Financial Planner Life Podcast
Welcome to The Financial Planner Life Podcast. We cover an intimate and honest account of what it’s really like to work in the financial planning profession.
Our guests share their stories of success, failures and learnings, as well as what to expect from a career in the financial planning profession! We host guests at various stages in their careers, as well as multiple roles to ensure that our audience has a variety each week.
Financial planners, business owners, paraplanners and back-office staff all have their own story to share, and The Financial Planner Life podcast is a platform for them to talk about their personal and professional journey. The podcast covers a multitude of topics, from mindset and motivation, health and wellbeing all the way to diversity and inclusion.
We approach each episode with the idea that it is going to educate and spark a conversation within the industry with topics that may not be openly discussed. So, if you are thinking of becoming a financial adviser, or you’re curious about learning more about this brilliant sector, we urge you to give the podcast a listen.
The Host: Sam Oakes is the host of The Financial Planner Life Podcast. since 2008 Sam has been supporting leading national and global financial planning firms in finding the best talent, he was the director of Recruit UK, a 7 figure turnover financial planning recruitment company that he successfully exited in 2024, Sam now works as the Head of Creative for Hoxton wealth, building out podcasts, YouTube and social content for this fast growing fee based international financial planning firm.
Sam has always had a passion for financial services, starting out as a trainer for leading product provider in the UK, he has been in the industry for over 20 years.
He sees himself as a partner to the industry and wants to contribute useful resources such as this podcast to educate those further who are seeking advice and help about how to push their careers forward in this amazing profession.
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Financial Planner Life Podcast
From Recruiter to £266M Financial Planner | A Career Change That Paid Off - with Vikash Kanani
How a Former Recruiter Built a £266M Financial Planning Business - Vikash’s Journey from BD to Chartered Adviser
In this episode of the Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes is joined by Chartered Financial Planner Vikash, who shares how he made the bold move from a successful recruitment career into the world of financial advice.
Vikash’s story is one of intentional reinvention. After building a strong career in recruitment and business development, he stepped away from the boardroom and into financial planning - starting from scratch, taking a pay cut, and retraining in his early 30s.
Now, ten years later, he co-leads Chatsworth Wealth Management, a thriving practice with £266 million in Assets Under Management, serving over 1,000 families.
We talk about:
- What made him walk away from recruitment
- Why recruiters are uniquely skilled for financial planning
- How he took over and scaled an existing practice
- Building client trust and social proof through content
- The future of advice, succession planning, and team culture
- The value of understanding client happiness and purpose
If you're in recruitment and wondering what’s next, or you're considering a second career in financial advice, this episode is packed with insight and inspiration.
Begin your financial planning career journey today
Whether you are looking to become a paraplanner, administrator, mortgage and protection adviser or financial planner, the Financial Planner Life Academy is for you.
With limited entry-level job roles, giving yourself the best financial planning career education, will not only kick start your financial planning journey with relevant qualifications and skills, but it’ll also help you achieve success much faster.&nbs
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And today on the Financial Planner Live podcast, I'm joined by Vikash Kanani. He has pivoted from a career in recruitment 10 years ago into building a business with 1.2 million in the financial planning profession and ultimately, I think, what recruiters do?
Speaker 2:they find a solution to a problem, and this is what I loved about recruitment there is always a solution. There is always the right person for the role, for company, for the culture.
Speaker 1:I genuinely believe that we can fix the advice gap by taking people who work in recruitment and putting them in financial planning.
Speaker 2:I do think recruitment's a good fit for financial planning. Ultimately, in both things you are more providing a service above and beyond anything else.
Speaker 1:It's it's how you make people feel it's a fantastic career switch and today Vikesh shares his journey, how he's built his business to over 250 million of assets under management. And stick around to the end, because we're going to talk a little bit about a golf day, a Financial Planner Life event that's happening in the summer and you're going to love it. Love it the cash. Thank you so much for joining me today on the financial planner life podcast. How are you mate?
Speaker 2:I'm good, sam, I'm good. Nice sunny day in nottingham, nothing, nothing to complain about good, good.
Speaker 1:We're definitely sunny in dubai. It never stops being sunny. We celebrate when it actually rains. Um, but hopefully not one of those flash floods we saw a couple. Remember those flat, that flash flood they saw in dubai last year, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:that was crazy yeah yeah, yeah, absolutely crazy.
