Financial Planner Life Podcast

Mike and Jane Saunders have run their own financial advice business since 1998. They've now bought five more from advisers who were ready to retire, and they're not stopping. Mike and Jane run Arrowe Financial in Heswall on the Wirral, part of The Openwork Partnership. They tell Sam Oakes what being self-employed really means, how they find and fund acquisitions, how they're buildin...

How do you become a financial adviser on a salary, without the financial risk of going self-employed? Jason Howard, Founder & CEO of Insight IFA, and Greg Ryan, Performance Director at Insight IFA, join Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain how they train, pay and mentor new financial advisers and financial planners, and why 37% of their advisers are under 30. Find out more about Insi...

Find out more about Aberdeen Adviser: https://fpl.partners/aberdeen-adviser Connect with Derek Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-smith-b687721/ Why does the financial advice process still take seven systems and seven hours? Derek Smith, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aberdeen Adviser, joins Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain what is broken for UK financial...

Learn more about The Openwork Partnership   How do you move from employed administrator and paraplanner to self-employed financial adviser, business owner and appointed representative of The Openwork Partnership? In this Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with Rose Hawkins, founder of Pebble Rose Wealth, about financial adviser training, self-employment and building a financial plann...

Learn more about the St. James's Place Academy When a financial adviser retires, their clients do not retire with them. Somebody has to be ready to pick up those relationships, and the profession is not currently producing enough people to do it. Sam Oakes welcomes back Gee Foottit, who leads the St James’s Place Academy, the longest running adviser training programme in the profession, to ta...

An adviser told Brian McLaughlin he was about to disengage 300 clients because he simply could not service them anymore. He did not want to. He just could not see another option. Brian McLaughlin is the founder of Pillar Client Services, and he has spent 27 years in financial services, from Prudential through to Rathbones and Octopus. Two and a half years of MBA research took him inside around 250...

A paraplanner sits down on a Monday morning to write one new business suitability report and loses most of the day to it. The document runs to 40+ pages. The client takes it home after a one hour meeting and, if we are honest, reads about five of them. Sam Oakes is joined by Jack Sleator, co-founder of Templi and a former paraplanner and adviser who spent five years inside UK advice firms before h...

Almost nobody in financial services can explain what an employee benefits consultant actually does all day, which is strange for a specialism that sits inside most of the big advice firms in the UK. Sam Oakes is joined by Natalie Malone, who leads the Risk and Reward team within Titan Wealth's corporate division. Natalie has spent almost 17 years in this part of the profession, starting in ju...

Financial planners are sitting on a confidence problem: a 70% opportunity gap when it comes to closing, and it is costing them business they should be winning. Chris Larkin, founder of training consultancy BigRock, returns to the podcast alongside Mark Rockliffe, CEO of Pembroke Financial Planning, to unpack what is really behind that number and what Pembroke has done differently over the past 12...

Jeanne Mpondo asked a room full of women in London whether anybody there was investing in anything. Not one hand went up. She then asked who owned their home or held a pension, and hands went up all over the room. Jeanne Mpondo is a St. James's Place partner running her own practice in London, and a former senior data analyst at S&P Global. She came into financial planning by accident, af...

 Towards the end of her ten years in law, Imogen worked out that fifteen hour days for three and a half months would get her to the billable hours she needed for her bonus. She did it, hit the number, and then handed in her notice.  Sam Oakes speaks to Imogen Winfield, Paraplanner and soon to be qualified financial planner at City Gate Financial Planning, about the five month career break that bec...

Rebecca Ellis became a Chartered Fellow in her early twenties, but becoming a financial adviser wasn’t her immediate next step. Today, she is Head of Advice at Titan Wealth International in Dubai, with experience spanning technical financial planning, paraplanning, international advice, operations and leadership. In this episode of the Financial Planner Life Podcast, in partnership with Titan Weal...

After 13 years inside a financial advice network, Wayne Griffith and One Financial Solutions have become directly authorised by the FCA. But what does it really take to become a directly authorised financial advice firm? How long does FCA authorisation take, what are the risks, and when is the right time to leave a network? Wayne joins Sam Oakes on the Financial Planner Life Podcast to share the f...

