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
102 - JAMES BARDEN: Giving Recruiters A Good Name
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In this latest pile of TRAP, the Trap Pack discuss
- Topical Titbits
- Meat and Potatoes: JAMES BARDEN - GIVING RECRUITERS A GOOD NAME
- TRAPist question from beloved TRAPist Conor Calahane
- Culture Corner
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Yes, indeed, dear Trappist. Welcome back to what many people are calling episode 102 of the Miyamo Lincoln, and joining me in the digital studio of Doom are two of the other three horsemen of the apocalypse, Andy Ultra Heart and Alan the Storyteller Smith. Watch the voice. Carl Widger is somewhere in a ditch in Nashville, having the time of his life on a family holiday over in the USA. So we have a fantastic stand-in for Wadger, and he'll be introducing. But before that happens, let's get this show on the road. Episode 102. You just demonetised us again. Read. You know you can play those. You can play clips for comedic effect, and it doesn't that doesn't breach copyright. Let's get this show underway with another high and year review read, read out by my very good friend, the Right Honorable mr. Andrew Ursane, rustling paper heart.
Andy Hart:That wasn't me, Nicholas. You are such a creature of habit. You've opened the show for the first 100 episodes in your signature style. Now you've decided to change it to the most irritating opening possible. But
Nick Lincoln:there was a World Cup on it. I'm celebrating Spain winning. That's how they. That's how they commentate on the go. Nick,
Andy Hart:I get the reference anyway. Smithy's joining us from his grandma's living room.
Alan Smith:It's actually my parents.
Nick Lincoln:Okay.
Alan Smith:Anyone watching this will will enjoy the 1970s, maybe 80s chintz curtains.
Andy Hart:Very nice. Very interesting background
David Quinn:class.
Alan Smith:Class. Yeah, as I was just saying, in your if you're in your 80s, you tend not to spend a ton of money sort of redeveloping and remodeling your house-it's just efficient use of resources.
Andy Hart:Yeah, and also the the Scottish element in the mix. Okay, let's get cracking with this review from Jim Stapleton. Did someone say six out of five stars as a financial planner? I should probably keep this professional, but the Trap podcast makes that difficult. It's one of the rare financial podcasts that's both educational and genuinely funny. You guys do a fantastic job promoting the real drivers of financial
success:patience, discipline, and not doing anything daft when markets get exciting. Well done! I must listen for anyone who wants to better wants better financial outcomes and a few laughs along the way. Keep up the good work, lads. That's from Jim Stapleton. All less money, Clomel Island, and it's great to have Dave on the show. Finally, we have first time we have a credible financial advisor, so welcome, Dave.
David Quinn:Thank you, lads. Delighted to be on.
Nick Lincoln:Well, let's let's give Dave's profit instruction. So, Dave Quinn, tell us a bit about the the person the the listeners can hear and the the YouTubers can see.
David Quinn:Well, it'd be very remiss of me not to talk about an unbelievable day yesterday with Mayo winning the All Ireland final. So I just wanted to say congratulations to all the Mayo listeners. That's a 75 years in the making, and I think anyone in Ireland who was awake yesterday watched that game, and it was a huge celebration. I had a tear in my eye, and I'm from Dublin, so can't imagine what the Mayo people were like. Anyway, yep, I'm based in Dublin. Have an investment financial planning business called Investwise, which is going 20 years this October. I'm working 30 years because I did 10 years before that in back office administration for hedge funds and originally Korean equity funds and all sorts of crazy stuff with J.P. Morgan. Yes, correct. St. Patrick's Day, 2004, was the day I saw the light and got the hell out of there when I left a J.P. Morgan office at 2o'clock in the morning for a beer and took a little career break and set up Investwise then in 2006, and we've been plugging away at financial planning ever since.
Nick Lincoln:Great stuff, great stuff. I know, I know, I know you. Watch thinks an awful lot of you, and I think the feelings are generally reciprocated. Absolutely, he's a poor judge in many ways, but in that kind of thing, he's a decent co. Well, Dave, great to have you on. Look forward to your contribution. Always good to get the Irish slant on live. So, Smithy Trap Forum, how's it coming along?
Alan Smith:Yeah, we mentioned this a couple of times before, as part of the ongoing evolution of the Real Advisor podcast and trying to share share the love, share the networking, share the honest feedback and ideas. We launched Trap forum, which is basically an online digital community where people can interact, ask questions, raise queries, and all that sort of thing. And it's been going well. We're up to we're almost 70 members now in the on the forum. It varies being honest in terms of activity. We probably all need to be on it a bit more to get a bit more interaction. But I think going forward, I think all of us get messages, emails, DMs on LinkedIn asking various queries and questions, and that's all well and good. But you're only ever going to get one-to-one kind of communication on that. Whereas it's better with a network. If someone's got a question or a. Query or something they've come up against that is almost certain they're not going to be the only one that's ever you know come up come up against that particular issue in the past. So it's far better done in an open forum, unless it's obviously confidential. And so we're going to be redirecting as many people as possible if they've got issues, queries, questions, things they want to share, ideas, new breakthroughs, things that they find interesting. Go to the forum. Sign up for the forum. The link is in the famous show notes, so-called show notes. So we'd like to see that number get up to 100. Once you get 100 in it, then it's likely to be a bit more interaction, a bit more community, a bit more queries and questions. And the great thing about it is, you can always track back and easily locate anything that's being asked. If you if you be able you'll be able to search really easily around different threads and different queries and questions, so it is all about the community. And the more people that join it, the more people that participate, the better it is for all of us. So please check it out. Click the link, sign up.
Nick Lincoln:Good stuff. Just adding adding on to that, we are planning to do I think certainly one sort of open town hall event on the on the on the Trap Forum where the four of us will be there for an hour or two just just shooting the facts and taking questions live. But that'll be exclusive to the people on the Trap Forum, and obviously everything that happens behind the Trap Forum is it's a walled garden. It is totally confidential. Your data is not sold on. It's not you know you are not the product with the Trap Forum. We've we've invested in a separate third party platform. We think it's Wizzo, and it'll just get better the more people join. Okay. By the way, Nick,
Alan Smith:that's what you've just done. That's a mixed metaphor. Do that on purpose. Shooting the fat or chewing the breeze. Chewing the breeze. Shooting the fat. There we go. We can shoot the fat if we want. We can chew the breeze. We do whatever.
Nick Lincoln:Okay. Moving on. Thank you. That's good to be corrected. God knows I've done it to you. And yes. So. Andy, Saturn Dome.
Andy Hart:Yes, so last week I went to the Saturn new offices in Liverpool Street. I think Alan's been there. They had the opening event. Lots of people there. Lots of team members of Saturn and users of Saturn. Nick, you were invited. Your absence was enjoyed, celebrated, celebrated. Yep. They had a couple of interviews on stage, and it was mentioned by one of the interviewees who runs a firm in Scotland that they provide full fat financial planning. So the the messages spread. Gone mainstream. Gone mainstream. It's it's an amazing building actually, and they've done a full renovation. It was in its history an old church and a synagogue, and now it's the Saturn Dome, the central place for the AI future of financial advice. They're going to have event space there. They're going to run events similar to other companies that we know, and they're also going to have an advisor co-working space downstairs where advisors can drop in, speak to other advisors. I think maybe maybe meet clients. So yeah, I thought I'd just mention it was a cracking cracking event. Yeah, that's it really. Just a very brief mention. Back to you, Nicholas.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, good stuff.
Alan Smith:So by the way, Saturn have just launched their operating system model and saw that advertised. Yes, thanks for using it, which mentioned on the last
Nick Lincoln:episode. So, a great health update from Dave Wild. Yeah, so in the our trap live happened back in May, our third one and our biggest and best, and it's always a learning curve for all of us. We had a had an attendee, a guy called Dave Wild. Well, he was going to attend, but he had to pull out with a health scare, quite a nasty health scare, and he gave his ticket away, and that was taken up obviously gleefully because it's a highly prestigious event to come to. Anyway, I've got got a got a tweet got an X whatever you want to call it from Dave Wild on the on the Advisor podcast channel. So we're on X as at Advisor Podcast. You can interact with us there. Anyway, Dave Wild said, "I got to mention at the very beginning of this, of this is referring to the recording of the live show. Very humbling to get a round of applause from a room full of people you've never met. Pleased to say, treatment done, and I got the all clear. What these four blokes are doing for financial planning in the UK is exceptional. So thank you for your kind words, Dave. But obviously, way more importantly, thank well, just thank God you're okay, and look forward to seeing you next year at Trap Live. If you hopefully you can come, so the good news, eh? I remember talking about that the events. It was quite a moving thing at the time, and that's a nice bow one. You can have a free ticket
Andy Hart:next year. Tell them to email me. You're welcome. Wow.
Alan Smith:Okay. What? Yeah. Nick explaining.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, it's a mumble. I couldn't really hear. And talking of health, you've got to be in relatively good health. I understand. Let's do something called a tough mudder, and we're doing a tough mudder, the Vanguard tough mudder, on the 18th of September. In the so-called show notes, there's a link to to join. You can join as a team. You can join as an individual, and you'll get teamed up. But the members of the trap will be there. Not perhaps all of us. Most of us, some of us there, covered in the
Alan Smith:important ones will be there. Nick, the important members. Yeah, the big
Nick Lincoln:cheeses, the top dogs, the head honchos, the big guys.
Alan Smith:Yeah,
Nick Lincoln:King of the Hill, Top Cats. Okay, right. Moving on. Smithy, are the. Wheels coming off at a certain very large vertically integrated sales force.
Alan Smith:Well, yes, this has been well publicized. You must have all read about this. Quite interesting. Our friends at St James's Place, SJP, well publicized that some of their biggest funders. Yeah, we we've come back. We've talked about SJP many times over this over the last few years in the podcast, and we say it as it is. But it's just an observation from the outside. Obviously, we have no no idea what's going on internally there, but you do see the information that's published, and quite a few. And this has never been really happened before, not at any scale, but some very significant practices, members, franchises, whatever you want to call them, at St James's Place, are have left have left one particularly big firm, which, if memory serves, has about 2 billion in assets under management, which is a sizeable vice business, three 3 billion. That's that was probably one of the biggest advice businesses in the country. I would have thought. Anyway, so they've
Andy Hart:they've
Alan Smith:departed, they've left, and then I just saw in the where is it in the City Wire magazine last week that two of the next sort of next level of significant firms have also left the firm, and it's just quite interesting. And I just put, are the wheels coming off at SJP? What we do know is they've changed a lot of their their structure. They've changed their charging structure for clients. They've also changed their compensation remuneration structure for advisors. Speaking to a few advisers that I know at SJP, initially the change was for the worst. They've now, I believe, come up with a slightly different model, different opportunity, and I think they're changing things. And I think they're going to pay some sort of bonus as next year, next in the spring of next year. Yeah. So those are just left are going to miss out on that. But then that's going to be. I think that's going to be the biggest sort of moment. That once because if if you were planning to leave, you're probably not going to leave right now. You're probably going to hang on to get this this windfall payment in March next year. Soderbergh seem to be just all over this. That you know they are just offering a safe home for people to. I guess you leave SJP and move into the independent sector. I get my understanding is Soderberg are private equity backed, but they are independent by definition. But they'll provide all the sort of structure and framework that if you've been at SJP, you would probably like to enjoy. But it will be interesting. We get a lot of sort of messages and whispers and direct messages from other SJP practices looking at their options, and it will be in the next 1218 months are going to be very significant for St James's Place. The share price has taken a big hit in recent times. It had a huge hit a year or so ago, or 18 months ago. Recovered quite well, but is now sort of under pressure again. So they are the biggest player. We talked about them a lot. They're you know massive operation. That what they do influences a lot of the things that go on in financial services in the UK, so it's just going to be interesting to see how things evolve over the next 12 months. Is either going to they're either going to come out of it stronger, or or they're really going to struggle if more and more of the bigger firms are going to depart? Any thoughts?
