeah, that'll be, it'll be there somewhere, but it will be obfuscated to them to the nth degree, it'll be buried away. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna, I'm gonna
Alan Smith:keep on mentioning it, we're gonna keep on mentioning it, yeah. At some stage, we might actually name names, because it's a statement of fact. It's not, it's not, we're not making it up, as
Nick Lincoln:ever. We'll always come and visit you, you know.
Andy Hart:Thank you, due to your
Carl Widger:age.
Alan Smith:Yeah, from Riches
Nick Lincoln:to Rags, the Alan Smith story. This would be a great topic, by the way, on the Trap Forum. If you're in the Trap Forum, and we could, we could start a thread on this, and maybe put some names, because it's a walled garden, we could put some names behind some of these scumbags doing this. Maybe the
Carl Widger:FCA could join as well.
Nick Lincoln:Maybe the FCA could join as well. That will, yeah, that would make it an interesting place, that's for sure. Always be closing,
Alan Smith:always be closing,
Nick Lincoln:always be closing, indeed. ABC, okay. So we're on to Andy, and mr. Musk has done something else, hasn't he?
Andy Hart:Yeah, there's a few moving parts with this one. So this is the Blockbuster IPO of SpaceX. Last Friday, they raised the most amount of money that's ever been raised on an IPO, $75 billion it was very much oversubscribed. He's become a trillionaire because of the final closing price of SpaceX, which has obviously made news around the world. Quite a few moving parts on this one. Something I was, I found quite interesting. I was looking at IPOs and history, and they're talking about the similarities with. Now, and 99 and the tech wreck, the.com bubble in 1999 alone, there were 478 IPOs, almost 80% were tech stocks, 70% had no earnings. The average first day return for IPOs in 1999 get have a guess, the average first day return for IPOs in 1999 What percentage did the 478 on the first day? 71% I mean, obviously I'm way too young to remember 1999 because
Nick Lincoln:when the dinner party chat dries up next time, I'm gonna.
Alan Smith:that's quite that, though. To be
Andy Hart:a lot of people made some fast cash very quickly there. Anyway, back to the SpaceX IPO, so it's over 2 trillion at the moment. It's the six biggest company in America. There was a bit of to and a fro in between advisors, because their clients are basically quite interested to work out if SpaceX will end up in their portfolio, and again, you guys may or may not be reading about this, but various different index funds have changed their rules to allow SpaceX in sooner, and again, it's not as clear cut. Some index funds operate on a market cap basis, some of them do it on free flow, you know. When you sort of peel back the onions of simple index funds, it will get a little bit more complicated. The other thing, obviously, there's been a lot of newly minted millionaires. 4400 insiders and ex employees are now millionaires. Obviously, the numbers will be a huge discrepancy between all of them, but the interesting thing about that 4400 I think, is these will be very wealthy employees, engineers, and they'll all be involved in the space ecosystem, and what will happen is a lot of them will leave SpaceX and set up on their right set up companies on their own, and there'll be these tiny little offshoots of space companies, and obviously SpaceX will be this sort of juggernaut in the middle, middle that they, you know, collaborate with. So, yeah, I thought it was a quite an interesting story last week. Any, any inbound from clients about SpaceX people, or is it just watching it? Okay, any any thoughts?
Nick Lincoln:Not particularly well. It just
Alan Smith:all our clients will eventually, whether it's immediately over the next year or so, will own a small, tiny part of SpaceX.
Andy Hart:Yeah,
Alan Smith:so that's that's fine. It's, you know, it's a testament to the innovation and what's trying to be created, if you look at it in traditional valuation multiple profit that it's just off the scale, it's just ridiculous. But
Andy Hart:it's over 100 times revenue, 100 times
Alan Smith:revenue. But if half the things that Elon is proposing to pull together over the next five years come to fruition, I mean, I think that the real success right now within that conglomerate is Starlink. What Starlink is doing, and the speed at which they're putting up these satellites around the world, which is quite incredible. So, that's
Nick Lincoln:that's that's his big thing for humanity. I'm telling you, that is changing the lives of millions of people who've never had internet access. Yeah, yeah,
Andy Hart:very, very quick.
Nick Lincoln:It's great. Those people wanted to launch a wealth tax against Elon Musk. Never say the same thing for George Soros, do they? It's almost like it's political. Let's move on to me. So, yeah, protection, writing protection. So, I've got a young couple, cumulative couples saving couple, sorry to use the correct verb, it's a saving couple in their 30s, got married last year, had just had the first child, absolutely brilliant, had no life assurance whatsoever, and I'm thinking, oh God, I'm back in the world of life assurance companies, I don't know about you, Trap pack, but as I get older, the thought of dealing with life assurance companies just gives me the heebie jeebies, and I'm quite happy to outsource protection to people that do it all the time and know all the wrinkles and what the underwriting foibles are different companies and how you get stuff on the books that maybe you couldn't get with another company that's two pounds a month cheaper but he didn't know that when he sent in the 85 page pdf application form so and the opportunities to outsource protection business to specialists has narrowed down in recent years, but I have - we might talk about them before, because of their podcast, but a company called Cura, Catherine and Alan Knowles in the north of England, they run a protection business, purely protection, called Cura Insurance, and I spoke with Alan Knowles last week about this case, and they're more than happy to work with advisors and introduce business to them, they're very slick, their website is excellent. All they do is protection. They're extremely knowledgeable on it. If you want a commission share, they'll do that, and if you don't want the commission share, they'll rebate 30% of the commission back into the policy to reduce the premiums on behalf of the client. So that's a really nice little angle to get this stuff on the books. And again, yes, Andy, we have mentioned this podcast before, but can. Friend does a podcast that's that's very good, called Practical protection.co.uk and if you listen to that, and then you ask for a CBD certificate, they will generate a CBD certificate for you. So, another way to get your CBD through the year, it's not, it's not as perhaps as vital as it once was. We had to do the 12 hours of protection CPD every year, well, that's been scrapped by the FCA. But nevertheless, just a shout out to Cura. I'm definitely gonna be using them going forward for the odd protection cases that I get very, very slick. And did you know, do you know Andy, do you know Catherine or Alan Knowles?