Speaker 1:I saw some of the videos out here about of it and I was just like my god and like some of the guys are saying in the office how high the water actually came. But I kind of witnessed it slightly, because it rained one afternoon and like there's no drainage here and it just started filling up with water and I was like, well, you can understand why. If, like a monsoon came along or something, yeah quickly, this place would be underwater. But yeah, very weird, never, um, you, never, you, never stop talking about the weather, though even if you leave england, it still continues to it's it, it's the british.
Speaker 2:One way or another, we will start every conversation with with weather, especially if it's sunny. Every Brit will mention the sun.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, vikash, thank you so much for joining me. We've obviously got to know each other through a little closed community, a little group of financial planners that I've been invited to, and it's been really lovely just to sit in there and listen to you all talking as well and observing what you guys and girls are talking about. Um, and we've built a nice little community in there and I pipe up every now and then with some hints and some tips so I can help, and I pleased to say, you picked up on one of my hints of the tips, which is, um, using video, wasn't it? You started using video on linkedin, but I brought you into the world of captions, the um, the app on them on the mobile yeah, absolutely whenever.
Speaker 2:Whenever Sam Oakes talks, I'm listening, and especially if he's talking about social media, marketing, video or content. So, yeah, at the start of this year I wanted to bring my LinkedIn written content into a visual form. So I started putting a few videos out there. And you piped up, sam, and went, hey, check out captions. So I downloaded it, had a look and then, I think I think a few hours later, I uh, I sent you a video of me reciting shakespeare into into the camera. So, um, yeah, I've started using captions and it.
Speaker 2:It helps massively, um, on a number of things one, using the features within it to make your videos a bit more interesting and two, the teleprompter function on it. And I think you said, look, you can now just focus on writing scripts and making sure that your content does exactly what you want it to, as opposed to just talking into a camera making mistakes and then spending lots and lots of times kind of trying to get your message across, whereas now I can just focus on the message in the written form and and then deliver it directly into the camera.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and for those not aware of the actual app itself, you could literally record yourself onto your mobile phone, import a script into it, onto a teleprompter, read the teleprompter at the speed that you desire. On the mobile phone itself, you can speed it up, slow it down and, of course, you can edit it directly on your phone as well. It can record in 4K and he's even got some AI features like denoising the background and making sure your eyes are looking at the actual camera, not at the script. So it kind of does some tricky little thing with your eyes are looking at the actual camera, not at the script. So it kind of does some tricky little thing with your eyes, doesn't? It makes it look at the phone, which is quite impressive and, as you said.
Speaker 1:So you know you'd sit there and think, well, what can I talk about? So you do 25 takes of trying to get the perfect. Yeah, yeah, exactly, you can just get the, get the script perfect, put it in there and and off you go, and it, to me, is a game changer and for anybody that's thinking about using social media and video and don't know where to start or to make you know how to make it easy. That is probably the easiest entry point and it looks really, really good. So I'm really pleased you picked it up because your videos just changed, so all your social media changed. Like when you started doing that, it was like a more relaxed approach to it. You could see straight away, but you didn't look like you were reading from a teleprompter either.
Speaker 2:You know it looked natural no, and that's it and it and it takes a bit of practice. You know you, you can't just look at the camera and not blink and everything. So the words are there. You still need to to know what you're going to talk about and you might go off script a little bit, but it's just just practicing with if you're walking and talking, to sort of look away and yet not just look like it and getting your cadence right as well. It needs to sound like a conversation.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, vikash. Why don't you just introduce yourself, tell us where you are in your career and how you got that?
Speaker 2:Good question. So this October I'm 10 years in to the world of financial planning Not a career that I ever thought I would do, or even knew what it was when I was younger. So I always wanted to be a lawyer, wanted to be a solicitor. Law was everything to me. So I based my A-levels around subjects that would help me with law. So I studied history, english literature, and then I did maths and business studies as well, because I always had that acumen Went to Warwick University, studied law and business studies and then not a lot of people know this, but I actually went to law school to do my LPC, my legal practice course, and had a training contract lined up as well with a good law firm.
Speaker 2:And partway through the LPC I realized I don't think this is what I want to do. I think, like with a lot of things, I thought law was one thing. You watch films, you read Joel Grisham novels. Growing up, as I found out more about it, I found out that the money was in corporate and commercial law. So I did my law school electives based on becoming a corporate and commercial lawyer, chasing the money, and at some point it all just imploded and I thought this is really not what I want to do. So I dropped out of law school, turned down my training contract and then I had a number of lost years where I did, did various bits and ended up like a lot of people do.