Nick Lincoln:Ultra.
Andy Hart:Yeah, you've covered most of the points, Alan. I think you are right. The next 12 to 18 months are going to be crucial. They've had a huge amount of change, and they have led with that change intentionally. There are going to be large firms that may continue to leave, as we've seen with these two. But there also be maybe firms that are joining them. So it's a bit of a revolving door. But my point, following on from your point, is Soderbergh. They are very, very aggressive now in the UK. They've recently purchased Benchmark Capital or Benchmark from Schroders because Schroders thought this is non-essential business for them. They're going to focus on asset management. I think they probably picked up that network for quite a bargain. And best practice is known for sorry, benchmark best practice are known for having slightly higher quality firms. So Soderberg are really really going for it at the moment. Yeah, as I say, I think they probably snapped up the Schroder sale for quite a bargain. So yeah, watch this space. But yeah, SJP are 20% of our workforce. So yeah, they're they're huge in the UK, as we as we said many times before. That's it.
Nick Lincoln:Okey dokey. Now, first contribution from our very special. Every time he
Andy Hart:talks, Nick. Every time he talks,
Nick Lincoln:Manford Man's finest moment. We
David Quinn:spent a lot of time listening to that when Niall Quinn was effective under Jack Charlton. We haven't had that kind of success in quite a while, I'm afraid.
Nick Lincoln:That's 30 years, Powers. Yeah,
David Quinn:that's the last time we had a decent football team.
Alan Smith:Don't talk about football.
David Quinn:Yeah.
Alan Smith:Over to you. Over to you, Dave. Let's just move forward. Thanks for
David Quinn:that. Yeah, the first piece I wanted to talk about is somebody that created amazing debate online in Ireland over the last few years. Retired actuary and pension activist by the name of Colin Fagan. He had a weekly news newspaper. Mainstream national newspaper article writing about his stock picking, he basically retired and took his defined benefit pension into a transfer value and invested the money in direct stocks himself, and has been very openly, you know, sharing his stock picks every every week and trading, and you know you you could argue the merits of that, but I think the debate he's been having with the Irish wider pension industry is about low cost equity investing in your pension and not investing into lifestyleing or investing into complicated multi asset funds and high fees. And he's he's been a brilliant voice in the market. I wouldn't agree with everything he says. I definitely wouldn't like to see clients going and holding their pension fund in 10 stocks that they've actively picked. It's very brave. He's done incredibly well. He's probably just barely behind the MSCI world, so he has done well. He's been very brave with picks, and he's had a lot of discipline and held on to some holdings, and he's done an outlier. Let's face it. But the debate he has created in the Irish market around keeping costs down, being disciplined, and having a really high equity content in your pension fund has been brilliant, and it's come up against a huge resistance, particularly on LinkedIn. He's every week on LinkedIn he's putting up something and getting huge pushback from the industry, you know, saying you really need to have these more expensive multi-asset funds in your, as we call AR. I'm sure you've heard Carl talk about the ARF, which is the drawdown pension structure here. And it's I'd encourage all Irish advisors to go and read Lincoln McCollum on LinkedIn and read his material because it's very thought provoking. And while you wouldn't agree with everything, and he's very strong in his opinions, he doesn't tolerate any kind of pushback that isn't well argued. But really interesting, probably just as interesting for UK listeners as well in terms of just that idea, which goes against a lot of what we would consider to be good investing into you know globally diversified index funds. He's a very focused, active investor, but the points he makes are well made and really interesting. And it's been very topical recently with what's been going on in the world.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, yeah, an interesting guy. I'm just looking at his looking at his LinkedIn profile. Sorry, I'm your hands raised.
Alan Smith:Yeah, I was just going to say that this reminds me of previous conversations we've had on this podcast. It is a recurring theme, and it's it's a source of frustration bordering on I don't know anger really about things like local government pension schemes and a lot of these and sort of big corporate pension structures, and every now and again something comes up. It's on in the newspapers or something. You lift the lid on it, and you find all sorts of just a mess of just dumb investments. I mean, there was one. When was it? A year or two ago? It was one of the like Kent Council local pensions. There was all sorts of weird solar farms and God knows what else. And of course, all went to zero, obviously, and it's just this. If you sort of again think more in more depth about it, why is this? Because you got, let's just say, a local authority or council in the UK, and they said, we've got you know half a billion or whatever it is in a pension fund. We're not experts, so we're going to hire somebody else. So you bring in these external consultants, who by definition have to justify their existence. So they say, allocate to this multi-asset hedge fund, private equity, you bloody name
Andy Hart:it. It's all ballers. Because
Alan Smith:if you really, it could. Because if they did, some of these big consulting firms came in and said, buy global equities, have a bit of cash, have a bit of bonds, and just let it run.
Nick Lincoln:They'll be out of work. Then they say, thanks
Alan Smith:very much. We don't need you anymore, and we've also highlighted. I think the classic on this is the if it's still the same, the Nevada Pension Fund, which again, however many billions it's got, is run by what's run by one guy. I think there's two of them now, two or three, because that's all he does is buy global equities in like the cheapest, cheapest fund, and it's the most successful, outperforms almost almost anything else, and these are the story. It's a real issue. We're talking about some of the challenges that are, you know, I'm sure broadly similar in Ireland, but certainly in the UK, you know, local government, local authorities, government in general is underfunded, and this is one quick win that you could save literally millions, 10s, hundreds of millions of pounds every year by not paying these expensive external consultants, and also by returning positive investment returns, and not bleeding away in ridiculous levels of fees and complexity, it's crazy. So your guy Column there, you know, he's obviously on the right track. He's going, he's he's taking it to another level in individual stock picking, and and I'm sure he's very good at it. 99.9% of other human beings are not as defined by the data which is published, but he's definitely on the right lines. It sounds like a worthwhile debate that he's he's leading over over in Ireland. Yeah,
Andy Hart:but he'll go and dive. He had his hand
Nick Lincoln:raised, Andy. Excuse
David Quinn:me. I'm only doing what Nick told me.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, no, no, good.
David Quinn:He. Really came to prominence recently because we just we just had auto enrollment introduced in January in Ireland, and he and Colm was lobbying the Irish government very heavily to invest the auto enrolled pooled funds that they gather up into equities and then smooth out their payments out to retirees and not use expensive fund managers to actively manage it, like you were saying, Alan. He was dead against that and lobbied really hard. He didn't. They didn't listen to him, but lobbied very hard to actually make the changes you just mentioned, Alan.
Andy Hart:Yeah, my final point. Yeah, nobody at the local authority gets fired for inviting 10 fancy-sounding name investment consultants in to pitch their BS. So again, they're all just trying to cover their ass. Why have they not studied and looked into the great success of the Nevada state pension system? That's the best in the world. If you said that to this local council in Kent or Birmingham or wherever else that's gone bankrupt, they would have never have heard of it. And they're in charge of real peoples, you know, local peoples, billions, hundreds of millions. It's insane, and
Alan Smith:it's everything comes back to that famous three-letter acronym OPM. It's other people's money. It's not their money. They get well paid for doing all these things. They no doubt get taken to nice lunches and golf matches and stuff with the consultants to win the business, and on it goes. They get a nice
Andy Hart:trip out in London every every quarter to be told some more BS on a beautiful looking you know deck. Anyway,
Alan Smith:absolutely right.
Nick Lincoln:If you suggested that to county councils, most of them wouldn't be able to find Nevada on the map. And when they found out it voted Trump in 2024, they'd have a fit and would just do another spy. But you made the point there. This it's just another rehash of this phrase that's eternal. You know, no one ever got fired for buying IBM, right? Exactly. The current iteration of that in in in in money terms, it is outrageous. There we go. Okie dokey.
Andy Hart:But sorry, just just to just to expand on this, why are the local authorities in charge of making investment decisions with hundreds stroke billions? Why isn't there a central, super simple team
Nick Lincoln:of talk? Talk of doing that. There is talk, isn't there? Yeah, but
Andy Hart:resources.
Alan Smith:But hold on, we have we've raised this as well in the past. Now, what is it? Is Nest? I think the the pension scheme, which itself is now. Then that's that's the auto enrolment in the UK, the kind of the the biggest one, I think, and they've gone public to say they're already allocating. I don't know, 1020, and they're ambitionists of 30% allocation to what they call private markets, private credit, private equity. I mean, what the hell is that? And these really are these are individual punters auto enrolled into their workplace pension scheme. Well, I mean, I just don't get. There's no data or evidence that supports that decision. What I don't understand why it's not getting pushed back upon, why people aren't being held accountable for these poor decisions. No,
Andy Hart:it's back to your famous quote, Alan. The upside's minimal, the downsides, you know, catastrophe. As in, there's going to be huge wipeouts of this, and if it does really well, and they get this extra point 3% who gives the monkeys? Go with what's always worked, rather than this new. But I think
Nick Lincoln:Alan's underlying point is more interesting. Is what? Why are they even considering this? It's like you know what? Because it's just what's happening.
Andy Hart:It's just Project Creep, Nick. Like Nest was perfect. It was done. We're sorted. We've got a clean vanilla investment solution for millions of no
Nick Lincoln:average work. I get that for you. But the evidence against private equity is so strong. It's such a non-compelling argument. Private markets. I mean, it's not. You don't have to look at it too hard to think this is a pile of crap. And and as ever, why are they trying to get the retail to buy it now? It's like you know VCTs. The stuff that comes to them, all the good stuff's gone by the time it goes out to the public. No, it's exactly retail sector.
David Quinn:It's a little like health and safety in that you start with a really simple, beautiful model, and then you add a little bit of complexity to it, and you never go backwards. It's only just adding and adding. And then people say,"Well, we had all that choice, and now you're telling us just to invest in global equities. What's wrong? You never see health and safety policies being reduced. No, and you know the thing. There was
Alan Smith:I read there was a great article in the Telegraph, I think today or yesterday, and it was talking about all this. This is like the what's you know British culture and stuff. Without getting too political here, but and it references that health and safety. As soon as you mention those words, health and safety, every rational person goes, "God, don't talk to me. But if you think about the actual the actual words are really positives, health and safety. These should be great things. We should all be embracing them. But because it's been done to death and over-engineered and layered upon layer upon layer, our immediate thought is, God, don't talk to me about
Nick Lincoln:it. And it's nuts. It's
Alan Smith:and it's and it's endemic, unfortunately, within society. We need to go right back to basics, first principles thinking. What are we trying to achieve here? What's the least complex way of achieving a successful outcome. Do that, move on. Auckland Razor as well.
Nick Lincoln:I think health and safety was rebarages ill and danger. It would be much far more fun, and I'd be up for it. So, Ultra, you've had another one of the experiences where you delve into a platform and get enmeshed in their in their regulatory guff.
Andy Hart:Yeah, for various reasons. My kids' jices are on another platform mainly because me and my ex-wife have access to this, so it's not under my direct remit. So it's an independent platform, anyway. So I set up young, you know, very smallish investments for my young children. But obviously, when you set these things up, you have to fill in an attitude to risk questionnaire on certain platforms, this is an attitude to risk questioner, just completely out of context, but it highlights the insanity of attitude to risk questionnaires in general. So I've got to fill in two attitude to risk questionnaires now every single year for my aging children. So I did it obviously when they were zero, and they said, "Well, who are we doing this for? Can't I just pick a fund. Obviously, I'm a professional insider, so I get an email, the dreaded email. We're going to basically freeze your accounts because we're a regulated firm, and you need to fill in this attitude to risk questionnaire for your six-year-olds. So I click on the link, I fill it in as best I can, the most extreme answers I can think of. I mean, then the question, the framing, you know, do you want a lot of volatility with your investments? Are you happy to see your investments aggressively decline? I mean, they're all just leading questions. Anyway, I filled it in. I got to the end of this attitude to risk question. It said some of your some of your answers don't match, and there's a bit of a misalignment. Therefore, we can't complete this attitude to risk questionnaire for you. So even if you answer it like a mad person or like a human, they don't let you complete it. So I went back, and there was maybe some misalignment. But again, our compliance functions when we set up investments for zero-year-olds, as in newborns, they still say there needs to be an attitude to risk on file, and it's like, well, who needs to complete it? The parent, as if they're the newborn. It makes no
Nick Lincoln:sense.