Andy Hart:I'm aware of them, but I don't know them personally yet. But yeah, I also listen to their podcast and do their CPD stuff. Yes,
Nick Lincoln:yeah, yeah, good stuff. Okay, yeah, just to, just to, just flashing, how, if that hand was flashing or something, that'd be so much better to
Alan Smith:miss it. No one sees it, by the way, to watch it on YouTube. This is just behind the scenes, digital hand up to say going next, but you're right, we have talked about this in the past. How most of us don't do much protection business, and I think on one hand, yes, because on average, as clients have accumulated and gained greater wealth, protection is less of an issue for the average pre-retiree, post-retiree client, but nevertheless, with all the shenanigans going on around inheritance tax, that is a relatively simple solution with all the complexity now coming into to effectively underwrite or ensure that tax liability. So I think it's something that should raise its profile amongst full fat financial planners, and I was mentioning on the last episode, I mentioned because we had this very sort of large case requirement for what is now turned out to be a 9 million pounds protection case, and of course you know your heart sinks immediately. You want to help the client, but at the same time you just think, God, this is six months of my life is going to be so identifying firms to work collaboratively with, like Cura, sounds like they would be a great solution, but there's a company that I was introduced to called Salus, I think, S A L U S, and it's run by a guy called Steve Lawless. The older boys in the, in the room might remember Brian Lawless. He was a Sun Life Ax. I was a real tech guru for many, many years. I think Brian's retired now, but his son Steve Lawless is the founder and CEO of this company. I put a link, and so they deal with.. I had a chat with him last week, they deal with, you know, much more complex high-end, that sort of thing, average case size 5 million, so if you are, if you ever, if you do come across clients, and some of these inheritance tax liabilities, if you want to insure it, whole of life, whole of life, second death, that sort of thing, that's what he says, that's where they're doing a lot of right now, worth checking out their website, having a chat with Steve, so I've referred him and introduced him to this prospective client situation. So it is good building collaborations and partnerships with others who are specialists, so we're not dabbling it, and all this stuff. I'll give it
Nick Lincoln:a go, give
Alan Smith:it a go. I mean, ridiculous. I'll
Nick Lincoln:do a cure rocks via an offshore bond written discretionary versionary trust geared. I'm gonna give me a culprit on this one, on this, on this one. I didn't say before, I'm gonna say that I had this planning meeting with this young couple last week who just had the baby, and at the end of the meeting, I uploaded the meeting notes to Saturn, Saturn friends of the show, that they got a great AI baked into their software page, their website, it's called Co Planner, it's an AI designed for financial services, and uploaded the meeting notes, because Saturn sits in on the meeting, and I said I interrogated the AI, and I said, was there anything I didn't talk about in this meeting? And about 10 seconds, it comes about the list of things in order of importance, and it said, Nick Lincoln, you blithering idiot, you didn't mention knife cover, this is how out of the out of I'm just not used to talking about life cover with clients, and sat and just said to me, they've just got a child, they've got no life insurance, you've got to go. So I had to go back to them. We're having subsequent meetings now about the life insurance. So it's this thing, this this, this Rumsfeld things, the known unknowns, something that I would have naturally brought up in years gone by. I just got so out the habit talking about life insurance, because 99% of my clients don't need it unless they're mitigating its inheritance tax at the other end of their lives, so they don't, they haven't got mortgages, the children aren't dependent, so just it pulled me up, and there you go. So, isn't that, isn't it good to
Alan Smith:show you that some of these AI tools are no longer just sort of a meeting note taker, they're like a high-quality assistant. Yeah,
Nick Lincoln:it was really good, and it came back with other things I could have talked about, which I, you know, you didn't really, the client's attitude to risk, that well, that's right, we don't re-evaluate the client's attitude to risk. Okay, that's that's pretty much set in stone, and it's driven by the financial plan. We know that, and Saturn doesn't yet know it, but Saturn will probably know that over time, as it is, it listens and understands my way of talking with clients and what I'm talking about with clients. It will build up its own internal model of the Nick Lincoln mind, and then we'll probably have a meltdown and jump off a cliff. Okay, moving on to Wadge
Carl Widger:Central Bank have increased interest rates from two to 2.25% Obviously, a 25 basis point increase isn't worth talking about, really. But is this the first in a C. Series of interest rate hikes, and then what impact will that have on basically everything? You know, what are what are normal historic rates? Is it 4% That's the case, you know. We've a good bit to go, and this is to curb inflation, and it's obviously ECB rates, so this is European-wide thing, and how will that affect each individual country? I think the rates in the UK are what, 3.75 is that correct? Yeah, yeah, so which is probably a normal enough kind of a race, maybe on the little, a little on the low side,
Alan Smith:yeah, yeah,
Carl Widger:yeah, like, how much of the Irish economy is being driven, funded by very, very low interest rates, and what effect will that have on everything, government infrastructure spending? You know, we spoke about it earlier on, you know what, what impact will a slight increase in interest rates have on geared property funds, etc. etc. So, yeah, it's just I think this is the first in the series. I think it's long, long overdue, and yeah, it'd be interesting to see the impact not only on the Irish economy but all of the other incumbents in the ECB, well, in the euro,
Nick Lincoln:not all economies are born equal, are they? That's this is the thing we have common interest rate.
Carl Widger:Yeah, this is absolutely the thing. So, and just, just interesting.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, you're right. I mean, Kyle, in the UK, interest rates typically between four and 5% is kind of the long-term trend, and you know, I'm so glad that we're getting back to a kind of a normal rate. Even we're going to look back on that period of interest rates, a point two 5% or half percent, for that all those years. It's done, it did so much damage, it distorted so much. That was, it was totally unfeasible to happen, and it's good they're back where they are. And you know, we've, we're, as I said, we're in 1990 their base rates were 15% in this country. I'm not wishing that by any means, but if people think that 3.75 or 4% or or two and a quarter, or two and a half is high, that's just because you've been conditioned with cheap money for way too long, and it's, it's, it's a really, it's a really, it's a
Alan Smith:bad thing. Um, okay, listen, we're 57 minutes in, let's with on the final two points of the topical tip, this topical tidbits of episode 99 Smithy CRP, missing an A, that's a good one. Centralized retirement proposition, CRP, centralized retirement. We've spoken about this in the past, somewhat, and again, I listened to, you know, money marketing, one of the trade rags. They've got their own podcast, which is actually quite good, and they had a pretty short, probably optimum length for a podcast, 20 minutes. It was a 20 minutes interview with the senior, senior person from Royal London, and they were talking about all this, and I thought I would just listen, listen to it, because I think it's fair to say that I've been, maybe Andy and Nick have been slightly dismissive of the concept of having a centralized retirement proposition, in that the investment model doesn't really change if you were invested in global equities and other things the day before retirement, you don't necessarily immediately switch to that to something different the day after, but there's a lot more to it than that, and I think the content that Royal London have put together is excellent, because they talked about a lot, a lot of things, and yes, you've got to have consideration that, at the very least, document, and it is an FCA expectation, at least document, if you're saying, well, nothing changes at all, that's fine, but document it, and you need to have a very sort of thoughtful process for those who are going into the spending period of their life, and the other thing that sits behind this as well, I thought was quite interesting, because they've gone out to many advisors and advisers' clients and asked them about it, and I've come across this many times in the past, the kind of the mental, the behavioral shift that happened, that happens when someone moves away from saving money and watching their investments go up, hopefully most years, to actually watching their investments go down, potentially on a regular basis. That was just something that people are, some people really struggle with. Anyway, I think it's, it's, it is interesting. It's worth exploring, it's worth looking at, it's worth not dismissed, dismissing, and it's probably worth checking out these, this content, and they, because they do provide a template and all sorts of supporting documentation. I think we've spoken, we don't, we don't use them, but Roy, Royal, they called Royal London, Royal London, but they're very huge in terms of supporting
Andy Hart:based in Edinburgh, I believe. Yeah,
Alan Smith:yeah, but not Royal Life, that's a different company, isn't it? There
Andy Hart:is,
Alan Smith:there's a lot of good content out there, there's chips, there's a link in the show notes. What do you guys, Andy, Nick, I know that's probably not. Applicable in Ireland, do you do anything around centralized retirement?
Nick Lincoln:No,
Andy Hart:right?
Carl Widger:What does centralized? Yeah, we did
Andy Hart:all the FCA rules around this.
Carl Widger:Sorry, does it not go if you have centralized retirement? Does it not kind of go against the grain of exactly what bespoke financial planning for each individual family is.