Speaker 2:I fell into recruitment um. So I saw an advert in the paper, or more my dad did. He said, hey, you need to go and get a job, so go and have a look at this. It was a temporary position um working in an educational recruitment firm. So at the start of every new academic year they recruit a number of attempts. So I went and did that just to earn a bit of money and I basically ended up going from a temporary position to seven years later I was on the board as head of business development and marketing. Good company, private equity backed, ended up in boardrooms in London in these big meetings I was probably mid to late 20s at that point earning some good money, and that's what I was. I was a recruiter that grew within that. That firm met my wife there and at one point, being the people that we are, we said you know what? We can do this better ourselves. So my wife left and set up her own recruitment company and six months later I followed, and that's what we did recruitment bug. We ran our own company and, through connections of connections, we ended up recruiting some high-profile names, one of which was St James' Place. Okay, so we were recruiting trainers for St James' Place. So this was 2014, 2015.
Speaker 2:My wife went to London for a meeting with a chap called Adrian Batchelor, who at the time was the head of the academy, which was fairly new at that point. I accompanied her and, as the story goes, partway through the meeting, adrian just stopped the meeting, looked me dead in the eye and went Vikash, you'd make a great financial planner. I didn't really know what to say. I thought he was joking. I didn't come from money, my parents didn't have a financial planner. I didn't really know what to say. I thought he was joking. I didn't come from money, my parents didn't have a financial planner, I didn't have any connections. But he told me about this academy, the numbers of financial planners dropping post-RDR, and that they were looking for second careerists who had something about them, who could learn the technical skills but maybe already had the attitude to become a planner. So that's how the journey started and that was. I joined the SJP Academy in October 2015.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic. So you kind of stumbled into it, like a lot of people actually do, like a lot of people do, yeah, yeah, and nice to hear you came from a recruitment background. I genuinely believe recruitment could be a fantastic place for financial planning companies to attract talent from, because of the varied nature of the role, the huge amount of focus on business development, the 360 aspects, you know, the managing multiple workload, operational writing, job adverts, writing job descriptions, sitting in with businesses, sitting in with clients, having to ask those really deep, meaningful, fact-finding conversations, spinning multiple plates over and over and over again. I mean it is really a fantastic training ground and lots of people who do well in recruitment tend to go on to do other things and be a success at doing it, or because it's such an easy one, like you did and you and your wife did, to step away, build your own business and do it yourself. So that's very, very interesting. So would you agree? Do you think recruitment is a good fit for financial planning?
Speaker 2:I do think recruitment's a good fit for financial planning. Ultimately, in both things, you are more providing a service. Above and beyond anything else, it's how you make people feel. Obviously, in recruitment, you've ultimately got to find them the right candidate, but it's how you manage that process, how you fact find. You know you become a specialist in in certain areas.
Speaker 2:I, with my legal background, recruited for lawyers and solicitors, so I needed to know right at the minute. I've spoke to four HR HR departments and they're all struggling to find solicitors who are four years PQE, so post-qualification experience and then you might start looking into well, why is that? Well, that's because in 2008, when there was a crash, people stopped recruiting and and that's had a knock-on impact. So then, when you speak to your next three HR contacts, instead of just ringing up and trying to get something out of them, you might ring up and say, hey, I've noticed this with other law firms. Are you in a similar position?
Speaker 2:You add value, you give them a bit of insight and ultimately, I think, what recruiters do? They find a solution to a problem, and this is what I loved about recruitment there, they find a solution to a problem, and this is what I loved about recruitment. There is always a solution, there is always the right person for the role, for the company, for the culture, and it was my job via my existing contacts and database or via LinkedIn or by company websites, to find that person. And again, it's a two-way thing. It's not just me recruiting someone for a company. I'm effectively putting Sam Oakes in a role that he might be in for the next 10, 15, however many years, and it's all about people, which I think translates into financial planning really, really well.
Speaker 1:How old were you when you made that transition and then started on the SJP Academy?