Andy Hart:But you can expand that out and say they they make little sense for anyone at any age. You know, you call you call attitude to risk questionnaires, mumbo jumbo questionnaires. I sometimes call them misconception mirrors. You know, I'm going to project your misconceptions back to you and then implement your misconceptions. Why work with an advisor if you're going to end up with a portfolio that's suboptimal because you filled in a form incorrectly or correctly is no correct way to complete them. Anyway, that was my minor point on that.
Alan Smith:Right. It's it's it's another example. Just that actually is a nice segue from the last conversation. It's you know corporate risk management. All this is we'll put up this boundary, this barrier. You'll self declare a whole bunch of shit, basically, so that you can never sue us. That that's kind of what they do. Oh no, you tick those boxes. Therefore, everything's done on you. And it's just another example. No one is creative and dynamic and human first. That's the trouble. This is why I keep coming back to people. Will always need good financial planners to translate this.
Andy Hart:I've never had to subject my clients to this insanity. Oh, you want to set up a you know a new investment for for your granddaughter? Okay, can you fill in this 27 you know question questionnaire about this newborn. It's just insane. Anyway,
Nick Lincoln:couple of points there. First one is one one question is for you, Quinny. So I'll come to you in a second. But talking of gysers and and and setting them up, literally this morning I had an email from a client following a planning meeting, and he wants to set up a they want to set up a gyser for their firstborn, their their baby daughter, and they are on the Fundment platform. Obviously, Fundment are friends of the show, but that's not influencing what I'm about to say. I went on the Fundment platform to set up this Jisa for their daughter. I did it literally in about 20 seconds. Amazing, and the client hasn't got to sign anything. You just put in the the newbie's name and date of birth and how are you paying into it? And you put them in the new
Andy Hart:private market fund that's just launched.
Nick Lincoln:I've gone them. I've gone them long in the private market. Cape Verde student accommodation traded endowment, longshore, USITS friendly offshore accumulation dividend payback fund. And the one you use for your clients.
David Quinn:It's good fund. Yep, the
Andy Hart:standard, the the go to
Alan Smith:default.
Nick Lincoln:Quinny, with with with your firm, you see you've got multiple RIs. Well, just very quickly, what's your attitude to what's your mumbo jumbo questionnaire process? Is it standardized? I hope it
David Quinn:is very standardized, and we we don't take huge amount of notice of it to be honest with you. But we we yeah we use it we use it as a guide. We tie it in with you know required returns from Voyant and lots of very in-depth conversations about what they want. Just it's too blunt a tool on its own, but you have to have it. It's you know it's an essential compliance requirement. Sometimes you can get. I I love when there's a big difference between a husband and wife. That's where I find them really useful. That's the only time I ever find them useful is if we do them separately, and the husband and wife have wildly different risk profiles. Then you can get something from that, maybe. But otherwise, it has to be a long conversation. Obviously, risk profiles are different for different parts of their finances. Sure, sure. You know. Kids' money might have a different risk profile to their pension fund, and you don't do the compliance departments. Don't expect you to do risk questionnaires for every single individual decisions, or the central bank don't. If
Andy Hart:you ask, yes, they would say yes.
David Quinn:Yeah, you know. So
Andy Hart:the answer is a risk profile, whatever the question
David Quinn:is. Yeah, yeah. So we do it, but it's a 10% of a much much bigger decision and discussion. I guess if even 10 for
Alan Smith:that interesting point you just highlighted there, Dave, in particular the difference between husband wife often on at this perceived attitude to risk and abuse risk very sort of in averted commas as it's because it's it's really widely misunderstood. But I'll just throw in a spontaneous comment. I don't know if you guys saw this. Was doing the rounds in the news in the last few days. Is a big survey, UGov, big survey, independent survey in the UK. 1000s of people of different socio-economic classes were surveyed, and the and one question, which if I remember it correctly, would you rather have a guaranteed 50,000 pounds now or toss of a coin a 5050 chance of winning 1 million pounds? Now, if you do the the maths on that, statistically you're far better off taking a risk and getting the. And I know it does depend if you've got not a pot to piss in. 50 grand could make all the difference, but it was across a wide range of people. But and so there's you can debate that all day long about kind of people's attitude to risk and bird in the hand versus what they might get and might might not get. But I thought it was what was particularly striking was there was very significant differences between male and female in the group, regardless of the socio economic class. Females, when asked, the vast majority, vast, vast majority said, "I'll take 50 grand now.
Andy Hart:But we are by default more risk seeking. We all know this. Males. The studies, yes. Yeah.
Nick Lincoln:I mean that that also comes back to the health and safety thing and how how the health and safety culture has just permeated everything. Now we just don't take risks. A a we're innumerable, and B we we don't take risk, which is C. While we're in the shit, okay. Let's just conscious of time, 33 minutes, because Tempus is fugiting along. We we all preach lifestyle financial planning, right? We're we're owners of our businesses. We say we we do this because we love what we do, but it also gives us so much latitude to live our lives and block out bits of time. For instance, I've now pretty much got August off because TLP, rather lovely Penelope. She's she's here around the house. Although, thank God, she's gone out shopping. So I've got some peace and quiet for an hour or so. If you're watching this, love, I'm only joking. All right, I'm only joking. mr. Quinn, you are a lifestyle financial planner. You are on a sabbatical. Do tell the trappists about this because I think this is really interesting, especially to business owners.
David Quinn:So it's not just me taking July and August off to play golf, although I have done a lot of golf actually. Business is 20 years this year, and I have always tried to stay as a lifestyle financial planner. Even as the business has grown, we've 10 nine staff now, and you know it's a decent sized business. But the team over the last year, the team have been. We've had lots and lots of discussions about succession planning, and as you know, lots of Irish firms are selling at the moment, and there's a lot of consolidation going on. And I don't want to get involved in that, really. I want. I'd love. I've been very open about saying I'd love internal succession, although the Irish system isn't set up for it really yet, but anyway, because I'm looking that way, I said, and my team agreed with me that for them to, for me to loosen the reins and let them have a little bit more ownership and responsibility and decision making capability, I had to disappear. There's no point in me being there in the office because they just keep asking me questions, which is great, not and to be encouraged, but I think it was just a great opportunity for me to step away. We had a couple of big projects. We're doing a rebrand and a new website and marketing program, and we have our accounts to complete. And I just wanted them to do that and take it on. And I needed a break as well. 20 years, you know, growing the business. I really just needed to freshen up and step away for a little while, and do a couple other things I really wanted to do, and you know, give me some energy for the next five years and the next phase of the business. And it's worked incredibly well. And I have actually more or less switched off. I haven't gone near the office. I haven't. I've been checking emails. They haven't been on to me. The only little glitch, and this is good for business continuity planning as well. If anything happened, the only little glitch was final authorization with the bank to get the staff paid. You know. Now I think they could have figured it out. I think they could have borrowed or something. You know, they came crying to me looking to get paid last month. I don't know if that was really was it worth disturbing me for that.
Alan Smith:In the middle of your backswing, come on.
Andy Hart:So 19th hole. Yeah.
David Quinn:So I relented and paid the payroll. But other than that, it's been. I hope. I hope it's been a great experience for the team. It's definitely been very rewarding. Just a lovely break for me to have some time with the kids and doing other things. So, yeah, and like I'm always saying this to my clients, you know, I'm 52. There's no point in waiting until you're 60 to enjoy life. You have to do it when you can. We and we had a client who we brought into a client lunch last year, who took a break from a big business in at 55 and sailed around the world with his kids, and came and hired a managing director to run the business while he was gone, and that was incredibly inspiring. And maybe that inspired me a little bit just to take this short break. Maybe I'll take a bigger break in the not too distant future, but it's been great, and I'd encourage everyone to do it.
Nick Lincoln:Superb.
Andy Hart:That was my ready day. Next year is the plan to do three months,
David Quinn:maybe,
Andy Hart:and then four months, and then five months. I mean, Smithy's been on a sabbatical for the last 10 years, and the the business has been flying. So I was, you know, the
Nick Lincoln:capital's gone from strength to strength.
Andy Hart:Yeah, yeah. That really changed their choice. When you literally, when you go in the office
Alan Smith:and they say, "Do you mind not coming in, please? Because we're we're really we're really busy. We're really busy. No,
David Quinn:if I can make myself obsolete, then then it is a proper business, I guess.
Alan Smith:Well, I I think that's that is the thing, Dave, and I really I admire and congratulate what you've done. And you're right, 20 years like nose to the grindstone building a business. I know it's hard and it's difficult and it consumes you and it takes a lot of your time. And I certainly spent a lot of time first decades building a business. Every time I went on holiday, like a week, two weeks holiday, I was on the phone and email every every single day, just connecting with the office, and and over time, and it's because, and I'm sure it's the same with your team, Dave. I'm I've managed to build a really really solid team of people who all interact with each other, and all the kind of operational stuff is literally done day to day, and so I can you know and and very intentionally will take time out and let them get on, and then you've got to sort of evolve your own role. It's another. It's maybe a whole conversation for another time. Identifying what your role going forward is because you move away from being an operator day to day, and whether I don't know whether you're still on the tools with clients and day day to day, you know, advising clients. But if you can sort of migrate yourself away from that, I think Carl's done that pretty successfully, intentionally, and then you know you're a founder, operator. You know you run a business, you're an entrepreneur at that stage, and I think that's the ideal way to be. And then you can easily take time off and sort of manage your life. Because you're right, who wants to just work the balls off for 25, 30 years and then collapse in the heat when they're 65 years old or something? You know, it should be. And we've got the ideal profession within which to do that.
David Quinn:I was amazed at the reaction from clients. Actually, I was expecting a flood of calls from clients saying, "Oh, oh, Dave, Dave, wait before you go, and universally really excited about it. And I guess saying I'm walking the walk maybe a bit, but actually universally delighted that I was gone. Now that maybe that's not a good thing. It was that was that was lovely to see.
Nick Lincoln:Right, right. Okay, thanks for that. Whose phone was that? I'm making a note. Right, Smithy. What time is that? Okay, fine. Nine minutes. I think I think
Andy Hart:there's a book in there, lads. The Obsolete Leader.
Alan Smith:Yeah. Can you? You're you're you're a best-selling author.
Nick Lincoln:Get get our AI to write another one for you, Andy, and we'll see how it goes.
Andy Hart:Yes, I like that. Thank you very much, boys.