Alan Smith:Well, Carl, I think you just need to document what your philosophy is, how you deal with both the investment side of things, the things like sequence risk things like, and also the behavioral thing. I know that the regulator in the UK, as we were mentioning before, about bereavement, are very keen on what they call client vulnerability. So, if your client is going into retirement and is, you know, they are sufficiently well off, they've got a great cash flow plan in place, but they are struggling with the sort of mental shift of no longer earning and accumulating and saving, then that's an issue. Now you can argue, well, that's what a great financial planner does, but it ought to be, especially if you've got multi advisors. Are you saying that every advisor adheres to the same kind of thought process and philosophy? Because some might do and some might not, but I think it's a useful thing to explore.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, I know, hands up, Andy, but I would say, yeah, if I had multi-ri firm, I'd have a centralized investment proposition, maybe wouldn't change much between the saving and spending stage, I would have one, but I was, I'm a song, I know what my brain, it's just me, so I'm not going to play the game and produce a pointless document that I'm going to not, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever read,
Andy Hart:I mean, there is certainly a lot more moving parts, and it's a lot more complex work when you're dealing with clients that are officially retired and spending down their money. I think it's roughly 75% of people that are vetted in the markets are saving clients, 25% are spending it down, but your point, Alan, that shift from someone working, whether or not being an employee or their own business, they, whilst they're working, they're an employee and run their own business, they're almost in their mind spending other people's money. I know it's their own money and it's their hard work, it's their human capital, and even if it's their own business, they still feel like they're spending other people's money, OPM. When they come to retirement, they've got this big pot of cash, and for the first time in their lives, they need to draw down from their own pot of cash and capital to sustain their lifestyle. Again, there'll be a behavioral answer around this, but it feels two or three times more painful than drawing down from that cash capital pot of money. I did do a whole article about this, and that's just one of the moving parts. Then, obviously, it's what they're going to do with their time, and then, obviously, yeah, you're right, it's the spending pattern, it's the financial plan, it's the gifting strategy. There's loads more with retired clients. A lot of people run advisory businesses that let their 90% of their clients are accumulators, they're savers. A lot of other firms run businesses where 50% of their clients are retired, they almost are two different professionals dealing with accumulators, aggressive accumulators versus very much retired clients. It's, it's two different unique skills, I think. A lot of us straddle both, you know. I've probably got 20% officially retired, drawing down the capital. A lot of them are very, very close. So, I think my sweet spot is the approach and the phasing period. Nicholas, anything further to add, or just financial planning trumps it all? And then, obviously, everything else will be dictated around that.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, I think that maybe we're complacent. Two things, so definitely you've got to help clients navigate that behavioral shift, that mindset, and thinking, well, I was Johnny Big Bollocks in the office or the company, and now I'm nothing, and that's we can definitely talk to class and help them anticipate that that switch, but you know
Andy Hart:anyone on the call is referring to anyone on the call?
Nick Lincoln:No, not at all. No, no, no, no, heaven forbid. Or Jane, Jane Big Bollocks, that doesn't work, does it? What would Jane? No, let's not talk about Big Jane. No, it's a, it's a behavior that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm sure you guys are always saying with clients that coming into that sort of going into the spending stage, where they're no longer putting money into the pots. I say, don't underestimate the effects will have on you, and you know, could we talk about it on the cash flow, this arbitrary date when you're going to stop working and not a penny more of an income comes into your bucket, but in reality, working with clients very similar to you, mr. and mrs. Client, I have found that most of my clients at that stage of their lives want to migrate into it and will do something to keep their gray matter involved. They'll maybe do consultancy work and they'll wind down because we need to have a purpose to get out of bed, but that's nothing that's nothing to do with the CRP, has nothing really to do with the FCA, to be honest. If they want to become a psychologist, then tell us what to do. With human beings, they're more than welcome to tell us the actual pure investment. No, very little changes, except you do now set up an emergency bucket with three to five years of plans, withdrawals from that bucket set aside to ride out the temporary declines, but that aside, nothing changes, absolutely nothing. If it's worked for 30 years in the same. Stage, why is it not going to work for 30 years or more in the spending stage? Keep it simple. Don't forget insurance companies. I quite like Royal London as they go. Insurance companies invariably have retirement accumulation income strategies that they want you to talk about. Okay, so they want to raise this red flag, this little demon in your brain, thinking,'Shit, my CIP is a bit loose. I need to have some kind of ghastly whatever with profit style arrangement. Oh, where do I get those from? Oh, a traditional life insurance company. So, just always be aware of that. Everyone's in this to make money from one way or the other. They're not just doing it at the goodness of their heart, and that's my take on it.
Andy Hart:Yeah, that was often, say, your final point, Nick. There are loads of package products that are coming up, springing up to try and address this centralized retirement proposition. So, from their point of view, it's a sales angle first and foremost. I know it's a regulatory point, and there are more moving parts for us practicing and advisors trying to navigate this space, but yeah, all these investment houses are now creating centralized retirement propositions around this, so yeah, it's mainly marketing from there. Okay, thanks. Good
Nick Lincoln:stuff. This is really good topical tidbits. This episode, episode 99 of the Real Advisor Podcast, we are at 166 minutes in. Andrew, you've got
Andy Hart:one more.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, no, Andrew, you've got one thing to plug,
Andy Hart:one more self-promotion. Okay, so I'm deep in trying to organize my two conferences this year, Humans Under Management London and Cape Town, but I have a gift for you if you were listening to this, following on from offering scholar tickets for the last 10 years running humans under management, but you guys jumped on the bandwagon track. I will continue my good deed, so I've given away five scholar tickets for anyone's listening to this to join the Hum team on the day, so please do send me an email. The email needs to be titled Trap 99 so I know that you've been listening to this show, and let me know that you are happy to come and be part of the Hum team for Hum London, which is on the fourth of November, so yeah, send me a quick email, Andy at Humans Under management.com and then hopefully you can join me for that subject line.
Nick Lincoln:Just repeat the subject line is I want to be treated dogs, I want to be treated as a dog's body for the day. Thank you for the
Andy Hart:opportunity, Andy.
Nick Lincoln:Let's move on to the what many people call the meat and potatoes of episode 99 of the Real Advisor Podcast. This is where we take a deeper subject and really get into it, and thrash it, and basically thrash the life out of it, and or we interview someone who we think is a leading light in this thing of ours. And Andrew did interview a leading light in this thing of ours. Do you want to say anything about it before we go into it?
Andy Hart:Nothing further to add.
Nick Lincoln:Okay. With no further ado, I give you mr. Hart's latest victim.
Andy Hart:Okay, today we are joined by Colin Lawson, the man, the myth, the legend, over 30 plus years in this mighty profession, the money business. You've seen a lot of changes, my friend, just to mention a few commission RDR regulation technological changes platforms financial planning. Now we have AI in the mix. What a time to be alive in this thing of ours. You are a financial services expert, an expert at someone who's made all the mistakes and also had some great success. I think you're definitely like most founders, unemployable for life. You have to create your own path. Last year, you graced the humans under management stage after a few years of trying to twist your arm, that went down very well. We've also shared many beers over the years, propped up a few bars. So, welcome to The Real Advisor podcast, Colin. How are you?
Unknown:I'm awesome, thank you, Andy. And thank you so much for having me.
Andy Hart:Superb. Okay, so we've got some questions to focus on. We're going to focus on sort of scaling a financial planning business culture, leadership growth, how you see things, where we're heading in the future. So we'll start off with a very brief journey, your journey into financial advice. Any sort of key forks in the road you want to share.
Unknown:Well, I think like many people, I totally fell into financial advice. My first job was a Ukrainian scheme at the Automobile Association, then got a job in their general insurance department, car insurance, and it was dull and boring, and outside the next door, literally was Norwich Union. I saw their consultants driving beautiful flash cars, spending a lot of time in the pub, and and I thought that's a job for me, and so took a minor pay cut, got the job next door, worked my way through, and eventually got a job as a broker consultant at Britannia Life, where I met an incredible mentor, lady called Viv Belcher, who literally taught me the ropes, and you've already mentioned the unemployable bit, and I think very early on I realized that commercial world wasn't really for me, I'm not very good at following instructions when I think that they're totally illogical and. So, yeah, the age of 25 and blessed with the arrogance of youth, decided it was time to set up on my own and be brave and see where it takes us.