Speaker 2:I had just turned 31.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting About the age that people start to consider life after recruitment. Yeah, exactly, most people get in around about 21 years old and then get out around the early 30s. Either sell their businesses or they get out. I was quite late to recruitment. I think I was a trainer first for Aviva, do a lot of training for aviva, and then I moved into recruitment at 27 years old and then got out of it at 42 years old, so about a 10 year stint, well, actually, yeah, well, that's about 16 years in, I think. But, um, similar, similar, similar sort of pathway great stuff. And also what about the actual niching down, though? So when you've got recruiters that are specifically looking at niches whether it be teachers or the local sector or something like that I think that's always very interesting as well, because they understand the niche, they understand the pain points that they have. So when it goes into actually targeting them as clients, prospecting them, it comes in beneficial because they already have a ready-made market, a ready-made niche to go after.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that helps and to an extent it doesn't really matter what the niche is. I ended up with two niches. One was, uh, media companies in holland of all places. Uh, fox. Fox networks, as in the fox, became one of our biggest clients, um, and at that point they were looking for roles called schedulers and programmers. So they are literally the people who put the schedule together for the TV program that you watch, that put in when the adverts are what goes where. And I again fell into that. Got to know Fox, got to know the team. Got to know the competitors in the area. So companies like Viacom. Got to know the team got to know the competitors in the area. So companies like Viacom. And at one point, honestly, I was having 15, 20 conversations a day with people all over Holland. It was the Benelux area, so Belgium, luxembourg and the Netherlands. So yeah, it doesn't matter what the niche is, but if you know about something and you've got a point and value to add, then then people listen.
Speaker 1:One of the things that come up a lot when it comes to being a second careerist is that one fear of stepping away from what you know? Yeah, and the level and the level of income that you're used to? Yes, then stepping into a financial planning now there are no jobs you're used to. Yes, then stepping into a financial planning now there are no jobs you can step into in financial planning as a trainee financial planner, which is going to pay you like. Some good recruiters are probably, on average, in a 70 80 000 quid a year. Yeah, probably pushing to 100 if they're pretty decent. Um, and then you've got some that are earning astronomical amounts. I've got a guy I know does about 700k a year in earnings. I get, yeah, what he earns, which is incredible.
Speaker 1:So how did you approach that? Because you must have been doing quite well, you probably. You sound like you had a good career in recruitment. So when you step across into st james's place in the academy and taking that was probably hitting salary, did you have some money in the bank to allow you to make that progression or did you just say sod it? You know, I've had enough of recruitment, I'm gonna. I'm gonna take a hit the salary and I'm just gonna build myself up and and try and take over I was lucky in that I had, uh, not just a very beautiful but a very supportive wife as well.
Speaker 2:Um and I always tell the story if it wasn't for Louise, I would have ran out of money before I became somewhat decent and somewhat successful, and it's something that I always say now to young planners who get in touch with me and even people who I interview. You know, we have employed advisors within our practice. We have self-employed advisors within our practice and I try and make a model that fits, as long as it's the right person. I interviewed someone recently who wanted to become a self-employed advisor and we had a look at their personal finances, because I know that it's not as easy as social media might have you make out. You know people who are on social media, people who are on podcasts, as an element of survivor bias, so you need a big chunk of money in the bank.
Speaker 2:At the time when I made the transition over, there wasn't really this route to join a practice or to sort of go in somewhere employed. I first started off by you will come out of the academy and, uh, you will set up your own business. And I'm on record now with saying that that's a terrible idea. And how? How can I learn to be a financial planner, a business owner, a marketeer, looking at my accounts, all at the time when I'm learning a brand new profession? I can't.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, without Lou supporting me through that first year I would have ran out of money, because I certainly didn't make enough money to even cover my living expenses, let alone what I was earning in recruitment. And you get some good roles in recruitment, to the 20 or 25% of salary finder's fee and you're recruiting for good size roles. You can make some good money. So, yeah, it was this joint focus that me and my wife had to build something bigger, build something more sustainable and build something of more value over time. And, like with lots of things in life, you have to take a short term, a short term hit sometimes.
Speaker 1:Great. You said it took a bit of time to get somewhat successful. Before we delve into that, why don't you just give us an outline of what you've built, where you are actually right now, and then we can talk about that how long it took you to actually get what you would be considered to be somewhat successful so we can give our listeners who are thinking about maybe leaving recruitment perhaps I think they're probably going to get affected by SEO to move into somewhere like financial planning. So talk to us about your partner practice right now. What size is it? How many people work for you? If they do, what's your assets under management?