Nick Lincoln:The obstinate bleeder. Okay, chapter one, Alan
Andy Hart:Smith
Nick Lincoln:on the obsolete. Right, property investing in the UK. Make this interesting. You will say that, Nicholas. Just you know, different points. Just go with the flow. So
Andy Hart:there's a couple of points here. I don't know. I'll get Dave's opinion on this in a minute. I probably about 10% of my clients are trying to sell properties at the moment. Usually investment properties. Is that a thing in Ireland at the moment, Dave? A lot of people selling because the numbers don't just stack up. Interest rates have gone up, and
David Quinn:yeah, it's an avalanche of private investors selling yet,
Andy Hart:absolutely okay. Well, the article specifically I mentioned is in the Times. A couple of points here because of the change in mortgage interest offset that happened many years ago in the UK. A lot of people now set up limited companies, buy-to-let companies, to structure their property ownership in, which adds another element level of complexity and hassle and ongoing administration, but they've released about 20% of property companies have been set up are predominantly non UK directors that set these companies up, and they've got the last 10 years actually of countries that these individuals are based from. So, from 2016 to 2019, Ireland was the number one foreign investors buying in the UK in the last four years in the UK. In order, it is currently this year it's India, Nigeria, and Ireland. There's still 1000s of these limited company. Businesses, property businesses, still being set up, but yeah, a couple a couple of moving points. Yeah, loads of clients are selling properties at the moment, and a lot of them are struggling, and the prices are have aggressively come down. But with property, they're generally sticky, and it takes a lot longer for these transactions to go through, and then the prices to really come down. So yeah, a lot of clients are doing that at the moment, but some people are still buying, but they're all structuring it in these limited companies. So yeah, not much more to say about that. But yeah, that's it. Over to you, Nicholas. Unless anyone has anything to say.
Nick Lincoln:Well, no, it's back to you, Andrew, because you have a little up, and you got a startup conference that you want to mention.
Andy Hart:Yes, I don't know if you know, but I run another business called Humans Under Management. It's a marketing and conference company. Anyway, I said a couple of episodes ago, I have some scholar team tickets, and they've all been swallowed up, which is great news. But I'm at the sort of final handful of tickets for London and South Africa, so please do grab your tickets. All the speakers have been agreed. Alan's helped me a lot with the speakers with his.
Alan Smith:You're welcome.
Andy Hart:Wide rolodex of of people that we have similar interest in. So yeah, close personal
Nick Lincoln:friends. What's the what's
Alan Smith:the date?
Andy Hart:Good question, Smithy. Let me check the date for London is the fourth of November and the date for Cape Town is the 22nd. I can't make that,
Alan Smith:Nick. Fourth of November out. Can't make it. Yeah,
Nick Lincoln:we've got anything, haven't
Alan Smith:we? Yeah, we've got. We're final called
Andy Hart:on this. Yeah, we got. I'm close to sell out, so if you're thinking about coming, please do come. We're going to put on a Kraken show. We've got lots of movies. Magnificent, Andy.
Nick Lincoln:The day seriously magnols. Thank you for this time.
Andy Hart:Thank you very much, Nicholas. Back to you.
Nick Lincoln:Good luck. So one of the things we've been talking about on track recently, and the FCA has kind of got involved in this a little bit and has kind of relaxed its stance. Is what do you do with clients that aren't involved, aren't getting involved in the process, the planning process? They're paying you a fee. You are making the invite to them every six months or every year, whatever your cadence is, to say, hey, let's get together and just look at your financial plan and just update things because this is good for all of us in this relationship to do that. What do you do with those clients that don't respond? And I had this with these clients, and they haven't responded for the last couple of years. Silently, they they they docu sign the client agreement letter, and then there's nothing. And these clients, like most of my clients, were referred to me, and they were referred to me by one of my best clients, a guy I really like. I like his family, and financially, he's really on it as well, and so I was getting to the stage with with these people that he'd referred to me where I was going to I've got to kind of let them go, I think, because this just isn't working. So I went back to the referee, James is his name, and said, James, listen, I know you're friends with with X and Y, but I just let you know I'm thinking about I've got to sort of cut the cord here because they're just not responding. If you if you happen to speak to them, would you just raise? Is there a problem with Nick Lincoln? One of many problems, but is there a particular problem with the with with Nick Lincoln and and you guys? And he did that with a WhatsApp chat, and straight away the clients came back to me and said, Nick, we're really busy here at RN. We still want you to be our our advisor. We just haven't got round to it. So I went back to them said, okay, I'm going to now put you on like a three-year cadence here. I'm going to get in touch with you every three years now, and if you want to have an ad hoc planning meeting any time in between those three years, by all means, come come to me. If and I'll drive the relationship from my end proactively, to use a terrible term. But if something happens in terms of legislation or taxation that I think impacts on you guys, I will be on the front foot and drive it. But for the minute we're going to park this now. We're going to change it to a three-year touch point cycle, and they're massively happy with that. Now I'm sure that somewhere the FCA, which has got more relaxed about this, by the way, they they have recently pulled back from saying you don't have to have annual reviews. By the way, as long as you're quite clear what you are doing for the client and what the costs are. So that's how I've handled this. I've gone from trying to get an annual touch point to go into a three-year one, I don't want to lose them as clients, but I don't want to engage with people that aren't engaging with me. So if they're happy with a three-year touch, as they get older and as life speeds up, hopefully they'll come to a more, a more, a more rapid series of us interacting. But that's just how I handled that. But it was just made more tricky by the fact these people were referred to me by such a good client, who in himself was referred to me by his parents, who are still with me, who I also like a lot. So there's a lot of moving parts with this stuff when you get referred clients. You know, it's not just about the numbers and everything else. You've got to think of, you know, you've got to turn your empathy button on, Andy, which is under the desk views, plugged in by your ankle. Just turn that on and just just think about where these things are going. So that, what do you think? Do you think going to three year? I know some of you are probably thinking, well, you've got to charge your change your fees, Nick. I have a different client agreement. I haven't done any of that bollocks. I've just said we're going from one year to three year, but I'm here for you if you want to meet between the three years.
Andy Hart:I've got a couple of questions for you, Nick. And yes, you have to approach these with a lot of common sense. You said you don't want to lose them as clients. That's my first question. I've got a few. Answer it as openly or as close as you wish to. Why do you not want to lose them as clients if they're not engaged with your process?
Nick Lincoln:Because they're nice people and they are paying me, and I've already done the hard work, which is the onboarding and the the tidying up of their pensions and everything else, and the initial financial plan and the ongoing planning. They're good people. They're just they're just very. They're also in. They're both self employed, so. They're not, you know, they their their incomes fluctuate wildly, you know. If they try to have a little break and focus on their businesses and then come back to me in three years' time, and I like them, but there is also a thing, Andy, because they're referred to me, you do for the duty of care. That's an element that doesn't
Andy Hart:mix. My next question was, yeah, what stage of life are they like? As in, would they benefit from touch points if they're 82 widowed? Life is super simple. If they're 5152, got mortgages, kids, stuff going on, then
Nick Lincoln:they're in their early 40s, pal. They're in their early 40s.
Andy Hart:Okay, interesting. And final question: Are you looking after a decent amount of money for them? As in, like it's no, not
Nick Lincoln:especially, no.
Andy Hart:Okay, fine.
Nick Lincoln:No, they're they're accumulators who who
Andy Hart:okay
Nick Lincoln:who have turned down the accumulating tap as their business incomes have fluctuated in recent years.
Andy Hart:Okay, so did they start off with a yes? We're happy to commit to X 1000s per month on the on the contribution scale, and it just scaled down.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah,
Andy Hart:classic. Okay, thank you,
Alan Smith:Nick. I think what you've done is spot on. I think it's really it's the correct way to approach it. You've been candid, open, transparent. You've asked them. You you are prepared to step away from it. You're not sort of hoarding, you know, holding on to these clients. You know, desperately just keep the revenue and and and like has been documented in other companies up and down the country the last couple of years, and I think it's a very refreshing approach. You just kind of contact them, reach out to them, and find out what what the issue was. And they said,"Look, and that's what we must recognize. This is our job. It's what we do full time. To most of our clients, it's just another piece of admin that they need to take care of. And some, especially if you're running a business or two businesses, in their case, it's like Jesus, I just haven't got the. I haven't got the time right now.
Andy Hart:I push back on that, Alan. Not most of our clients don't have time to have an annual planning meeting, and Nick is super efficient. So Nick would probably get it done in 45 minutes. But there might be something he could tell them that could save them 10,000 pounds. Well, just throwing it out there.
Alan Smith:True. Well, and that just leads me to my other question, and maybe doesn't really apply in this case. So obviously, we've gone through this in the past, and what we used to do was what we call an in absentia meeting. So not replying, not replying, not reply. We're just going to have the meeting anyway. In other words, we're going to make you know whatever you're supposed to do. You know, look at the have they maximized ICE allowances? You know, this sort of traditional checklist that you might go through, and we would do that anyway and send it to them based on or the the information that we knew, you know, currently know hasn't been updated, obviously. And what would happen then is they'd come back to you about six months later and say, "Right, I'm ready now, and you end up doing two, effectively two financial planning reviews, which is also suboptimal. So the way to do it is the way Nick's done it. But that's my only question: is there are usually, you know, not hundreds of things, but there's a checklist of things to be done. Whether it's capital gains tax, ICE allowances, pension allocations, rebalancing-you name it. How do you manage that if there's zero engagement?
Nick Lincoln:Yeah. Okay. Interesting. These clients don't have. They are so uncomplicated. Okay. There's no capital gains stuff. There's no buy to let's
David Quinn:element.
Nick Lincoln:You know they're just they're just paying off their mortgage. They were paying into their pensions. They were paying for, and that was it. They're just very very low maintenance clients. And I don't think there's in terms of checklists and make sure they do everything. If you've got clients with capital pregnant capital gains, you're bed and breakfasting stuff from one wrapper to another, and you're setting up an emergency bucket because they're about to go into the saving stage, although that is a full-on financial planning relationship, and there's no way, as Andy said, as for someone in retirement, that would be acceptable. And funnily enough, most clients in the spending stage want to engage with you because every year they they want to just know they're okay, right? But these clients, it's like financial independence days away down the line. We know Nick's there if we need him. He'll soon get in contact every three years, and we know that Nick will be on the front foot with us if he thinks that he needs to get in touch with us about something that pertains to our situation.
David Quinn:Yeah, very very quick observation on that is it shows how much our clients value the peace of mind of just having us there in their corner and maybe just paying attention, and you know that that peace of mind it shows how much of our fee is just represented by that, and that the fact that they're willing to sit there and not engage with you, but yet they still want you in their corner, shows the the value of that part of our service. I guess.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, thank you.
Andy Hart:My my final point, Nick, is I might have got personally a bit annoyed about that. I've tried to make contact with them two or three times, email, WhatsApp, whatever. They've ignored me. I then contact a mate of theirs. They contact them, then they get back to me. I would have got a little bit personally pissed off about that. Probably this this whole thing about don't get personal in business, it doesn't quite exist. But I think the element in your situation, is they've been referred to by one of your top clients, so that's why you're sort of keeping this all within house.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, Andrew. If if if they hadn't been, or they were referred to me by someone who I'm not that particularly close to, or has no longer a client, I'd have told them to buck her off, and it would have been a you know see a no you know not I yeah I am annoyed. Because I like getting things ticked off my to-do list, right? And I had this planning meeting, just not getting. It was like it was overdue, flashing at me every day on the screen. That's I love just getting that stuff off my off my screen onto the next onto the next task. I'm very task driven, so that's where it was annoying for me. But definitely, if this if these couple weren't referred to by this this guy James, who is just just a really interesting guy, lovely families, parents are great. I just had to just go a little bit further than perhaps I would do normally. Okay, thanks, guys. Thanks for your time on that one. So, Christ, 52 minutes. Shoot me. Who's next in the in the doom loop? Oh, Quinn, Whoop versus Garmin. Come on, make it sexy, Daddy.
David Quinn:Very quick one. This really struck me when I read it over the weekend. Whoop is the fancy, silly arm fitness gadget that doesn't do anything. It just tells you later on what how you were during the day. Is that is
Andy Hart:that Whoop strap line? Whoop is the fiddly, yeah, stupid.