Andy Hart:Wow, you set up on your own at 25 became self-employed at 25 Interesting. So, you have been in the business for over 30 plus years, Colin.
Unknown:Yep,
Andy Hart:so what were these flash cars they were driving out of interest. Can you remember the makes and models
Unknown:well? Anything was flashier than the note car that I had, but yeah, I think it was your classic, the nice, the nice Cavaliers, the old Escort XR three. I even, I think, back in the day.
Andy Hart:Oh, wow. And now you run Equilibrium, obviously branding behind you. Equilibrium has built a very strong reputation. Sorry, over the last few decades. What are the sort of two or three pivotal growth decisions that you think have accelerated the business?
Unknown:Yeah, the first one for us, I spent the first two years starting from scratch, no clients, nothing. I described myself as a martini man back in the day, I would see anybody anywhere about anything, and the first two years went well, and but I was still learning less than I was when I was employed and working twice the hours, and somehow that didn't really seem to fit, and so I was 27 back then, and realized that ideally I wanted to see people during the day, it would be great to see them on location of my choice, and it would be really useful when you're in financial services to see people have this thing called money, and so it was clear that that's that kind of demographic was going to be people who are close to retirement and people who have reasonable funds, and but age 27 didn't know any rich old people, so the question was, Is where do you find them, and so looked out in the marketplace, looked at what other people were doing, and came across the concept of seminar selling, and that was the big thing that transformed the business, because all of a sudden we'd found a tap that we could turn on and off, it was a high cost tap for sure, but you could turn it on and off when you needed more clients, and it just gave you that confidence that you knew you could get more customers, more clients, and when you know that, then you can reinvest into the business accordingly. That literally transformed things for
Andy Hart:us. So, very high level on that is that sort of direct marketing, you, I, you know, you identify a postcode, a patch, you get a beautifully put together letter, send it out, book the golf course, book the nice place, fill it up with 5060 people. Well, I'm assuming the first wasn't wasn't 50 and 60, it was probably five or six, and it sort of scaled from there. So, do you want to give a brief overview about the seminar selling,
Unknown:yeah, and it was 5060 off the bat.
Andy Hart:Got very lucky with that one.
Unknown:Now we stopped doing them just after Covid. I mean, obviously Covid was a big broker, but their efficiency had been coming down and down and down, because when we first started doing them, the internet didn't exist. People had to go to a presentation to get that level of information that they wanted, and obviously these days it's changed dramatically, but interestingly, we've just done one again for the first time, and purely because my gut told me that people were really angry about tax, and that it's something that you can't get on the internet in the level of depth that we wanted to go through with it, whether it's, you know, up with the pension changes, inheritance tax, or the income tax, CGT. So we took a bunt and thought, let's try it, try it again. And so we identify the postcodes, find a nice venue that people would want to go to, and we generally mail 10,000 people, so it's really old school, and hugely inefficient from that point of view. Direct
Andy Hart:marketing in the post, and a bit of direct marketing
Unknown:in the post, just old school blanket mailing, you get the data, so you've got an idea that you're mailing the right people, and we got about 55 prospects there, or bums on seats, actually, is more like 40 odd prospects. We then supplement that with a little bit of existing clients, which are great, because they act as amazing advocates for us. Yeah, and I think we've got about 12 appointments off that so far, which is interesting. And sometimes it can be a slow burn, because you need to, you know, they're not always ready at the time, and so typically we'll carry on getting clients off an event for about the next five years after it, so next month
Andy Hart:it's brilliant. You're still at it, shows consistency pays off. Just to come back to a previous point, you mentioned you were 27 young advising older people. That's the thing that a lot of younger advisors listening to this will be struggling with at the moment, as in their circle when they're younger, as you say, younger people normally require mortgages, debt. They're not the perfect financial planning, wealth management clients. So, any tips for younger advisors that might feel a challenge around that?
Unknown:I think you've got to try and think as much as you can on the other side of the beach ball. You are not them, clearly. So, how do they think? What is it that motivates them as individuals, which is very hard to do when you're in a completely different financial situation and stage of life that they are. So, really listen and really question what are their pains and gains, and I do think that whatever ism that you're facing, whether that's racism, whether it's a heism, whether it's an ageism, the only solution is to be better. You've got to be really good and really work on your own skill set to make sure that when people look at you and go, oh, he's young or she's young, that what they actually see is somebody that's really young, incredibly competent, and very confident, and I truly believe that it's just work on yourself as much as you possibly can, so that you can come across as a true professional and gain their confidence really early.
Andy Hart:Brilliant, brilliant. Now let's drill down into the nitty gritty, the meat of this business. So you've scaled a bit of firm from yourself, solo advisor, built out a team, and you've probably studied all the different metrics that financial planning business owners study. So what metrics matter most to you while scaling? I've got a few options here: revenue, profit, client numbers, AUM, staff retention. What are the metrics that you have always focused on or used to focus on, and now don't? So, just over to you to be as open as you can around that.
Unknown:Staff retention is huge. So, Debbie, my right-hand woman, joined me 26 years ago now, I think, and has been with me thick and thin, and you know, I, if she decides to quit, I'm going. I think it's vice versa, you know. We, we are very much a pair in terms of how we work, and that makes my life better every single day. And I was looking back with just an hour end of year briefing last week, and we're going back to 2009 and we were a team of 24 then, and 12 are still with us now, which is, which is key. And then the second one really is around profit, but it's not just about the profit, it's being clear and understanding how businesses work. If you want to scale a business, so I always said I get paid three ways. I get paid first of all as a an employee, what job do I do? I should have the same pay as anybody else in the business, from that point of view. I should get a little bit extra for being a director, for being a partner, for that extra responsibility and work that goes in, and once those are fixed, everything that's left in the business is profit, that's not mine, that's the business, and most of that should be reinvested. So, if you look at a traditional company structure, they'll best pay out half as a dividend, the other half retained by the business to reinvest, and in the early days you can't afford to pay a dividend, you've got to reinvest all of it, and if you can identify that top level of money and keep growing that and mentally go it's not yours to keep, it's for the business, you're always going to be looking at ways of reinvesting that into better systems, better people, better processes, better premises and just constantly improving things, which will in turn generate more profit, and eventually you'll get to the level where sure you can start to pay some amount as a dividend, but still it should never be all of it. I think where people make mistakes is they build a lifestyle business where as the income goes up, so does their take-home pay go up, and they then haven't got the money to reinvest, and when things then go a little bit south, you have bad markets, they have badder years, and then they don't feel great. And so I think that's a real key point is identifying what true profit is and putting that back in.
Andy Hart:Do you mind sharing a few metrics around equilibrium, sort of amount of employees, how you sort of structure your team, because I think you were quite innovative in the pod structure, having one lead advisor, many sort of team members behind them. Are you still running that structure? Yeah, I think we're still
Unknown:about, so we're a team of about 100 now, and the client manager, what we call the paraplanner ratio per advisor is give or take about four to one at the moment. Okay, and so that's that's fairly unusual. That just technical
Andy Hart:team is very large compared to the client facing advisor.
Unknown:Yes, and very highly qualified. So, a lot of chartered people in there as paraplanners, some are fellows, and also very well rewarded. We're trying to make paraplanning a career in its own right. If you don't want to have to do that sitting in front of clients and taking the grief that we all get from time to time, you want to be more behind the scenes. That's absolutely fine. You should be able to make a career doing that. And then what we've been investing in more and more over the last few years is the backpack office team, the data and insight, the transformation team, as we call them, those are behind the scenes, really working on the operations, the processes, trying to simplify things as much as possible, trying to make tech do as much of the heavy lifting as possible. You touched on AI really in its infancy at the moment. Interesting to see where it takes us over the next five years. I don't think any of us know is the honest answer there.
