While schoolchildren across the country spent lockdown hunched over their textbooks at the dining room table or enjoying a ‘forest school’ experience during many family walks in the countryside, advisers were learning many lessons of their own.

At our fifth and final 2021 regional roundtable organised by PIMCO and Citywire, advisers from the Midlands shared a wealth of knowledge amassed during lockdown – from having deeper insight into themselves and how they work best to realising greater efficiency and productivity – which they are now applying to a ‘new normal’ for the advice profession.

‘One of the key takeaways is we’re quite fortunate as an industry,’ said Lee Dineen, a senior vice president at PIMCO. ‘We don’t manufacture anything – there’s no factories, there’s no widgets – so we can generally transact across our industry digitally.’

For Sarah Seeley, a director and financial adviser at Kind Wealth of Oldbury in Sandwell, the key lesson has been time management. Like many of her peers, she has reaped considerable time savings from having meetings by videocall instead of face-to-face. But, equally, working from home blurred the lines between home and work life and made it imperative to strike a balance.

‘Time management is one of the key things,’ she said. ‘I was able to have a meeting in one day with somebody down in London and somebody up north, which I would never have been able to do before. Zoom has been fantastic to be able to do that.

‘But being in lockdown and being able to have that work/life balance was really hard because I wasn’t going out to work and there wasn’t a difference between work and home life. Trying to bring that back is something that’s really important.’

While Lena Patel, a chartered financial adviser and founder of ISJ Financial Planning in Leicester, felt fortunate to be sitting at home drinking coffee while her sister and son – both in the medical profession – went out to work, she soon realised that working from home is not for everyone.

‘I used to think working from home was fantastic. Wouldn’t it be great to work from home? How quickly did I realise that no, it just wasn’t for me. That’s the biggest lesson for me.

‘I love going to work in my office. I think clients enjoy it and for me, it’s bought home the good that we do for clients and how we have managed relationships with everybody. For me, it’s been a challenge, but I think we’ve all learnt, as a world, from it.’

Working from home was an entirely new experience for Phil McGovern, managing director of MPA Financial Management of Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, and one that he did not relish either.

‘I prefer the buzz and discipline of going to the office every day, rather than walking across your bedroom and starting work,’ he said.

For him, communication has been the biggest lesson: ‘We’ve got to communicate more than we’ve done in the past.’

Sadly, many of McGovern’s clients died in the past 12 months and this has made him hone his communication skills – to communicate clearly and compassionately with the next generation and promote intergenerational financial planning.

Despite saving one client’s children £450,000 in inheritance tax, they have still elected to manage the inheritance themselves – pressing home to McGovern the need to build stronger bridges with the beneficiaries of assets under advice.

‘I dealt with their dad for 15 years and I did a good job,’ he said. ‘They [his children] have never dealt with an adviser before. Good luck to them. We’re not all rip-off merchants; we’re just trying to help people financially.

‘I think clients do appreciate what we do. We don’t save lives, generally, but we sort of do, don’t we? We help to build finances and pass them on.’

Toughest challenges

Like many parents up and down the country, juggling work with childcare was the biggest challenge for Seeley. When Britain went into lockdown on 23 March 2020 her twins were in reception.

‘I had two four-year-olds at home who I was trying to home school as well as run a business,’ she said. ‘On top of that, we had two new starters that joined us in March and then we went into lockdown. Juggling the children, work and trying to train two new starters was a huge challenge.’

Patel has three children, whose initials inspired the name for her company – two of them young adults and one of school age. As a single parent and sole-trader, she is used to being independent in both her home and business lives. But feeling isolated and having no-one to share the burden with heightened the impact of an unfortunate incident that happened to her shortly after the onset of the pandemic.

‘I had a really difficult time at the beginning because I was ghosted by a professional connection I was working with and it knocked my confidence,’ she said.

She channelled her energy into her clients, many of whom are single, elderly and live alone, by ‘stepping up to be somebody they can talk to’ as they struggled with not being able to see their families or lead normal lives, especially the case for those who were shielding.