David Quinn:I think it is. I think it is. I think I read it on their marketing material. Well, Fitbit have got
Nick Lincoln:one now, haven't they? Fitbit, the Fitbit one is just a band with nothing on it, so I think it's and the
David Quinn:Tour de France guys have them, and Rory McIlroy is an investor in the whole business, blahdy blahdy blah. And their business model is that the the band itself is really cheap, and you pay a subscription for this online service which analyzes the data and gives you some scary figures if you didn't sleep enough, but Garmin last week came out with a quite an expensive watch that does it all, but with no subscription. So you just buy the watch, you get all the data for free online. So that has really threatened Whoops recurring income business model, which we all love. Our recurring income business models.
Nick Lincoln:That's a big change.
David Quinn:I found this to be fascinating. Like, there's some parallels to our business, I guess. But it's
Nick Lincoln:what does it cost, Dave? Is like, is it like 30 grand for the thing?
David Quinn:No, it's not. It's. I guess the. I think the Whoop is maybe 100 euros, and maybe the Garmin is 300, something like that.
Nick Lincoln:Okay. Garmin
David Quinn:are in the business of selling
Andy Hart:physical products,
David Quinn:physical tech, and Whoop are in the business of a subscription-based online service, and one has just wiped out the other. It's very interesting to see what Whoop do to defend against it, but I just found that really fascinating. Brilliant, quick, brilliant. The
Nick Lincoln:market, the market will work it out. Smithy,
Alan Smith:well, through you know, for many many years, you know, as technology comes along and there's new versions of it, and you know, I'm reminded. In fact, when I come into Culture Corner, I'm going to refer to some other piece of technology that seems to have superseded previous technology. But I used to have many years ago. Do you ever when I was driving around a thing called TomTom? Do you ever have that? TomTom is like a satellite navigation, right? Sat nav, and then Google Maps just come out on your phone, and and it it was the thing is, if something else is 80% as good as the thing you're paying a lot of money for, then it's good enough. Mostly, it's not Google Maps was never quite as good as TomTom, but it's good enough, and I think that is yeah, yeah. I think so. Or or then Waze came out as an app. Waze, yeah,
David Quinn:Waze, Waze, yeah,
Alan Smith:which is much more detailed and pretty good. It's just an app, and it was kind of it was whatever. It's cheap or free, and this is the thing when you've got, and look, I think a lot of these AI companies in in every vertical, every industry in financial services for sure, they are launching these products and services that in future will become a feature of some other organization. They just sort of launch them. Just you know, someone's doing something and said, "Well, now we can do meeting note recording for something for free as part of a larger package and so on. So you've just disrupted, and so this is another example moving from. And you're right. That's where the value. That's where, frankly, most of the value is in financial planning companies. It's the stickiness of the clients and the recurring revenue. But I guess the point being that we are sort of in a very dynamic environment where things are changing, ongoing, and we've got the. And we must keep talking about the human experience, the human element. Whereas these organ, what you've talked about there, Dave, is data. Is simply data. That's all the person is is buying, and whether you get it by one-off payments or by monthly subs, I think most people will be happy just to do a one-off payment. So, so you're right. It's going to be interesting for those two organizations.
Andy Hart:Do you have a Whoop or Garmin, Dave, or Apple Watch? Would you have?
David Quinn:No, I had a Fitbit, and it has died on me. They were notoriously fragile, and I haven't replaced it. Actually, I I really enjoyed having the Fitbit. It just kind of kept me honest with exercise. Yeah, but I I haven't replaced it, and I I'm kind of in the market for something. So maybe the Garmin would be the way to go now.
Andy Hart:What cheap thing do you have in your wrist, Nick?
Nick Lincoln:I have a Fitbit, my friend. I have the Fitbit, the most basic one with a big time, so I can actually bloody read the thing. It's telling me it's 3o'clock UK time, which means we must crack on onto the next point because we are nearly at the hour mark on episode 102, The Eni Dos of Ti Erape. Let's move on. Who is next? Oh, good grief! Yeah, can't ultra.
Andy Hart:I think this is quite interesting, especially the new world we're entering in. The article is entitled "Inheritance Tax Police After Your Wealth. Here's how to stop them. It's basically the increase of HMRC investigations, specifically in relation to inheritance tax. There's a lot of electronic AI software that's going to come into the mix with this, with payments being transferred between families prior to people passing away. There's going to be a lot of alerts. So last year there was 4000 905,000 investigations in tax year 2025 26. Five years ago there were three and a half 1000. Last year there were 5000. So the investigations are on the rise. The thing that's quite interesting is the tax recovery has stayed quite flat at about 250,000. The next question then
is:It's a government department. They've recovered 250 million. They've launched 5000 investigations. How many investigators? How big are the team? What is the cost? Is the cost to recover the 250,000,400, 50 million, and there's a net 200 million pound loss here, which happens with a lot of government departments. So it doesn't seem like they're recovering that much money. But specific to us as practicing financial advisors, I try and keep a good grasp with my clients with gift registered timings. You know all of the information around various gifts that they've made, but certainly with the new rules coming in around pensions, our ducks have to be a little bit more in row, the eyes crossed and the T's dotted again. You know reasons for having a full fat financial planner that can help you every single year. So the investigations are apparently going to be going up. The tax take has not really moved. So for example, in 2021 they recovered 326 million and they only did 4000 investigations. Whereas last year they did 5000 investigations and it was only about 260 million. So, anyway, point to note for Braxton
financial advisors:just keep your records a bit tighter, Smithy.
Nick Lincoln:Well, his hand was raised, but before he didn't lower it. So, I will go. As I said at Trap Live in May last May, what are we now? This year. Sorry. This thing about pensions in April 2027, it changes the whole thing about pension consolidation advice. Agreed. Knocks into a into the front door. Thank you. Tell me someone to the front door, Google. It knocks into a cock hat, and I just get the consolidating those pensions for whatever reason you can, unless the pension's got like GMP or guaranteed annuity rates in it, or something like that, something arcane or protected tax-free cash amount. No policies written in the last 30 years have had any of that stuff. Really, just be consolidating those pensions because you do not want to be dealing with multiple insurance companies when you're a personal representative of someone's estate. Yeah, exactly the most enormous bull ache in the world, and it's it's a brilliant reason to consolidate pensions onto your platform of choice and just do it yesterday. And it's a red line for me now. With new clients, prospects, they they will be told out say you will be consolidating these pensions. Yes, I'll look at the charges and make reference to it in the suitable letter. But that's so far down the line of priorities. Get consolidating these pots because there's a shit show coming down the line.
Andy Hart:I yeah, just I echo your point, so Nick. But I had a recent one, even with transact, as in the client dies, and it was still quite convoluted. All the executives need to be ID'd. They do a lot of thorough research into it. So God knows how tedious. Imagine you had to do
Alan Smith:that across 10 different pension providers with Phoenix and
Nick Lincoln:Reassure. Yeah, Abedin, you know, because we're giving them an issue recently. It
Andy Hart:was quite painful with Transact, and you know they're obviously, and they're one of the best, covering all their bases. But yeah, it's going to be torturous with some other platforms. We will all find out post April 2027, and it'll all be in the Trap Forum link in the show notes. We can all discuss this stuff. ABC, ABC,
Nick Lincoln:there, ABC. Okay, let's let's couple of final points, and then down to you, storyteller.
Alan Smith:Have you got to go down to your door first, Nick, or have you got
Nick Lincoln:one of your servants? My man, my man will put something in the west. If it's a package, it goes in the west wing.
Alan Smith:Okay, well done. That's good. I wanted to shout out this an article I read the other day in the Times. Saw a person that the the author of it. You might know her, Andrew Eliza Philby, the author of Inheritocracy, it's time to talk about the bank of mum and dad. Sounds that sort of person that would speak at your. You read the book, okay? Read
Andy Hart:the book. Yeah,
Alan Smith:speaking at Hum, but she is a quite an interesting article with lots of data because the it's the article. It's about this so-called. We've talked about it before. This wealth transfer. The title of the article is "The Great Wealth Transfer Has Started to Unravel, because we talked about in the past. There's countless articles about this, the great wealth transfer. What our advisors doing about it, and we were kind of, I think, we were quite neutral about it, saying, "Well, it'll happen over time. And but the data now, and as. Obviously, it's symptomatic of, I guess, the current economy and how difficult it is for younger people. But the age at which parents are transferring money and wealth to their children, the age of the parents has come down significantly. The age of the recipients has clearly come down significantly. Often, the next generation wasn't receiving funds until they were maybe in their 50s, and it's now much much younger, and the follow-on from that that she was referring, she's kind of tying it up with with AI and some of the data around the amount of people who now we again you've mentioned it before, Nick, about your existing clients checking out your advice, and more and more people are, and particularly younger people. So somebody in their 20s to 30s, because their parents want to help them out, they are recipients of these funds. They are straight on Claude and Chat GPT. The data is very compelling about about that, and they're asking things. But the the the sort of the the conclusion of the article, which is worth reading, is that even this sort of next generation of recipients of this wealth, they still prioritize and highlight and and welcome the value of a human advisor in the mix as well. They get the basic stuff done done, which is it doesn't really change from Google days. You could get information from Google for donkey's years, can't you? But they are you know they're throwing all the stuff or the information in from mum and Dad's portfolio and pensions, and say, and they're about to receive money. What do you think about this, ChatGPT? And then they're kind of receiving the money, but but the point being that that generation hasn't. It's not the money is invested; it's then paid into, paid down loans, debts, helping them. The next generation they've got far more complex lives than the previous, the kind of baby baby boomer generation, who tended to work for companies for decades, build a pension. They rode the bandwagon of property prices going up. It's just that the point of the article is it's a very different market, and we all have to be prepared for it if you want to stay successful as this wealth generation increases. Okay.
Andy Hart:Yeah. Ultra good points. Yeah. There's a couple of moving parts here. The only thing I will say specifically about AI, I think more of our clients' children will be challenging our advice in the future. We may have looked after parents, mum, dads. They might be in 60s, 70s, and their kids will be throwing everything that we've ever done for them into AI, and that's their right, I believe. So then, and then you've got the situation where kid who's got a little bit of knowledge is going to the parents. Oh, I found out something's you know. By the by, here, I think you should approach your advisor and you know discuss whatever. I mean, I'm totally up for any of my you know investment portfolios, financial plans being thrown into AI, and my clients challenging things. I'm more than happy to speak to the children, but this is going to happen. Be on the front foot, and just being on the front foot. I put my own client agreement into AI last week. I said, challenge this client agreement as if I'm a client. Tell me what are the issues, what the problems. I'm flattered. thought my I thought I thought my client agreement was quite decent. I'm on version 21. It ripped it apart, and a lot of the things it picked up on, I wasn't concerned about. But a few things I picked up, and I thought Ali got a good point there. It did say that the main issue was I'm sort of merging a marketing document with a legal agreement because I thought if it's just boring, boring legal agreement, that's not very attractive. So I'm going to add in a bit more sort of narrative to my client agreement, and it said no, that's that that that's a bit of an issue, you know. And I'm and I'm making claims in there that can be unsubstantiated. Various other things. Anyway, it's just worth doing it because our clients are going to do it anyway. So be on the front foot. All of you listening to this, put your client agreement in ChatGPT or whatever AI of choice you use, and say, rip this apart. This is my company. Assume I've sent this to a prospective client. What would they pick up as being an issue? And obviously, they focus on fees compared to others, loads of other stuff. Anyway, do it, please.
Alan Smith:That's one of your most valuable contributions, Andrew. For a long time, it's just got me thinking because exactly that way of thinking. Some years ago, we looked at traditional terms of business client agreements and thought, man, they are so. Even the word terms of business sounds, or client agreement, just sounds. So we renamed it. We called it"Doing Business Together, and we made it like a glossy. It was really, really nice and highly personalized. We put an image of it front on reflecting the, and now marketing brochures. And you're right. Maybe they're not serving the. Maybe this just supposed to be a boring legal document. And just do
Andy Hart:it. Yeah, I think the more creative and the better firms will get more ripped apart via radio. Again, it's just a starting point. It's not as if we're going to read the top 10 points of feedback and then implement all of them. Again, it's human interpretation, but it is definitely worth doing.