Andy Hart:Correct. Yep. Okay, so you bit our team to 100 people, so you must have made some hiring mistakes over the years, or your thoughts, your thoughts on hiring, is it hire the right person to then hire the right people? Or over to you.
Unknown:Yeah, hiring is always tricky. I'm particularly bad at it because I like people. Everyone gets the
Nick Lincoln:job,
Unknown:I'm an easy sell. We do use a psychometric profiling called Colby, which we introduced many years ago. First of all, we started to interview the people first, then doing the Colby, then realizing the Colby didn't fit the role, and because we like them, we'd still hire them. And then six months later, we go, isn't this person working out? And you pull back out the Colby and go, so now actually we'll do the Colby first, and if it doesn't fit, we won't even hire them, so different roles we're looking for specific things, so that's just a great filtering process, and it's not to say that the person isn't great, it's just will they fit in with our environment, and because we're fast-paced, we change quite a bit and need to, so are they able to keep up and adapt with that, and as I said, and each role is very different. The mistakes really come more in the higher end levels, the higher end hires, and I think often we've recruited behind the curve for where we were going. So, in particular, compliance managers, for example, I think we didn't recruit high enough grade that we should have done. We should actually recruit for where we're going, not for where we've been. I think we had exactly the same in head of finance often, and we fixed those two now. The one that we're still struggling with, I think we're two or three hires in, and quit a number of years ago, was advisor manager. Who is it that can actually deliver the sales training, the technical side of it, the people management, really holding them to account and making sure they're at the right skill levels, and so that's going to be a key one for us going forwards. I think it's because it's such a varied, it's probably a very expensive role as well, because if you're a senior financial planner that's been here for decades, bringing in somebody that knows less and is paid less than you isn't going to cut it. So, how do we find that person is still one of our conundrums at the moment.
Andy Hart:Okay, and as a founder and someone who's built and scaled a firm, many founders struggled to delegate. At what point did you realize you needed to be sort of more of a leader than a, than a rainmaker? And I'm assuming, obviously, you still don't, you don't advise clients now, in terms of from a regulator point of view, but you're still heavily involved in being a rainmaker for the business, and speaking to top clients as they come in and various other things, so how have you managed that transition and the delegation question?
Unknown:For sure, I've always done some form of coaching course, whether that's a one on one or whether it's been group coaching, and I was remembering one of the earliest ones, the coach said, okay, write down a list of everything that you do in a day. Now, at that point in time, it was just me, so that's easy. It's everything from making the coffee, doing the photocopying, filling out the application forms. They said, okay, next put an asterisk next to the ones that you dislike the most, then put a an asterisk by the ones that you're least competent at, and that's your first hire, and then eat, sleep, and repeat, so every year you still do the same list. What can I get rid of that other people can do better than I do, and do it for less money? And then there's the Dan Sullivan Strategic Coats course that I did, who have this great concept, is called unique ability, and unique ability is defined as something that you're really good at. It's something that tops up your energy tanks, that you actually love doing, and that you'd almost do it if you weren't being paid for it. And if you can spend the most amount of time possible in that unique ability, everything else will follow, and I think that's that, that's really key. What else, then, outside of that, can you delegate that? Somebody else will, it will be their unique ability, where they'll love doing it. And, luckily for me, I'm incompetent at so many things that I'm really good at the stuff that I'm good at, but I am too. Totally incompetent in so many different areas, that it makes it easy to delegate. I see other founders that are actually multi-talented across the range, which is operations. They're good at people, which is about bad things. They can't let go, because everybody they hire underneath them isn't as good as they are. Yeah, and that frustrates them, but sometimes you have to just accept that you can't let perfection be the enemy of good. You've got to sometimes delegate and accept that somebody else won't quite do it as well as you will, but it's good enough anyway. And if you want to scale, you're going to have to do it, whether you like it or not.
Andy Hart:Back to the marketing prospecting for new clients. How involved are you in landing ideal top clients for the firm?
Unknown:Not that much, to be fair. I'll get involved with the advisors and do a little bit of, you know, coaching. We'll talk around cases that are larger ones. We've realized actually that the top 45 clients that we've got and bearing in mind that we've got about 1300 I think I'll have to fact check myself on this one now, but I think they've got something daft like 24 per cent of the assets and so we're really starting to think about what is it that those clients get? How do we treat them differently? So that I pop in and see them at least once a year, even if it's just a 15 minute chat when they're having a coffee before they go make a come in. Just give them a call out of the blue, checking in and seeing how they're going, making sure that our investment manager sees them. So at the top end it's more just making them feel important than anything else, and knowing that they have direct line of contact if need be.
Andy Hart:Okay,
Unknown:but other than that, you know, we've got a great team, and they can be trusted at any size of client these days.
Andy Hart:Briefly switching it, marketing of a financial planning business, now you guys have tried lots of different things over the years, but also stuck to the things that have worked very well. Anything else you'd like to share with the listeners around marketing do's and don'ts? Things that have worked well, is that is that an ongoing spot that's been filled well within the firm, or is it constantly evolving as and when sort of new channels sort of pop up and new things are suggested, marketing over to you, mr. mr. Lawson.
Unknown:Yeah, constantly evolving is one of our strap lines, and we're doing that for sure. I think it's, it's difficult as a financial planning firm to stand out, and I remember, I mean, it's got better, but I remember back in the day, you'd look on every IFA website and it was all blue, we all had the IFA promotion logo, and you could literally copy and paste one website to another, and there was no point of differentiating at all. So the key is, how do you differentiate yourself, and is it clear from a client's point of view, what you actually stand for as a financial planner. There's some great ones out there, and most of them, if you can be really clear about values, purpose, and mission. So, what are your values that you stand by? What's the purpose of the business? And so ours is a very nice, simple one, which is making people's lives better, and we approach that from a team point of view, how do I make a team member's life better today? How can I simplify their job for them? How can we make the culture better, so that makes their life better? And from a client, if every single time I'm walking into a meeting, the question is, how am I going to make this person's lives better today? And that isn't by just doing an ICR, is it? It's not by making a pension contribution. Those are all the hygiene factors around the job. It's what everybody expects, and that's not going to get you noticed, and it's not going to earn you a high level of referrals. But if you can genuinely make someone's lives better, and you can show them how they've done it, and remind them how you've done it, because they forget things are horrible like that, you know, yeah, and because often they'll take, take the credit themselves, yeah, and so you got to be constantly reminding people, and then we've got our mission, which again comes back to making people's lives better, but it's different phases of the journey, which is how do we help our clients to live the life that they want to live and really dig down into that and once we've done that, How do we help them look after those that they love? And after we've done that, How do they leave a powerful legacy? And it's a constant gyrating through, because at different times of life, different bits will be more important, won't they? But that's how we try to differentiate ourselves both with clients and in the new stage of the journey that we're heading on, going forward.