Speaker 2:all that kind of stuff yeah, so, um, the practice is four advisors. So there's me and my business partner, rick, which which we'll talk about. So we are 50 50 shareholders of chats with wealth management. So there's rick and I, joseph and vikesh. So I'm vikesh, there's vikesh within the practice as well. Four advisors, six support staff. We help about a thousand families with all of their financial planning needs and at the minute bearing in mind that we are recording this right in the middle of trump tariffs, chaos and market crashes, we look after 266 million of client funds under management for those families. If we'd had this conversation towards the end of January, that number was more like 292 million. So at this point, we don't really focus on the funds under management number, because any fluctuation in markets or Mr Trump sneezing can have a big impact on that. So so we focus on things that we can control and focus on yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 1:And what would you say? And what's the turnover of your business? So last year it was 1.25 million great, the employees that you, you people that work within your business at the moment. Are they employed? Let's look at the planners. Are they employed or self-employed? Because I know at st james's place there's a there's a steer mainly towards self-employed people going in running their own partner practices, but then there is a route to go in and sit underneath existing partner practices self-employed but, what do you? What do you do?
Speaker 2:so we we focus on the person, we focus on what they want to do, what their motivations are. So at the moment we have, in addition to Rick and I, we have an employed financial planner and we have a self-employed financial planner and we've made those roles and we've made that remuneration basis based on what they wanted. I always want to promote entrepreneurial spirit. I also I heard you speaking to Guy about this Guy Skinner, I also want to promote entrepreneurialism as well. So our self-employed advisor he has no wife, no child at the minute and he wanted to build something, work on his own terms, but work within a practice. He knew very early on that he didn't want to go out and just do that on his own.
Speaker 2:We have an employed advisor who, at this moment, doesn't want that fluctuating income as such, he has a wife, he has a two-year-old child. Income as such, he has a wife, he has a two-year-old child. So he is on an employed basis. But whenever anyone joins us or we interview again, taking from my legal background, we have a document called Five Steps to Equity Partner. So all of the planners who join us at one point, I would like them to become part, part of the management team to become part of the ownership structure. I think that's important, one for people's motivations and two just for creating a sustainable business. Um, but no, it it entirely depends on the person, their attitude, their morals, ethics, integrity, and if they're the right person, we will find a remuneration model that works for everyone so to be somewhat successful as a financial planner, as you put it.
Speaker 1:How long did it take you?
Speaker 2:so I joined the academy in october 2015, so I'm I'm coming up to 10 years.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. So within 10 years, you've been part of a team that's built a practice with 266 million under management. That's pretty damn impressive. So how many doors did you have to knock to find those clients?
Speaker 2:So look at the start with anything you knock on doors, you get rejected. You knock on doors, you knock on doors, you knock on doors. I realized quite early on that for me, there might be a better way to do it. And that better way to do it look, I'm I'm always a sponge for learning. So I'm with sam oaks in a WhatsApp group. Sam Oaks put something on there. I'm going to adapt it straight away.
Speaker 2:So when I first joined SJP, I would go and talk to anyone who I thought was moderately successful and say do you have any clients that I could go and see who you might not want to go and see? Yeah, sure, vikash, we do. I was just, I was just helping them, helping me. Okay, can I go on a joint meeting with you? Yeah, yeah, okay, why not? So I went on a joint meeting with so I, I, I got to know the, the sjp community really well, and then I got to know a particular practice who we, we clicked. It was two guys who had each built their own individual practices, merged them together and really liked them. They dealt with financial planning in the same way that I did and, to cut a long story short, in 2018, me and Rick ended up taking that practice over.
Speaker 2:So you asked me, how many doors did I have to knock on? Well, I had to knock on a few doors to find almost mentors who I liked and got on with. But I always knew if I could go into a practice, possibly with a view of taking it over. Then all I had to do was knock on the doors of existing clients to then get introductions, get referrals. So my view was always I want to build a practice on top of an existing practice. So have I built? And have we built that 266 million from scratch? No, have we added a big chunk of it on top of an existing practice by adding value, making efficiencies? Yeah, so that's yeah.
Speaker 1:That was that was my so interesting because the ecosystem of St James's Place lends itself to you being able to actually buy an existing practice. That's what the ecosystem creates. You didn't obviously have to go external to do that. It was there already. Is that was there already? Is that you know? Is that a benefit of sjp? Is it something that you've seen as being beneficial in your journey? Like is that? Was that quite an easy process, or was it difficult, as it could be if you were going external and acquiring a business?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, look, I'm I'm not going to say it was, it was an easy process at the end of the day. There are lenders, both sjp as a lender and external lenders. There's due diligence, that that you, that you have to do. There's a business to take over. There's fluctuating markets, there's regulations, there's there's all of that. But was that easier than I don't know? Maybe if I was out on my own trying to buy another practice? Yeah, probably because that infrastructure they call it the BSP model. That is a cornerstone of the SJP proposition. Up for that part of it.