Alan Smith:All right, I can see Nick's getting very very edgy. Last. Shout out! I just want to mention I wasn't here for the last recording of the Real Advisor podcast, and Lisa Johnson did a sterling job in my stead.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, she was great.
Alan Smith:And so, and the one the reason that I wasn't because I was away traveling on and on holiday, and we don't care. We don't
Nick Lincoln:care. We don't care. And I spent a day
Alan Smith:with a previous guest on the podcast, mr. Marmite himself, the other mr. Marmite, not just Nick Lincoln, Paul Armsen, and I was sailing on his yacht around the Aegean coast. Spent a day, fantastic, fantastic. The yacht is cold, spellbound. It's a beautiful oyster, like the Rolls Royce of sailing yachts, and and we did great time. Just you know, shooting the breeze, shooting the fat, chewing the breeze, whatever we're doing. And he just, and I just, I said to him, I give him a shout out because he is, he is running his inspiring advisors afloat, which is a group of what does he get on about five or six advisors gets together. You do it. You have you spend a week sailing around the Aegean coast and literally chewing the fat and shooting the breeze, few gin and tonics in the evening, and it's a very sort of proactive. I did the, I think the first one or the first first or second one many years ago, and he's sort of redoing it again. I'll put a link in the show notes. If anyone's interested in spending a few days sailing with some like-minded, ambitious financial planners, check out Inspiring Advisors Afloat, hosted by the one and only mr. Paul Armson. I thank you.
Andy Hart:Are you going on that, Alan, or is that you just mentioning it?
Alan Smith:Just mentioning it.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, I've already been. I
Alan Smith:can't. You can't.
Nick Lincoln:If um, if just come back to the previous point, I'm very flat that Andy's follow my path. In episode 100, episode three, and I discuss putting my terms of business through AI, and it is, it is, yeah, it's very early. You've been
Andy Hart:to Tenerife. Nick's been to Elevenerie. Alan's been to 12. Well, it's all recorded,
Nick Lincoln:and it's all sequential, so people can draw their own conclusions. Right, let's go to the next section of the show, which is called the meat and potatoes. This is where we take a subject and give it a damn good thrashing. And the subject of this episode, episode 102, is that of recruitment. Now, some of you will die internally when you hear that word, because it's not perhaps a sector that has the greatest reputation, but there are in the rough there are some diamonds, and we think we found found a diamond. So, firstly, Alan, if you give the next interview a very quick background, 20 seconds on who we're going to listen to in a second, and then we will play his recording with you.
Alan Smith:Yes, we've referred to him a couple of times on the podcast before, but his name is James Barden, and James Barden runs his own, effectively, a recruitment consultancy, recruitment business, where he helps ambitious financial planners find their home, find a place with a good, proper, full-fat financial planning company, and helps those financial planning companies identify some great candidates. So, this has come up a lot on the podcast over the last couple of years, and we thought, look, let's get him on. Let's have a chat with him about the current landscape, what he's seeing, why he does what he does, the sort of firms he works best with, some of the challenges that he sees and experiences. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my conversation with mr. James Barden. James Barden, welcome to the Real Advisor podcast. Good to see you
Unknown:and yourself, Alan. It's been a while.
Alan Smith:It's it's been a while. Now, James, we wanted to do a short excerpt on this specific subject. So, in order to set the scene, why don't you tell me a little bit about about yourself and and what you
Unknown:do? Okay, James Barden. Been running the FIMS consultancy now for 13 years. I've been in financial planning recruitment for 20 years. Prior to that, like yourself, I was working for Standard Life Direct Custom Revision as an advisor. I think youngest in the UK, 2324, back in the early mid 90s. Did that for five or six years. Went and became an IFA. Was an RI of a couple of different ARs, and I suppose I just got fed up of the industry. I thought I'd come back to it, but it was a case of it wasn't financial advice at the time. It was just product sales, and it was a hamster on a wheel. It's like you know, go and see somebody, invest a few 100,000 pounds, earn 10 grand, go and play lots of golf, and and back at it, and it was like, no, I I don't like this. You know, it was it was the 90s, the early 90s, and I I just took a step back, spoke to a couple of recruiters. What am I going to do next? Looked at bank assurance as well as as a different route in advice. I thought I'm just not sure where I'm going with this, and I didn't find the recruiters very helpful. So okay, maybe I can do that because I've got a good network. I've always been a good network, so I've got a network of advisors. I understand. The industry. Let's go from there.
Alan Smith:So you are a a recruitment consultant. In in in summary, you you you help people, you help employers and employees. You know, match, find work, get into the right the right business. It's interesting because you sort of poach your turn, gamekeeper, and you you've actually done the job and in all sorts of different guises, so you kind of understand the the mechanics and and and the culture. And talking about culture, I'd like to ask you because when you and I spoke before, you you were explaining to me that you you don't really deal with sort of the large consolidators in terms of you know finding advisors and helping fit them. But you you generally deal with the smaller boutique, what we like to call full fat financial planning firms, is is is that how you position yourself?
Unknown:Absolutely, 100% When I started in recruitment, I worked for a large national, and because all of my friends, it was a time where Standard Life made a load of redundancies, advices. and they were all looking for work, and none of them wanted the corporate lifestyle, and they'd had that for so many years, and it was well, what's different? So I just started making phone calls, and I was speaking to advisory companies that I'd worked for previously, or you know, you know, small owner managed businesses, and I just felt more comfortable there. Instead of getting a CV, sending it to HR and and waiting, not being able to direct to candidates to you know what's going to happen next, how is this process going to work? Because it was very much sort of like a supermarket sweep, you know. It was really, really. I don't. It wasn't great. So I then got headhunted to move to another national with the promise of heading up a division, doing this, blah blah blah. That didn't last long at all, because they were a large national and they didn't want to really recognize what I did. So I ended up going to a much more bespoke and boutique company where they just said, "Do what you do, and then yeah. So I'm, I'm working with clients that have you know strong recurring income models, high advisor retention, you know clear client propositions, you know, advisors do want some direction, but they also want the ability to have some flexibility, and be accountable for the advice I provide the clients, so you know not freaking a product off the shelf. And I one of the difficulties I find with the larger corporates as well is, yeah, I I've got no problem with a centralized investment proposition at all. You know, it's it's managing risk, it's keeping the the FCA happy, but clients don't fit one model. We're all individuals, and these advisory practices that have this one model because it keeps two and a half 1000 advisors happy, and it keeps the mass affluent market with affordable advice, yeah, it sort of works. But we talk about AI, and I truly believe that mass market financial advice and mass affiliate market is is is is coming to an end. I I really do because it's not relationship related anymore. It's more about this is your product. This is what it does for you. This is its performance. Yes, it matches your risk. And at the moment, they've got inexperienced advisors going out looking after 250 clients. They're not planning,
Alan Smith:right?
Unknown:They're just they're just a compliance function.
Alan Smith:This this to me is this this this is the key difference. I mean, over since trap started, we all of us get a fair amount of inbound. You know, you've got you've got advisors who've tuned in and listened to, and of course we, as as we often say, we we agree as a as a group of four of us, we agree on a lot of things. We disagree on some things, which probably makes it more interesting. If we agreed in everything, it'd be boring. But when we get people approaching us and saying, "Look, I hear what you say. We don't do this in my firm. We don't do the proper financial planning. We we kind of shoehorn. We've been told to shoehorn our clients into the whatever is the sort of the the in-house model, which is expensive and underperforming, etc. etc. And so they say to us,"Do you know any firms that do this? And the difficulty is, of course, I know a number of other financial planning firms, but I don't know. I don't know them intimately. I don't know what they do inside the business. Are you able to identify proper firms that really do proper financial planning? They've got a sensible investment proposition that look after their advisors. How can you identify those in advance?
Unknown:A lot of it is recommendation. I'm targeting advisors. I've got a set of clients, and I have obviously every other company is a resource. Obviously, not Capital Partners or any of your guys. Obviously, that would be ridiculous. But yeah, so I'm just constantly talking to advisors, and it's not just about who you work for. It's who have you seen previously? What companies do you rate? Why did you interview with them? What attracted you to them? Why didn't you move to them?
Alan Smith:Okay.
Unknown:What you know? What were the problem? What were the good things about that company? So in 20 years, you sort of you get a feel for it. I just know so many people, and you also track where they go. So I'm always mapping the market because AI is fantastic if used correctly. If not, it's it's a scourge. I I was doing some work the other day, and it it it sense it was going to send a message to say your experience in lacrosse really puts you at the forefront of our of our of our of our clients' thoughts.
Alan Smith:Interesting, yeah,
Unknown:yeah. So
Alan Smith:so it's really just your own experience. It's sort of market intel, just working with people year after year. You know the better firms,
Unknown:and you know what they do, and also when I'm searching, if I'm working with a candidate, yeah, and when I'm working with a candidate, then you know I'll have an area and searching for the keywords in people's on their websites in all their marketing literature, you know, lifestyle, financial planning, evidence based. Nobody uses the words full fat financial planning like we do. Not yet. Not yet. It's coming on their website, but yeah, you know, cash flow modeling, lifestyle financial planning, those keywords. AI can search for those for Me, yeah. Then you have to discuss culture because there's four and a half 1000 advisory practices out there, 28,000 advisors, rough numbers, granted, but there are probably only a handful, a few 100 that really do the job as you and I would recognize in the correct way,
Alan Smith:I think this is the the key thing. I got to say, my own experience. I've looked at a few other advisor websites, and they do talk a good game. But I've spoken to people who are working inside them, and it's it does. There's a bit of a disconnect, to be fair. So I think this is the nuance. This is where it's, and I guess this is where your experience is is invaluable.
Unknown:It is there. There are two cultures to a lot of companies, unfortunately. One is the public culture, the face of the company, and then one is the lived-in culture. You know, because a lot of times as well, I I might speak to an advisor, and their boxes are are ticked with who they're seeing before they speak to me. Sometimes they might have had a trusted recruiter for 10 or 15 years, and you know they're with all the companies that I would recommend them to go to. Now, in that instance, I still can add value because I can't place everybody. If I could place everybody I spoke to, I'd be multimillionaire. I'm not. So it's well, I know somebody within that company, or I know somebody that has previously worked at that company. Would you like to speak to them? Obviously, I have to get permissions, but and I'll just introduce people, and and from there, you know, it just it's increasing somebody's knowledge. So, both clients and advisors have to have as much knowledge about each other as they can. Because looking to the the naughties, it was like common work for us. We've got loads of leads. Brilliant. You know, there's because of the way the business works now in recurring fee income.
Andy Hart:Yeah, the
Unknown:issue that we have is there's much more risk to moving companies.
Alan Smith:Yeah,
Unknown:are your clients going to move with you? Are they your clients? Probably not.
Alan Smith:Right.
Unknown:12 month restrictive covenant. What happens in that gap? Who's who's going to support you? What happens if you support it for 12 months and those clients don't move?
Alan Smith:Yeah.
Unknown:And because of consolidation, the market's becoming more litigious.
Alan Smith:Yeah.
Unknown:And and that's also a problem. So, if you're looking to. You need to have nailed down what your proposition truly is. It's not. Oh yeah, we got plenty leads. Oh, we got loads of clients. Prove it. What do those clients look like? Where do they come from? How many do you want me to look after? What income is that going to be? Because with consolidation, yes, I'm moving a lot of advisors from consolidated companies. Either at outset, it's it's it's one of two. It's normally bang straight away. I'm not having that. Don't want to be part of that. Bang. Speaking to their clients, they might work for a small SME or boutique practice. It's been taken over by one of the big boys, and they've had those relationships for for 1015, 20 years, and they know their clients going to move, and they will go. And I suppose that's not so bad because the consolidator is not really losing anything because they won't be purchasing those assets, and even if they theoretically do, it will be reflected in staged payments going forward.