Andy Hart:Brilliant, brilliant. Switching subjects, consolidation in the advisor profession, buying and selling of businesses, the roll-ups. I know this is an area that you spent. Quite a bit of time on recently, so what makes an independent firm valuable today? You know, is it recover, revenue, brand, people, process, niche? What's what's your thoughts on on what's happening in the, in the wider market with consolidation, PE firms, and all the other stuff that's happening? Sure, you're involved in this at the moment,
Unknown:people obviously very important part of it, across the range, profit is a key driver, obviously, because everything else, all those other metrics, it still drills down to profit, but not too high to me. If the margins too high, it's a big warning signal that you're cutting corners somewhere. What is it that you're not doing, you're not reinvesting into, and if I buy profit that's too high and have to eat into that, then that, that, that's an issue. Fee alignment is pretty key, I think. If your fees are much lower than an acquiring firm, that's going to be very, very difficult to deal with, you mean to
Andy Hart:up the fees, potentially. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the FCA
Unknown:take a very dim view of you acquiring a firm that's charging a half percent financial planning fee, and coming in and charging 1% for what may be the same service. Now, if the service is very different, then you can just, you can, you can make an argument for it, but you've still got to demonstrate that the client wants that different service, you can't just impose that on them.
Andy Hart:Yeah,
Unknown:so if your service level and your fee level is very close to the firm that's been that's looking at acquiring, you're going to get the most value. I'd say investment flexibility as well. Most consolidators, just from a common sense point of view, are ideally going to run one investment proposition, and sure, if your demographic is different and demands a different investment proposition, then that can be created and adapted, but you're looking for as much alignment as you can get in the ideal world. I would say
Andy Hart:you also did look at what has been called the elegant exit, potentially looking to sell the firm to the client bank. How did that go? What were the pros and cons around that?
Unknown:So, just to recap, my elegant exit idea was to sell the majority stake in the business to our clients. Yeah, and if I'd found it as mutual, I, you know, one rough metric that was used in back in the day was it was roughly 3% of AUM, was a rough number for evaluation, and I thought, well, if we're selling, say, two thirds, that's 2% of AUM, it's not unreasonable to think that a client could invest 2% of their portfolio into a private company,
Andy Hart:yeah,
Unknown:and I just thought it was lovely, but for about eight years I was asking the wrong question. I was going out there to accountants and solicitors and lawyers, and asking the question, "Is can this be done? And the answer I kept getting back was, "Yes, it can be done. And I was like, "Great, let's go and do it. And I set myself a deadline for doing it, and it's only when you set a deadline that something becomes real, and started to really look into it, and I realized that I'm asking the wrong question. The question that I should have been answering, asking was, is this a good idea like that? Just the fact that you can do it. Yeah, I got lots of hell no's, and it was just down to wide shareholder base was a major issue. How do you have 1300 shareholders? How do you manage the secondary market, even though I had some solutions, none of them were elegant, as you would say. How do you manage the potential that it might get flipped in the future, so that all the clients then vote for selling it at a nice profit? And I was like, but I sold a massive discount, why am I losing to
Andy Hart:help you?
Unknown:And then the real big one was bringing in the management team, and to get a real high-quality management team is very difficult, because private equity get first dibs, and they get first dibs because they can offer sweet equity and incentivize people in a way that I couldn't in a much slower growing environment, and it was that that I realized that chances are I get dragged out of retirement in three or four years time and it won't be when it's good and then the time period to replace that management team can be quite long and so yeah had to abandon that dream unfortunately
Andy Hart:I wonder if any firm is actually going to pull the trigger on that I mean you could do it with a more concentrated group of people at 2025 still again it's quite a few names on the old cap table. Did you run it past any clients?
Unknown:Clients love the idea,
Andy Hart:so all the clients love the idea, but the specifics of it was okay, interesting. So, which of course
Unknown:I've been telling clients that was our option for years, when we had to then explain last year that we'd sold 60% of the business to private equity. It was a had to be communicated well.
Andy Hart:Yeah, yeah. So that's the next question. So, what are the growth plans now for equilibrium? We just touched upon it there. So, yeah, what would you want to share? Listeners,
Unknown:yeah, so we took investment from Sovereign Capital last year as a platform business, as they would call it. They've had experience growing Skerrits and later into Shackleton, and then exiting that to Lee Equity last year, and so they've got great industry experience and were planning on a similar but very different buy and build strategy. I think we're a very different business to Shackleton in terms of quality, average client size, and so our plan is to look for really high quality firms that have built great businesses and to add two extra cs into consolidation of communication and collaboration. I think if I'm acquiring a firm that has built a great business, to believe that the equilibrium way of doing everything is the best way is arrogance at its worst. I think if we're buying a great firm, there are going to be things that those firms are doing that are better than than how we're approaching it, that we can learn from them. You know what it's like at the conferences, and do you learn just as much from the people around the bar, around the conversations as you do from the main platform speakers. And so to actually build a business that has, you know, advisory groups of all of the founders that can collaborate together, really good communication, and build something that has not been done before, that is building the first national values, purpose, and mission-led business that's out there, because I think if I look at some of the other consolidators, not going to name any names or anything, but I think consolidation is like the wild west of commission back in the day, you can be a bad consolidator and still make an awful lot of money, and if that's all you want to do, then happy days, but I've said publicly, I said at the Humans and the management speech, that all of my equity that I earn going forwards is going to charity. So, whilst Sovereign Capital, they have one goal, and one goal only, and that is to return the money to the investors, is to get a good return on the people that have trusted them with their capital. I've got a different goal. My goal is to build true value, build something that is pretty unique and different out there, and as long as those two things are in alignment, as long as we can do that and make money, happy days. And so far they very much are. We've got a number of firms in the in the pipeline, and I'm confident that we can, we can do something different, so I think it will be buying lower number of firms, getting integration done really well, because I think done well it should be something that people lean into, it should be something where people go great, I want that, because you're, I can see that that's better for my clients, I can see it's better for my team, and if we can keep doing that, where people actually want it, it's not being imposed upon them, they're actually saying, "Yes, please give me that, that's great, I want it. And it's a completely different mindset, and so it's going to be an interesting journey, Andy. And we'll see in five years how we get on.
Andy Hart:We'll get you back in five years, but to drill down on the detail, there, Colin, there'll be lots of people listening to this that might fit into the sweet spot of the firms that you're looking to acquire. Can you share, you know, revenue numbers you look for? Is it is it minimum of x million, is it minimum average client size, average age, average AUM charge? Like as specific as you can be, like when you look at these sort of term sheets for buying firms.
Unknown:Yeah, so I've just done a, an assessment sheet, just looking at eight different points that we're looking for in firms, and there's an AUM number around about 250 to 300 million, where firms seem to hit the ceiling of complexity, where the founders are still doing most of the running of the business themselves, they're getting frustrated with compliance, HR, finance, and everything. Yes, and that's the sweet spot. Interesting, when people break through that, they seem to very quickly get up to the billion, because to break through it, you need all those senior highs, you need your finance, you need your clients, you need your ops, you need your HR, but it's a huge bottleneck
Andy Hart:at 250 303
Unknown:50 is what I'm kind of seeing out there. Our average client size is about 1.1 million. I think the industry is probably about 300 ish. So the firms that we're in discussions with at the moment are around about the 700 800 mark.
Andy Hart:Yeah,
Unknown:and where we break through is really where averages kind of get lost, because we've got, you know, some at 15 million, 20 million, and that skews it, so you're looking at mean as well as kind of average, and hopefully by bringing in the extra quality and extra resource, then those firms can retain and grow some of that top end clients as well, because organic. Growth is what it's all about, and again, I've talked about fee alignment that we're looking at. So, we charge generally 1% and then tiering down to half.
Andy Hart:Yeah,
Unknown:we're looking at investment compatibility again. You know, we want to look at the firm, look at their whatever their DFM proposition is, model portfolios.