Speaker 2:But I do think that helps, especially in the context of you know we've got these stats out there that the average age of a financial planner is 58. There's x amount retiring in the next however many years. There's not enough new financial planners coming through. There's an advice gap. So all of that should lead to well, well, why is this difficult? Yet we speak to young financial planners and we know that it is a very difficult thing.
Speaker 2:So I do think there is something in the theory and I've not quite articulated it yet that if we do have all of these 58-year-old financial advisors retiring, we have new people who are struggling. Then is there something whereby, like you would in any other profession, financial planning seems to be this weird thing? Why don't we plan that instead of Sam Oakes coming in as a new financial planner trying to build his business from scratch a bit like in the legal world you would have a training contract where over two years you sit six different departments, so four different departments, departments. Why don't you have these new planners going into existing practices with a long-term view of succession planning? That? That just seems to make sense to me, right yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So what you think that's something that could be put across the actual profession as a whole like we create almost this, this, this route into building out a mini acquisition look in in anything that you do in life.
Speaker 2:If a business or a profession is to be sustainable, then you need some type of succession planning, and it just seems bonkers to me that you get someone coming in as a former recruiter who then has to market to his existing network and they're like wait a minute, vikash. Five minutes ago you're a recruiter, now you're saying that you're a pension specialist and I'm gonna, you know, do x, y, z. No, actually I'm going to see how it goes whereas what I found was that when I joined a practice, I would go in and say oh, sam, you're already part of the practice I'm dealing with, so there's already that element of trust in there. It's it puts less pressure on on me and ultimately it worked for us, the two guys that that we took over from. They are now out of the business, they they're living their lives, they're playing a lot of golf, they're enjoying it, um, and it's given rick and I something to build on top of which, which I think okay, maybe that can be done, maybe across the profession yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker 1:How did you end up meeting rick then? Where did that come about?
Speaker 2:it was almost like an old school. You know, with my indian background, it was a bit like an arranged marriage. So, um, I said, the practice that we bought used to be two practices, um, so I went in as an advisor into my mentor's practice, rick went in as a as an advisor within within his mentor's practice and when the two merged together, uh, the guys basically said, look, we have a plan that within X years, we would like to exit and we would like you to be our successors, um, and we'll give you first right of refusal. So me and rick just met at that point, you know, and we joke about it now. So that was 2018.
Speaker 2:I got married in 2017 and I will joke to rick and say, oh, you're not in any of my wedding photos. That feels really weird, because over the last seven or eight years, we have spoken daily. We have a business together, we have clients together, we have employees together. But look, sam, we did a lot of things at the time as well. We went out a few times. Our wives, fiances, met, we went and played golf together, we spent a lot of time together because it was a big commitment. You hear about these horror stories of partnerships falling out, so we wanted to make sure that we were compatible in in some way to to lead and run this business together okay, great, good.
Speaker 1:So that's a good okay, so you came together like an arranged business marriage. I love it.
Speaker 2:Well, like an arranged business marriage. So Rick Rick is a second generation financial planner, so his dad was a financial planner. Roy Rick is a financial planner. He's 38. He has been in financial planning administration para planning planning for 20 years, so he had all of that financial planning side of it. I had my legal background recruitment. I'd helped my wife run a business but was fairly new to financial planning. I don't think at the time he could have taken over a business without my business acumen. I don't think I could have taken over a financial planning business without someone with 20 years of financial planning experience. So we complement each other really well and we still do. I'm the guy who you'll see selfies of on LinkedIn and posts on LinkedIn and I'm on Sam Oakes' podcast. No one knows what Rick looks like, apart from his clients. No one will ever have seen him. All of his clients love him and he he likes it that way. We. We balance each other out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it talking about linkedin, then, and social media and marketing. Is this something you've started to get stuck into? Have you always done it and have you been gaining much success?
Speaker 2:so it's.
Speaker 2:So. It's not something I've always done, maybe a backlash from being a former recruiter. When I was no longer a recruiter I thought I'm deleting LinkedIn and never logging onto this platform again. So look at the start of last year I was on a leadership course led by a guy called Steve Quinn Really great guy and in the January I was, as you are on these courses, you're taking everything in, but it's a nice point to be sort of outside of your business.