Alan Smith:Right.
Unknown:Then the other people that lose leave from consolidators are sort of two years down the line. We don't know what this is going to look like when the consolidator consolidator takes over. They are saying things aren't going to change. They are telling us everything will be okay. So they manage their clients' expectations because most people in this scenario, companies that are selling consolidators, the clients become assets.
Alan Smith:Yeah,
Unknown:they're not people, and so advisors in that circumstance will will be speaking to their clients, saying, "Look, this is happening. You know, we are being taken over. We really don't know what that is like. We don't know what the future is going to hold. So I'm I see myself as your advisor. If you're happy with that, we'll keep that relationship going. But I can't guarantee that the advisor. I'm in is going to be right for me and for you for the future. What I can say is, if I need to go, I will find a scenario that enables me to provide you with the service and the advice that you've become accustomed to for the last 15 or 20 years.
Alan Smith:Yeah, exactly. That that makes sense, and that that that that reflects our experience. You're right. There's been so much consolidation M and A activity, and look, in many cases, it works works well. But sometimes, if you if you've been working for a really successful boutique firm, you know, proper financial planning firm, and you find yourself not through your own choice in an environment where you're no longer delivering that, you might need to look at your options, I guess. And I think that's hence the activity, hence the inbound we're getting, and a lot of conversations around the marketplace. James, this has been really helpful, short and sweet, kind of run through the the marketplace as you see it, and and your activity and the value that you add to, I guess, to both to advisors and people working in firms, but also to companies who are looking to hire and recruit. If people want want to get in touch with you and have a conversation about their situation, what's the best way to get in touch?
Unknown:Either website, LinkedIn, probably. I sort of, I live on LinkedIn, as I'm sure, yeah, you're pretty pretty active. Yeah, I just want to say one thing about the track before we finish today. Sure, that I want to thank you guys because you're bringing to the fore full fat financial planning, but for the pre and new careerists, so the youngsters that are coming into the industry, it's important that they see what financial planning is truly about, and the medium of your podcast does that, and and and it's great for the industry. So thanks for that.
Alan Smith:Oh, pleasure. Yeah, thanks for those positive words, James. We're going to keep on, you know, obviously keep on having these conversations as we roll forward with the Real Advisor podcast, and yeah, keep on tuning in, keep on supporting us. We appreciate it, and we'll put links to your to your LinkedIn account and to your website in the show notes. And if people are interested, they'll get in touch. But for now, James, thanks for joining us.
Unknown:Thanks, Alan. Cheers.
Nick Lincoln:Well, Alan, what do you think?
Alan Smith:Well, you know, James, James, James is clearly an expert. I just find it quite interesting what he's done. You know, we've all spoken to recruitment companies and people over the years. I guess you know, it's the biggest firms for the most money. Is if you're if you're a recruiter for SJP, you know, you're going to get a lot more traction, fees. You know things going on. James has chosen through his own personal, as he explained his his personal journey. You know, been an advisor, worked for big corporates, and he's landed the other side of all that and seen the benefits. Proper full fat financial planning. So the fact that he only works with those sort of firms, he doesn't work with consolidators. He just finds, in his own experience, you know, he did say, you know, some good, some not so good. But we're seeing. I think. I think one of the reasons we wanted just to have a brief chat with James was because this is this podcast is quite dynamic in terms of we respond to what the market asks for, and we get a lot of inbound. In fact, without naming any names, I I received an email this morning from another advisory firm that we all know, who is in the process of recruiting, and she was explaining to me the person we want to recruit an advisor is, and again, this is just classic. It's going on all the time, working for a nice boutique firm, owners sold, sold to big consolidator. The now the the new owners are telling shoehorn all your clients into our investment portfolios. I mean, it's a it's a tired, it's a tired old repeated thing. We you know I'm almost bored of hearing myself talk about it, but it's just reflecting what's going on in the marketplace. So that particular advisor is now saying, "Look, I'd like to come and work with your firm. Is that possible? And they're sort of negotiating the, you know, the pay structure and what it what it looks like. And we're just seeing this happening. There's no, you go back to the root source. There's so much M and A, and it's driven by private equity-backed consolidators. It's just happening a lot. But if you are, you know, on the ground doing your day job, being a financial planner, you don't want to do that. A lot of them don't want to do that anymore. They they signed up for a particular type of job and they're no longer doing that job. So I think James is potentially a really valuable resource for anyone who finds himself in that situation and says, "Look, I just don't love this anymore. I love working with my clients. I love giving them really good proper financial planning, and it's it looks like my future in this organization is not going to allow me to do that. So I think James is providing a you know helpful source of finding people, and he you know covers the whole country. So wherever you are, if you're having that kind of this sort of conversation with yourself, probably worth having a chat with with him. Dave, what's the market like in Ireland, sort of.
David Quinn:It's it was an absolutely fascinating listen because we're so far behind in Ireland. We haven't. There's no chance we have a recruitment agent focused just on real financial planning yet because they they get one gig a year maybe.
Nick Lincoln:It's not what Carl says. That is what Carl says. The
David Quinn:recruitment landscape in Ireland is still very much large numbers. People moving from one brokerage to another for a slightly higher bonus, a slightly higher commission share. We see tons of CVs coming across our desk all the time of people who aren't quite ready yet to move to a salaried profit share type financial planning employment. They still want to know that their pay is somewhat linked to production, that famous word. So that wouldn't lend itself to his his business model, James's model, which was quite a shift. But also, we I've found, and I see a lot of the more successful firms in Ireland now starting to advertise directly out to people. I guess because the recruitment landscape is so fragmented. If you pick a recruitment agent, you need to nearly pick five of them to try and find the diamond in the rough, and it's just too spread out. So I've seen some firms now just going direct. We've had great success advertising out directly to non-industry. I know I hate the word industry, but non-financial services people, people in the tax profession, in the accountancy profession, to try and get them into our business because they're clearly intelligent people. They're clearly hungry, and if they're young enough, they can learn do the exams with support all the study, and we've had great success that way. I would love if there was a focused recruitment agent in Ireland who was just targeting people who wanted to get into the proper financial planning space. But we're 10 years away from that, I guess, because we're still just at the very early stages of consolidation, and as you know, still very much in a commission production environment for now, but brilliant to see it because I've been so skeptical about the recruitment sector in general. It drives me crazy. So that was a little, a little, a little ray of hope in in that area for me.
Andy Hart:Just on that, Dave, you have specialist financial services recruiters that recruit for the brokerage and stuff that you're talking about, or is that still quite
David Quinn:no, no? What I would see is recruitment larger recruitment firms that would definitely have a specialist in house, maybe a financial services department or a particular agent in the firm who tries to specialize in financial services, but it's still very broadly spread and very thinly spread, and they don't really get what we do yet. I don't think so. That's the challenge. If they really understood it, then they'd be able to filter down the CVs because of the CVs I see coming across my desk. I know they don't understand it yet properly.
Andy Hart:A couple of couple of points to. That was a good interview, Alan. You're really good at that. You should set up your own podcast one day.
Alan Smith:No comment, right? Just go on. Just ignore your nonsense.
Nick Lincoln:Come on,
Alan Smith:please. Please continue. Okay, so
Andy Hart: my final point:James sees inside firms from speaking to people that run these firms and speaking to people that have been in these firms. He's an insider. Keep it simple. And I thought the thing that he said was very interesting. There's a there's a difference or a disconnect between the public persona of a company plastering financial planning everywhere. We do financial planning. Yeah,
Nick Lincoln:no, sorry,
Andy Hart:to the private culture where, yeah, I know we said that on our website, but yeah, we've never built a financial plan in the last 14 years. So
Nick Lincoln:yeah,
Andy Hart:again, as I you know see firms from the inside doing training and various things, I also have found that disconnect. So obviously, it is a recurring theme. It just slowly catches up the public stroke private culture. So, but I think I think that's the point. If you are
Alan Smith:if you're a financial planner and you and you check out if you go
Andy Hart:to those firms. You go to the firm. You go to the web. You go to the
Alan Smith:website and you speak to the boss, and he goes,"Yeah, yeah.
Nick Lincoln:Just
Alan Smith:that's why I raised it because I
Andy Hart:are look sorry. If you are looking to join a firm and they've claimed themselves to be financial planners and they claim to do full fat financial planning, there is no harm in you saying, "Okay, can you show me your financial planning process and building financial plans for clients? Is there anyone in the firm that I can sit with and they can show me that planning process? And in the UK, it pretty much needs to involve Voyant. There are other cash flows out there, but they're watered down, and the similar thing with Ireland. So I think there's no harm in you're you're about to invest the next huge block of your life in that firm. There's no harm in you saying the person who's probably interviewing you, the boss, will usually crap it and say, "Well, I don't do the financial plans, and someone else does in the bit in the in the office, and we get a report. And so I would I would push back and say, "Show me your financial planning process, not your investment process, not your financial services process, because we know that the plumbing in the background. The financial planning is a separate art that not all firms can can complete. No, it's a good
Alan Smith:point. It's a huge decision, isn't it? Moving job, career, the next 10 years of life potentially, and to find yourself having changed jobs, particularly if you're looking after clients, and you six months in, you think this crap. Think I've just left this, and what? They just had a more Dave. Dave, we'll
Nick Lincoln:go for a lie down while these two talk over each other for the next 20 minutes. No, but it's it's it's absolutely
Andy Hart:for about six weeks. He's been pissing around in Turkey. You know, we've got lots. It's absolutely
Alan Smith:true, and therefore, someone like James is helpful because he does know, and he was the people that went there when other firms spoke to the owners, experienced it. So there we go. What's next, Nicholas?
Nick Lincoln:Right. The next thing is you lower your hand, Alan, for the 58th time. The next stage. By the way, the thing about full-fat financial planning, it is coming down the system. It is, you know, kind of just by osmosis, getting out there now. And if recruitment consultants are seeing you in that that view, fantastic. And may that may that long continue. Okay, so we're now at what we're one hour 34 minutes into episode 102 of the Rilla Visor podcast. So it's time for me to look out my window and see if I can see Posty. There she is. She's just on the front door below Lincoln Lodge, hauled the bulging sack of Trappist questions up my extremely long executive driveway, and so when we answer a question, we're going to reach into the bag and pull one out. If you want to leave a question for us, do so on the pinned tweet on X, the Pindex on tweet, and via the so-called show notes. The link is in there. We do get to your questions. We do them sequentially. We will come to you in good, good, good time. Let's see who this one is from. Again, good quality cartridge paper, heavily sealed down envelope. A lot of saliva went into this. This is from a young man. I think from your neck of the woods, Quinny. I'm guessing. Just stereotyping entire nation here, because that's what I do. Callaghan. He must be Irish, right?
David Quinn:He must be. That definitely so good. All right,
Nick Lincoln:and I'm not going to joke about being Irish because he's given his LinkedIn profile as LinkedIn.com, which is a bit broad. There's quite a few people on quite a few people on LinkedIn. Right, read mr. Marmite episode talking of Armison, the the pirate, in terms of his looks, not his attitude. mr. However, equity in business and house is real value. Sure, it can change, but so can the value of a portfolio. Surely, if someone plans to realize equity in the future through a sale, business or house, this should be included. Thoughts? Your hand was down. Is it back up, Alan? I'm losing. Yes, going
Alan Smith:down's gone back up again. So I'll give. Okay, right. So
Nick Lincoln:first, first you, Smithy, then you, Quinny.
Alan Smith:Right. And by the way, just to clarify, his name is Armson, not Armison. As you keep saying, Armison. Paul Armson. Okay. Quite. There's no I. Well, we managed to get column
Nick Lincoln:into column, and it really should be Colin. Well, I know. I did notice. Well, I'm going to adding extra
Alan Smith:vowels. I'm adding unseen vowels.