Andy Hart:Yeah,
Unknown:can we genuinely look at ours and say actually on a risk-adjusted basis, you can do that scatter plot and say yes, our performance is slightly better, the risk is slightly less, and the charges are very similar. That makes that an easy transition across. So, are the client banks similar? Because think about it from an FCA point of view, and just from a common sense point of view, consumer journey trying to bring, trying to impose something on a client bank that looks very different, is it just doesn't fit. So, is there a cultural fit as well? So, one of the first things I do is go and look on the website, try and find out about the values, what articles have they written. How do they speak? Do I think that they're, you know, acting with total integrity, and always have done. And so it's that's where the people side really comes into it. Is is there are we going to think the same way about how we look after the team, and are we going to think the same way about how we look after clients looking for that philosophical intellectual alignment as well.
Andy Hart:That's great. Just to focus on a sort of modern day trend, the personal brand of the founder. Do you explore that in any way? A lot of founders are very much behind the scenes, don't want to be too public, but I feel like personal brand is going to be a bit more of an important thing going forward, especially when the machines take over everything. Is that anything you look at, or you just sort of look at that very, very high level?
Unknown:How do you mean by personal brand? On me,
Andy Hart:just the founders writing articles, you know, doing videos, being very open with their clients, appearing on podcasts, is this something you explore or not? Really,
Unknown:yes. And now I've actually got a little bit more time and a little bit more to say than I want to get more involved in that, right? So you're on that
Andy Hart:journey.
Unknown:Yeah, it's partly if I was doing an advert for firms that we're looking to acquire, I think it's important that it's a founder financial planner led business, not an accountant PE led business.
Andy Hart:Yeah,
Unknown:because I think those two things are very different in how it shapes up, and you need both for sure. And, and, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for founder-led branding, especially also in interacting the organic growth, because people look at more than a website. You know, I said before about how do you differentiate yourself, and generally culture becomes harder as you scale, so it becomes more important that that message gets out there in more and more mediums. Yes, used to be fireside chats, you know, when there's 20 of us, we can all get together. Well, you're all you're in the same room basically every day, so culture just rubs off. Once you get to 100 that gets more difficult. Once we get to 310 offices, even more difficult. So, repeating it, different mediums, written presentations, podcasts, just keeping that message all the time, so that we're all on the same page, is, is, is going to be key.
Andy Hart:I could ask you a million other questions. I'm conscious of time and the fitness into the Trap Podcast. My final question is, any thoughts on the future, next 510 years? What do you, what do you see changing, but also what do you see not changing? So, over to you to close us out.
Unknown:I think you're going to get multiple national brands of financial planning firms. I think that's just inevitable. I think we're heading in that direction already, so that when you stop people on the street, they'll be able to name the top six financial planning firms that are out there. I think you'll then get splinters away from that, that you'll go back to smaller firms again, and I can also see firms forming alliances. So we talked about before about that compliance function, a HR function, all the operation side of it, that you could almost go back full circle and have networks, but networks that are truly powered, it's that concept of one kitchen, two restaurants, or one massive kitchen and five different deliveries coming off it, so do you have financial planning firms that just do the financial planning, they collaborate in the middle, form an alliance, and create that operations division, and potentially, as a mutual, I think, would be interesting, so all the firms own shares based upon what they add into the pot, I think could be incredibly powerful and. And would allow people to retain their independence of brand, what they want to do with the investments, what they want to do with the offering, but not have all of that challenge of scale, and I think that would be a very, very interesting model for somebody to go and play with. In fact, do that in five years' time, Andy.
Andy Hart:We will see. Awesome, awesome, great stuff. Thanks for being open and honest and sharing your business journey. Final question, where can people find out a little bit more about you? Any places to direct people?
Unknown:I would say the Equilibrium website, so just give us a Google, watch the humans under management speech, if you want a 28 minute version of this, but in a different format, and yeah,
Andy Hart:and I think it's open on the Humans Under Management website. Go there and click events. Colin, that was awesome. Obviously, people can contact you on LinkedIn as well, if they have any direct questions. Look forward to the inbound, Colin. Thank you very much for your time. That was brilliant. Thank you.
Unknown:Thank you, Andy. It's a pleasure, as always. Bye.
Nick Lincoln:A decent, decent thoughts. Yeah, no call.
Alan Smith:It was great. Yep, superb. Thank you. I'm sure it's gonna be very impactful for people looking to scale and grow the business. He's certainly putting the, putting the blood, sweat, and years in this business. So, yeah, that was enjoying speaking to it. Yeah, it was. I enjoyed listening to that. Andy, he's quite a player, isn't it? I've known.. I don't know him as well as you do, but I have known him on and off for probably a decade, and he's always struck me as one of this rare breed who are entrepreneurs first and financial planners second. He's like a business guy from the beginning, there's a lot of us. I'll put myself not in that bracket that I just sort of started, gave myself a job, and then over years just managed to sort of grow it a bit and hire people, and what have you. But, but Colin, and he's been through, like I have as well, but he was far more ticket, took it far more serious than I did, been through the strategic Dan Sullivan's Strategic Coach program. Not sure if he's still active in it, but there's this - it's very clear if you're, you know, early stage, you're a founder, and you're serious about scaling a business - doesn't matter what the business is, he's in the money business, he's in the financial planning business, but he could probably have gone into many other industries or businesses, he's fundamentally an entrepreneur, and anyone who, any Trappist tuning into this, who's serious about growing, scaling, and really making your company bigger and better than it maybe currently is, would be well advised to obviously listen to that, listen to it again, and I think probably get in touch with him, because he's very open to helping, guiding, directing. We saw him at Hum London last year, give a keynote speech, and he's very good, and we should all be learning from those who are a few years ahead of us on the journey.
Nick Lincoln:What you had your hand raised, now it's down.
Carl Widger:Yeah, I'm having a few technical issues here, but hopefully you can hear me. Yeah, it was a brilliant interview.
Andy Hart:So you've been so cocky all day.
Carl Widger:Yeah, it's great interview. I loved hearing. I think you got loads in in that little segment. Reinvesting the profits, the key to building a firm, his use of seminars, learn from it, and his staff retention, looking after his team. They were the three messages I got from it. Really interesting guy, serious, serious business. That man has well done.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, I liked it, because it's always interesting to hear other planners. I mean, his business is so different from mine. He probably not like my business at all, because I'm a super high profit margin, and he wasn't a big fan of that, but he's, you know, I'm a solo advisor, and he's the other extreme, 13 111 clients, over 100 staff, and he's very candid about knowing what he's good at and what he's not so good at, and having the humbleness just to say, I'm not very good at this, I'm going to get people in who can do these things for me and just release up my time to do what I do best, so it's obviously a serious operation, and it was a good interview. So, thank you for that. Any more points to make? No, it was good.
Andy Hart:Yeah, good, good chat.
Alan Smith:Yeah, I hope people are enjoying these. We don't do them every week, but periodically we find people that we think are of interest to the audience, and they won't be of relevance to everyone listening, but if we can continue just to get good quality guests on and do these kind of relatively short interviews and chuck them into the mix, I think we're so far getting pretty good feedback. Yeah, to do next time.