Speaker 2:We're in Manchester and I was just doodling on a pad and I wrote give LinkedIn a sustained and consistent go. And that was all I wrote. I didn't really know what I was doing. So I first came on and probably wrote a couple of articles on boring financial plenary things like asset allocation and concentration risk and realized no one cared about that type of thing. And over the last year I've sort of developed my own voice and style of how I write on LinkedIn. So it's more personal stories with some tie into financial planning.
Speaker 2:What I'm trying to do on behalf of me and Chatsworth is to go down the. If you build it, they will come approach. I'm just going to project myself out there into the universe and those people, those clients, those future employees who resonate with what I'm saying will come to me. Um, and and I believe, I believe in the marketing lingo all the cool kids, they call that top of funnel marketing, and then there's middle and funnel and bottom of funnel, which, which is a call to action. Um, so I've been.
Speaker 2:I've been doing that for just over a year now. I've had good client success from it. So we've onboarded brand new clients, some who may have known me and were connected to me on LinkedIn, and then some completely cold. We've also seen a big increase in new introductions and referrals from our existing clients that we're connected to, and I think a lot of that comes down to social proof. It's a bit like, you know, if I'm out there putting a video up of me and me and you have spoken about this, sam, you know, before someone meets you, they already have an idea of who you are. Um, so some of it is in that social proof and they may say, oh, check out my guy on LinkedIn. So it's been good for new clients. It's been good for getting referrals from existing clients. It's also really helped me build my network within St James's Place as well, which is important to me and with other financial planners as well, which is part of the reason that we met and we're on this call now.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So you're a bit of an academic, you like to study, you like to learn new things. What types of things have you been learning recently and how are you implementing that into financial planning?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a bit of an academic, and I had this imposter syndrome of being a second careerist. I didn't realize at the time that everyone in financial planning well, nearly everyone was second careerist. So I got chartered, I became a fellow of the Personal Finance Society and then I sort of knew that my next qualification wasn't going to be something financial. I received a piece of advice earlier on in my career that said look, a lot of people can go really deep into one subject, but there's not many people who layer different skills on top of each other. So if you're a fantastic financial planner, then maybe take a public speaking course, because there won't be that many who have got the combination of both.
Speaker 2:So recently I've finished a course called managing happiness, which is from Harvard X, which is the online arm of Harvard University, and that really stemmed from me having this philosophy within financial planning of helping people live the life that they want, making sure that their estate and their affairs are in order for when they're not here, and then also helping them to leave a legacy, whether that's financial or non-financial. So if I genuinely wanted to do all of that, then what better way than to really go to the core of of our sort of human purpose, which is, I think, a lot of people just want to be happy and they just want to be content, and I wanted to formalize that learning. So, yeah, embarked on, embarked on that course.
Speaker 1:Do you just very briefly sort of give us an outline of what that course is? It sounds quite interesting to me. It's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, look, it is a long course, it covers multiple things, but if I start off with with a few main things that I that I took from it, one of the big things that I took was and it says this in in the opening, the opening few pages we always think about happiness as something on a spectrum from unhappy to happy. You know, I am unhappy now, but if I do this, this, this, I will become happy. So it's almost this journey that we go on, and what I learned from the course was that it's not so much a journey in that way. Happiness is made up of four distinct parts. They are faith or purpose, family, community and meaningful work. And if you imagine a sphere containing of all four of those parts, all four of those parts have to be there and in balance for you to feel happy and content. And that feeling when you're riding on the crest of a wave and then you go, do you know what? I don't feel great now, I feel unhappy. That's not because you've slid downwards on this scale, that's because something is off on one of those parts and we need all of those parts to be filled. We need our own souls to be filled, and I really think it helps a lot when you are speaking to a client about the why. Why are we doing this financial plan? Where do you want to get to?
Speaker 2:Ultimately, I found people want to know they're doing the right things with their money. They want to live a good life and they want to leave a lasting legacy for their, for their loved ones. And, if I can help them through this understanding of psychology, big, big tie-in with retirement. You know, I don't think retirement exists in the way that it did 40 years ago. You don't retire on a Friday, get a gold watch and then play golf. People need that sense of purpose. People need that reason for being, and it's not just money. Money can help. Money can help you buy time. Money can help you do the things that make you unhappy. Different for different people. Got a client who loves gardening. Got a client who hates gardening. We use one of their monies to get a gardener so that can free her up, spend time with her grandchildren. The other one she loves it. So let's keep it in there. Let's keep that in the plan.