Nick Lincoln:Now that's not that's a new rule for trap. We add unseen vowels into names. Crack on.
Alan Smith:All right, Nicky. The I remember when Paul was explaining all this right in those very early days that until it's like liquid or accessible. I mean, Paul would exclude. Pension as such, but because it's not income generating, and you know if you are under the age at which you could receive it. So, I like all like all the answers to almost all financial planning related questions are it depends. It's nuanced. I think for business owners, it's super helpful because you're building with the end in mind. You're saying in order for you to live the life you want to live for the rest of your life, you need to have a capital value of X, which throws off an income stream of Y, and therefore your business needs to be worth 5 million pounds, 7 million pounds. But it's absolutely
true:the business at that moment is only worth what the business owner thinks it's worth, and it wouldn't be the first person in the history of the world who had a business worth millions of pounds that went to zero for any number of different reasons. So I would say depends on the situation, and but go carefully. But I wouldn't be putting if if a if a if a client of ours said my accountant told me my business is worth 10 million quid, I would not be putting that in full up you know as a as a real value like the questioner has suggested because it's not necessary. We can say, well, notionally put that in, and that's what we need to get to. And by the way, if you're anywhere remotely close to that, you should begin the process of thinking about selling that business. Because once you've achieved financial security and independence, what else are you doing? Which is a whole other question. So the the answer, like a lot of these things, is it depends, and it's quite nuanced. Who's next?
David Quinn:Okay, just for you, I think go on to Quinny. You know, you know Paul though. He's very likes to create a bit of tension, doesn't he? So he he was very dogmatic on that. You don't include it at all, but I think he just does that to get the engagement, which is a good thing. Gets the conversation, Quinny. Yeah, because I just completely disagree with excluding it, and I even push as far as to say some factor of inheritance should be included in the plan. I'm kind of mention it later on in my culture corner recommendation, but this this whole idea of dying with way too much money and you know overshooting. So I agree with Alan. You can't put in the full optimistic owner valuation of the business, but there should be something in there for all these potential buckets, and then you can plan for the worst case scenario. But I, I think people, and certainly in Ireland, there's a hoarding mentality, and people overshoot a lot their wealth. A lot of the clients I deal with work too long, don't spend the money they have, and if you exclude the business value, and if you exclude some small bit of inheritance, you know, the parents' house being sold or whatever, and you exclude those things, they're going to overshoot by miles potentially. You have to be realistic. You have to be very careful. It is nuanced, as Alan said, but it's dangerous to exclude everything because they will work too long, overshoot, and not spend when they should be spending. That's my worry.
Nick Lincoln:Love this stuff. This is why this thing of ours is so interesting. Ultra tie a bow on it.
Andy Hart:Yeah, find a couple of points. I mean, I do. I build the plans live with the individuals and clients. So, version A, I would exclude the business big value. I'll put it in as a line item and give it, you know, a euro or a pound valuation. I'll come back to it. The downsize of the property again, it depends on how much money is going to be released. And the final thing is inheritance. Again, you got to be very careful when mapping inheritance out. So version one or version A of my financial plan will exclude the business value, will exclude the downsides, will exclude inheritance. If they run out of money, then it's a conversation of okay, well, what leaves are you going to pull to basically fix fix this financial plan. If they are 57 and been running that business for 27 years and it's clearly got a value, I'm putting it in. If they're 24 and run a payment system and they're working out their mum's garage, I'm not putting it in. So again, it depends. The right size down size situation does create a lot of money for certain people, but if the property values are selling one for 300, buying one for 200, again, it's not going to move the dial. And then the final thing, the inheritance. Again, we all know how to tread carefully with that. If they say, "Look, my parents are you know incredibly wealthy, and I'm a single child, you know, at minimum, I'm going to get 10 million. I might model X million in 789, 10 years. I'll be extremely cautious with the number and the timing of it. So, hopefully, that's answered Connor's question a little bit. Nicholas, over to you.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, our tie bow on your bow. That's been tie. That's a bow tie, bow tie. Yeah, I echo what you three say. Really, they really go very light on the. I go light on the figures. We'll include it in their discussion point. It's interesting, and might be the same with you guys. How few clients, most of the clients that we look after, tend to be kind of self-starters, okay, and quite motivated people, quite driven people. And the inheritance thing, they most of them just don't want it factored in. They don't want to think if it comes in, it's like a bonus, right? And they'll give it away to the kids or they'll do something with it. They just, I have it on the timeline as a discussion point. I have it on as a pound, so because I'm not ignoring it, I put. I mean, kick it way down the line. We don't want to think about a pound pass. 10 years
Andy Hart:minimum.
Nick Lincoln:You know, it's something you don't know when it's going to happen. You don't know how much you're going to get, so you don't want to hang a plan around it. But and the clients typically will say, "I don't want that factored into my into my plan. Thank you. Right, let's go on to what many people call. Culture corner, one hour 41 minutes. Christ, get me a gun! First
Alan Smith:up, very briefly, you guys tried the new the Chat GPT voice mode. I don't mean just the voice dictation thing, but the interactive voice version is brilliant. Check it out. It's on your. It was actually on the phone now as well, but you have a conversation back and forward, and you can be just and it is just so realistic. You know, we've had all these like voice like AI tools, and they're all a little bit glitchy, and they take about 30 seconds to reply in some like weird American accent. This is as close to having a normal conversation with a human as, including it's saying things like like like well like I was thinking about you know that's the way that people speak and it's it's very very human very interactive and it's
Andy Hart:yeah you've been away a long time Anna we need to go for a beer mate we'll talk about that we'll talk about that offline all right anyway it's really good
Alan Smith:check out and Claude has just launched theirs well that's been out for a little while but ChatGPT is the best version of it right now and as you're walking along, you can just synthesize his ideas, having a really good conversation, and it produces something on the go. It's brilliant. Check it out. Thank you.
Nick Lincoln:You see, if you weren't locked out of your offices, you could have real conversations with real people. But this is what you're reduced to now, Smithy, in your role. Okay, now Quinny. Normally, we don't prompt people for their culture corners, but given that as you're you're sitting in the chair and you're new to this, I will prompt you. You are next with Die with Zero,
David Quinn:I had two in there, and I'll only talk about that that one because that was the interesting one. Die with Zero. Has this come up in the podcast before? Surely it has. We
Nick Lincoln:have mentioned it with a very cultural book. Yeah,
Andy Hart:I have read it. Yeah, yeah, that's good.
David Quinn:Surprise hasn't come up before. I think Carl's
Alan Smith:mentioned it. Actually, I think
David Quinn:it's a phenomenal read, and the premise from Bill Perkins is that you die with zero. Pretty bloody obvious, but he advocates not overshooting. And this is so topical for me at the moment because I'm battling with clients to get them to spend their money. There's a lot of wealth in Ireland at the moment. A lot of wealth accumulating through tech companies, stock options, new entrepreneurial activity, all that stuff. Loads of money. People not spending it. Terrified of another big crash because we did get pretty badly hurt in 2008. So this book articulates so well: dying with zero, getting through your money and spending it. And I'll only one chapter, which was the one that's the most relevant to the conversations I have is the kid. Well, what about the kids? I want to leave money for the children. I want to get them on the housing housing ladder. Blahdy blahdy blah. And he argues, give them the money now when they need it, not when they're 65 and you finally pass on. And that's his answer to that part of the die with zero model. Obviously, you don't want to die. You don't want to get to zero before you die. And he talks about that in the book. I won't spoil spoil the rest of it, but it's a brilliant read, really topical for me at the moment. And I found it some brilliant points in there that I'm going to be making with clients when I get back from my lovely sabbatical.
Andy Hart:That's my question to you, Dave. Is there a book that you give to clients? Sorry to extend the podcast. Is there to go to.
David Quinn:Funny you should say that because I have still a few copies of Paul Armson's Enough that I was giving out for a long time. Clients love it, and
Andy Hart:Armson's check landed for this episode, boys.
David Quinn:I can't believe I'm yeah. You'll be
Alan Smith:lucky
David Quinn:because Alan, I never knew he had an oyster. That's amazing.
Nick Lincoln:Yeah. Oh, yeah. And a boat.
Andy Hart:Good. Good.
David Quinn:But I give out that book, and actually, I think when I run out of copies of that, which is soon enough, I think I might get loads of copies of Die with Zero.
Andy Hart:Okay. Over to me. This
Unknown:is the Elon. What? This
Andy Hart:is the Elon. I was pointing on my book. This is the Elon Musk interview on the Economist. I think a few of you may have watched this. Brilliant. I quite. I do quite like the host Zanny Milton Beddoes, which has got a very posh-sounding English voice. He pushed back on her a lot, and he and he did some interesting thought experiments with her. Push back on various. Check it out. I think it's a decent interview. Obviously, Musk is a polarizing character, as we all well know. But I think it's worth worth an hour of your time, Smithy. You watched it, didn't you? Thoughts?
Alan Smith:I watched it. I thought it was brilliant. I thought Elon was on form. It wasn't as combative as he has been in the past, but he just pushed back. And when he said that, you know, you'd be surprised many people hate you're the problem. People hate you, the traditional mainstream media, that put us sort of back in a place. But there's, I mean, there's a lot of the classic lines. But the one that I just really remember now is because he said pretty good at making predictions, which he is. He said I get most of them, right? And you know, history is is evidence of that. Things he's predicted a long time ago. He and she was asking him what will what the world look like in five years and 10 years, and he said in 10 years, AI will do every single thing, both digital and real world, better than any human being. Than any, he said, an interest and the. That I sort of hung on to from for all our careers viewpoint and our businesses,
Andy Hart:the money point of view. Yeah. No,
Alan Smith:he said. Well, the money is a separate conversation, a huge conversation. But he said AI will do everything better than any human being, except for being human. I thought, well, exactly. That's it. That's all we've got. That's all we've got left, guys. Is just being human. Yeah.
Andy Hart:He said. He said. Money. Money won't exist or be important in 2036. Well, so
Alan Smith:yeah,
Andy Hart:like everybody, I'm just caught between all different competing forces. You know, people living longer, universal high income, robotics taking over everything, retirement extending, money being a problem. I'm just my brain is full. Look it up, Nick.
Alan Smith:Nick, you muted.
Andy Hart:Mute people. This is just a shocking
Alan Smith:absolute shambles. Nick, come on, Nick. Just
Andy Hart:in autopilot, ending the show. But Andy,
Alan Smith:you're going to have to you're going to have to end it, Andy.
Andy Hart:Okay. Thank you for listening to episode 102 of Trap. Nick, are you back off mute, or is your microphone bollocked? No, go on. I like. I'm looking forward to you being spontaneous. This will be. This will be. No, no, no. You're back. You've unmuted, Nick. Well done. Well done, Nick. The limelight of closing out the show. You love it, Nicholas. Over to you. Well done, Father.
Nick Lincoln:Okay. There you go, dear Trappist. Episode 102 slides down the U bend of Father Time and is flushed away. Another pile of trap. Thank you to our guest Trap Pack member Dave Quinn for your contribution. It's been great to have you on here, dear Trappist. If you enjoyed the show, please do leave a six out of five star review on iTunes or your app of choice. Like and subscribe to YouTube and hit that bell, and you'll get annoying pop-ups or something will pop up somewhere, God knows where, saying when we've dropped a new episode. But in the meantime, take care out there. We'll see you on the other side. Adios in the trap pack and have a good couple of weeks. Goodbye.
Alan Smith:Bye. Sign up to Trap Forum.
Andy Hart:Yeah, Nick. We need to add questions inside Trap Forum so people can ask us questions. Good idea. You're never on
Unknown:it.
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