Andy Hart:Okay.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, let's move on to the next part of the show, which is Trappist questions. I can see that on my on my Nest camera thingy that the postie is there. She's hauled the bulging sack of Trappist questions up the drive. This dear Trappist, for those who are not familiar with this part of the show, is where we take a letter from one of our beloved Trappists, one of our devoted Trappists, take a. Question from them, and we respond. A lot of these questions come up again and again and again, but you know, repetition is the mother of learning. We don't mind thrashing them as and when we need to. Let's have a look and see who this one is from. It's another good quality letter, good quality envelope, beige, quite thick paper. The handwriting isn't joined up, so that doesn't low expectations from this guy, and he's a okay. This is from a Cooper, doesn't say whether it's Andy or Annie. A Cooper, I recently met with a BDM from Prudential, who was singing the praises of proof fund growth. Good grief, and the benefits of using similar funds within an offshore bond or directly into the fund via a platform. He went to great lengths explaining that, as a life fund, the holdings don't need to follow the same rules for investment allocations, which provides more diversity and less exposure to equity, fixed interest, volatility. I don't even know where to start with that. Hey Cooper, but we'll come back to it. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. I use low-cost passive funds, typically 70 to 80% in equities, but I wonder if such a fund might be worth considering, potentially for clients' short-term bucket, which is being drawn out in the next 12 to 24 months. Thanks for all the great work that you chaps do. Alan,
Alan Smith:have you guys had a look at this at the fund? The detail lifted the lid on this Pru growth fund that was sent,
Nick Lincoln:my understanding is especially the old Pru with profits fund, isn't it?
Alan Smith:Sort of, but not really. I've posted a link to the sort of, yeah, the detail where it breaks down what it owns. Look, my starting message here is, with all due respect to Prue M and G and their broker reps, if I was you, Miss Trappist, I was going to refer to
Andy Hart:the private thing, Alan, the high private allocation
Alan Smith:amongst other things. So the proof fund, where does it invest across the globe? And so let me just give you a headline on this proof fund, proof fund growth, cautious risk managed proof on growth, total allocation to private markets, private equity, private credit, private infrastructure, blah blah blah, 28.6 call it 30% so a third of the fund, the cautious fund is 26.6 nearly a third of the fund, and on it goes, and on it goes, and I'll just.. and it's a really useful document, because it really breaks it down, what some, you know, gives examples of some of the underlying holdings. So, there is a property investment in Helsinki, Finland. There is a.. what's this called. Agro Vision in Peru, the world's largest off-season blueberry producer, providing jobs, blah blah blah blah, all fine and all kind of responsible investing, but hang on a minute, you know these are for this is supposed to be low-risk clients and understand what you own and what you've got. So, in summary, a third of this fund, and I'm neither here nor there on it, but I'm not a fan of these packaged products anyway, but what I would say to any advisor is, lift the bloody lid. Don't just take what someone says this is a good alternative to low-cost index, proper, you know, globally diversified portfolios. If you were telling your, because this sounds like, please,
Nick Lincoln:yeah, thanks. So, for the
Alan Smith:cautious, your cautious clients, and then going into retirement, you know, if you tell them, as part of your suitability report, that a third of this farm is invested in private markets, private credit. We've talked about this countless times on previous episodes, including privately owned blueberry harvesters in Peru, for example. I don't know anything about them. There might be an incredible investment, but it doesn't strike me as being relevant to what we're talking about. So, that's my long-winded answer. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
Andy Hart:I am quite blown away that this fund owns such esoteric assets. It's mind-blowing, but just a point
to answer the question:if you put this fund in an onshore bond for short-term access, your life as an advisor is going to be absolute hell, trying to get this money out, trying to work out all the calculations. I know they weren't directly referring to that, but any short-term money does not really need to be being in an offshore bond type structure. It's going to be hell for you.
Nick Lincoln:And just to maybe tie, tie a knot, a knot on this, if you're looking for short-term bucket money, 12 to 24 months, do not go into a packaged product, just do not cash, or if you're going to go into a fund, you know, short date, ultra short dated global bond, maybe, but certainly at the moment, yeah, even just, just cash, okay, no more hands are raised, so that tells me that we can, we're now at what's that's one hour 56 minute, we've come at the two hour mark, so let's just get through Culture Corner alive, and that Carl, we're all, we're all rooting for you, fella. Okay, we're all rooting for you.
Andy Hart:He's on his mobile in his garden, tethering off Starlink or something now.
Alan Smith:How do you shit? Why are you? Why asking Carl? I thought I'm not,
Nick Lincoln:I'm saying. Car, we're all rooting for you, because he's having such troubles calculator or mobile phone, concentrating. You're first, you hear me now. Time is going by quickly.
Alan Smith:My culture corner, yes, God, my culture corner is a little app, a little device. Let's hold it up to the camera, if you can see it, called Pocket. It's credit card sized device, and what it does is, it can, you know, it can record your conversations, so all your meetings. I know you've got Saturn, and a bunch of other others, but they don't necessarily are able to record telephone calls as well. So, this is a device across about 99 pounds, it's magnetic, you can stick to your phone, and you can carry it around with you, and do what you want. And I do think, as we evolve, and you've just given a brilliant example of it, Nick, with your recording conversation that historically wouldn't necessarily record it, so a lot of our, certainly our professional conversations can be captured, can be recorded, even sort of meeting in real life with somebody, and so this device called Pocket, and I put a link to it in the show notes, is, and they position it as much more than just a meeting note taker. They come up with some fancy phrases, but I kind of like it. I get it called that your strategic thinking partner, because it will automatically create flow charts, graphs, ideas, examples. If you've got, you've come to a Friday night, and you've had loads of meetings during the week, and you sort of ask Pocket just to give you summaries, next actions, anything that you, anything you might have missed. So, I only got it last week. There's a waiting list to get it, but so I'm early days of trialing it, but so far, so good. I know Nick's going to say another buddy's shiny new object, but I'm happy to try. I don't care, but I'm happy to trial new and interesting things that that can enhance and improve my day-to-day business life, so check out Pocket. Thank you.
Carl Widger:Okay, not sure. Can you hear me?
Nick Lincoln:Yep.
Carl Widger:Okay. Good. Yes. Streetwise, but by Lord Lloyd Blank Feen, I think his name is ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs. The start of the book is pretty poor, and then it gets really, really interesting, and he ended up being the CEO of Goldman Sachs. He was in, he was very high up in Goldman Sachs, but they did their IPO, which is obviously a topical issue at the moment. The average payout for the partners in Goldman Sachs, when they did their IPO, was $84 million He got about double that. It's a really, really interesting story about his career in Goldman Sachs. So, I would encourage everybody to have a read or a listen to this book. I think it's really good.
Andy Hart:Okay, I'll keep this. I'll keep it super short and sweet. I know we pushed for time. It's the Trigonometry Podcast, which is an awesome podcast, a very interesting guest. They've got a financial expert on there called Patrick Boyle. I've put the YouTube link. He's a professor, he knows a lot about global finances, a load of other stuff. So, do check it out. I think you're going to enjoy it. Over to you, Nicholas.
Alan Smith:Yeah, I listened to as well. He's Irish, isn't he? Very, very good, very smart. He's the smartest Irishman
Andy Hart:I know.
Nick Lincoln:Oh, by country mile, by a country mile. Yes, I listened to it as well. Okay, the final culture corner, I referred to earlier on the show, this is Money Podcast, talking about the slow motion UK property slump. It's one of those podcasts you need to know your enemy, so just dip into it now, and again, because it's financial journalists, lots of times, just talking about the same old stuff in that very annoying way that financial journalists do, where they all laugh at each other's jokes, like the funniest things ever. But it's quite interesting on the property slump. Okay, that brings us at the two hour mark. This might be a record, the two hour mark. Episode 99 of The Real Advisor Podcast comes to a close. It is being flushed down the U bend of Father Time. Please do leave a review on iTunes or your app player of choice. Like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you do leave a review, leave a six out of five, leave a one out of five. We don't care. We love them. We love one of the extremes. Don't want three out of fives till the next time from the Trap Pack. It's Adios. Take care out there, and we will see you on the other side. Goodbye.
Alan Smith:We made it just another absolute shambles, so many levels,
Nick Lincoln:a genuine financial, genuine, absolute
Unknown:shambles.
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