Trevor Greetham, Head of Multi-Asset at Royal London Asset Management, still measures market timing with a clock face borrowed from a 1930s newspaper.  The idea dates back to a reference Trevor found from the London Evening Standard, a clock face marking out stages of the economic cycle: recession, recovery, late cycle, slowdown, each paired with the assets that historically perform well there. Th...

Think about it like Netflix, but for CPD. That's how David Tait, of Redmill Advance, describes the platform he's built for financial advisers, back on this week’s episode to talk through it.  Rather than static articles followed by a handful of multiple-choice questions, the platform's content is genuinely interactive: cards to flip, embedded videos you have to engage with, and many...

Laura Fordham's (Financial Adviser at Titan Wealth) route into financial planning wasn't planned. She spent her first year handling the job entirely alone, while her client bank was still small. She lays out exactly what that year looked like in conversation with Sam Oakes this week Laura Fordham's route into financial planning wasn't planned. She started out on maternity cover...

Lewis Prosser has spent years myth-busting what it takes to go chartered. He is joined this week by David Tait of Redmill Advance. Lewis runs the St. James's Place programme supporting advisers from Level 4 through to Chartered status, and one of the most common myths he encounters is the assumption that becoming a Chartered Financial Adviser requires five years of experience, specifically as...

Hardy Michel is the founder of Marloo, an AI tool for financial advisers, and one of the most unusual things you'll hear him say as a tech founder, is that he'd rather you didn't sign a long-term contract for AI - even though it works against him commercially! Spending years working behind the scenes at retail investing platforms, Hardy Michel watched the same pattern play out again...

Natalie Cheesman, Partner at St. James's Place, joins Sam Oakes to talk about how she built a financial planning practice to £6 million in funds under management in 18 months, without ever fully stepping away from the mortgage business she'd run for 15 years. In this episode, Natalie explains why a transactional mortgage career, however loyal her 1,200-client bank was, left her wanting s...

Dan Hobbs, CEO at New Leaf Distribution, joins Sam Oakes to talk about what building their own podcast has delivered for an IFA Network. He's joined by his father, Founder & Chairman of New Leaf Distribution, Mark Hobbs, whose own scepticism about podcasting turned around once it started outperforming close to £1,000,000 spent on Google Ads." In this episode, Dan and Mark explain why...

Dan Armitage (CEO of Neuro Sparks) and David Tait (Founder of Redmill Advance,) joins Sam Oakes to talk about supporting neurodivergent individuals in financial planning. Dan spent a decade as a regulated financial adviser, as well as a bank manager in his early twenties, before founding Neuro Sparks with his mother three years ago. He lives with ADHD, dyslexia and dyscalculia himself, and that ex...

Matthew Samuel, UK Chartered Financial Planner and SEC Regulated Financial Planner at Titan Wealth International, has built a career across both the UK and the international market, specialising in advising clients with US connections and US assets from his base in Dubai. He holds his UK chartered status alongside the Series 65 qualification, which makes him a registered investment adviser under t...

What does it take to leave a secure career, become self-employed and build a financial planning business managing close to £40 million in just three years? In this episode of the Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with Samantha Wood, founder of Wood Mitchell Financial Planning and a Partner at St. James’s Place. Samantha’s career began in the British Army, where she progressed from s...

Romany Youell, Founder of The Finance Woman, qualified as the UK's youngest ever financial adviser at 18 after dropping out of college at 16. By 24 she had built a £10 million financial planning business. But the journey between those two moments nearly broke her. In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam Oakes sits down with Romany to hear the full story. How she grew up going to client...

Aycan Richards, Chartered Financial Planner at Titan Wealth, spent 13 years building a financial planning career across Qatar and Dubai before making the decision to sell her business and hand her clients over to Titan Wealth. In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam Oakes sits down with Aycan to find out what that journey actually looked like. How she moved to Qatar in 2013 with a seven-yea...