Speaker 1:So working out what people's why is and what makes them happy is a big part of financial planning, would you say, or what their future self might, how their future self could be happy exactly.
Speaker 2:It's how their future self can be happy. I two two things on that. I think a lot of the time we put too much focus on people's future selves, and I think any time where you're thinking too far in the future causes anxiety. So, whereas I might previously have asked someone, right, you're thinking too far in the future causes anxiety. So, whereas I might previously have asked someone right, you're 75 years old, what have the last five years looked like and what have you enjoyed? You know that's a good question. It's a good open question. But if I'm asking that to 44 year old Sam, you're now thinking about all of these things in the build-up to, so instead I might say something along the lines of Sam, what have you done in the last five years that's made you really happy, and that's an easier question for you to answer. You might think of something you did with your family, your, your daughter, a particular piece of content you created, right? How can we do more of that for sam oaks going forward? So sam Oakes feels happy and content love it.
Speaker 1:Well, vikash, I'm looking forward to something that's going to make me quite happy, which is, I think, in June fingers crossed, we got it in the diary um, we're all going to get together me, you and seven other financial planners, girls and boys, uh to have a game of golf.
Speaker 1:And not only that, we're going to record it on beautiful cinematic cameras and we're going to go night. Two sets of nine holes, so two games of nine holes, different golfers, different financial planners, all discussing their journey within financial planning, and people who are keen on golf can watch along and actually watch a game of golf as well. So for me, it's quite cool because it's like a brand new thing that we're doing here at the financial plan of life. It's great to have got to know you and everybody else in the little group that we've got going, um, and that everybody's keen and interested to do it, because I can really see something in like the financial plan of life golf tournament and, I think, out for a lovely walk, as long as it doesn't rain. Out for a lovely walk, playing, playing a bit of golf, talking financial planning and a little bit of competition in there as well. I think we're on to something, don't you?
Speaker 2:I absolutely do. I'm really, really looking forward to it. It's going to be for those of you who watch golf content on YouTube, think Jimmy Bullard meets Rick Shields meets Sam Oakes of Financial Planner Live. I won't reveal the other financial planners, but there's Sam and eight financial planners who, if you follow Sam, if you follow along on LinkedIn, you will have heard of them all. So everyone's going to be mic'd up. We have access to a golf course, we some beautiful videography, some drone footage so you can see, like sam says, a bit of competition, a bit of goal. But, most importantly, this is something that that everyone in the group has done, not to promote to new clients, nothing like that. It's simply to give something back to the young financial planners coming through. All of us have been mentored along the way at some point. All of us have got people that we look up to. So if we can now, in our positions, do something which gives back to those young planners coming through, then it's our privilege and duty to do so. So watch this space.
Speaker 1:It's all booked. I love it. I love it. I'm really looking forward to doing it. I think it's going to be a really fun way to educate some people, and, I think, a bit of golf along the way. Um, apparently I might be a wild card. Wild be in the sense that I don't know how to play golf. I go down to top golf and I can smash a ball pretty far. So whether or not my putting game is any good, um, it's to. We'll discover that on the day, I think. But I'm really, I'm really looking forward to it and today, look, thank you so much for sharing your journey, um, on the financial planner life podcast, you would have inspired and educated people.
Speaker 1:I think this one as well. I'm gonna title it up towards recruiters because I genuinely believe that we could fix this advice gap by moving a lot of really good people from the recruitment profession, because it does have a shelf life. People get bored and it's tense. You know that when, when you hit your 30s, you kind of are looking for something else. You get a bit old in recruitment when you're in your 30s, if I'm honest. So I think it's actually a prime age for stepping into financial planning. 30. So I think, um, there's definitely something in that and I think, um, if I yeah, if I mark that up on youtube, then hopefully we might get a bit more interest coming as a profession.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and in true Sam Oak style. He has taken a snippet of an idea and he's about to 10x it, and he's got a whole master plan of filling the advice gap with former recruiters. So look forward to it, sam.
Speaker 1:I've just got to execute it. Everyone's got a brilliant idea. You've got to execute it. Fantastic Well, vikash, thank you so much for joining today and on the financial plan of life, and I'm really looking forward to seeing you again. Take it easy, mate. See you soon, sam, cheers, cheers.