‘For me, it was a real time to shine,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, when you’re isolated with no-one to talk to and nowhere to go, you can be the one person that keeps them sane. Ringing them personally, even just for five minutes, that’s what I really found clients appreciated – that consistent contact.’

McGovern has grown-up children, aged 22 and 25, one of whom is an adviser within the business. He became a pillar of support to a 90-year-old, whom he talked to daily.

‘Margery’s on the phone again for a five-minute chat. She has nobody else and

that was her comfort blanket,’ he said.

Having five adults working from home and fighting for bandwidth brought its own challenges, as did trying to equip admin staff with 16 laptops quickly.

‘Talk about mass panic buying of stuff,’ added McGovern. ‘I had to buy one in Leicester, one in Derby, the rest around the Birmingham area – you just couldn’t access them at the time unless you were spending a silly price for something you thought would last just a few weeks.’

Face-to-face contact

As the pandemic persisted, advisers quickly adapted to new ways of working. As we emerge from it, they are relishing the return to face-to-face contact

Patel credits Zoom with broadening her reach beyond Leicester and intends to still use it for introductory calls, especially with clients going through a divorce or who are looking for help with a specific event in their lives.

She gave up her office during the first lockdown and was at the point of ‘do I give up?’ Her turning point came towards the end of lockdown in June of this year when she started operating from new premises.

‘That has just revolutionised everything,’ she said. ‘It’s really revitalised my love for it again and made me want to inspire more females to come into the profession, become financial planners and help clients to live good lives.

‘I went out and did some interviews with clients because when your confidence is down, you think, what are my clients thinking? They’ve been so amazing and what they’ve said has been so heartfelt – how I’ve changed their lives and empowered them to go and do what they want to do in retirement. So, after a bit of a rocky start it’s been great for me.’

Face-to-face meetings were also the first thing that Dineen wanted to return to. ‘To get out and see people and go to conferences and engage and shake hands and just be around humans again is fantastic,’ he said.

For him, client preferences are paramount – a sentiment echoed around the table.

‘It’s going to be slow and gradual,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of businesses that are still being extremely cautious about their return to work and getting people into the office. We’re listening to our clients. We’re understanding what they want to do and if they’d like to meet with us in a coffee shop down the road or a restaurant for a spot of lunch. If not, we’ll stick to Zoom for the time being and that’s fine, too.’

MPA’s admin team has returned to the office, while its advisers continue to work from home as was ordinarily the case pre-Covid. Kind Wealth has followed a phased return to office working for everyone.

‘I personally wanted to get back to the office as soon as possible,’ said Seeley. ‘I was in the office as soon as I could, but in terms of everybody else, it was pretty much what they were comfortable with and we did a blend of working from home and coming into the office, just as a bit of a transition.

‘When we have clients come in, we let the staff know, so if they’re not comfortable with clients coming in, they can work from home. The majority of the time they’re in the office – they prefer to be.’

Family feel

While Covid could have sounded the death knell for some practices, communicating via post being one example – ‘I don’t even check my pigeonhole anymore,’ quipped McGovern – there was a sense that the personal touch remains vitally important.

Patel recently notified her client bank about her new office by post. ‘I sent change-of-address cards and clients really liked it. You go in and it’s on their fridge. From a client perspective, it’s nice to receive something from your adviser. Not all the time, but it is nice to have something physical to touch and feel and look at.’

Likewise, Dineen appreciated a thank you gift sent to him by an advice firm near Bristol with which he shared his wisdom.

‘I probably spent about an hour and a half with them, assisting them with their thought processes, just as a friendly help. As a thank you, they sent me in the post a small selection of cakes, which was so lovely and nice of them and they were delicious,’ he said.

‘Ahead of all their Zoom client meetings, they were sending this little package of cakes to say, we look forward to talking with you and engaging. It’s all about the personal touch. They said it went down an absolute storm with their clients.’

MPA has recently appointed a PR firm to help it with client communication, to make it more consistent and harness the power of personal stories, such as an adviser and his girlfriend expecting a baby.

‘These are very personal relationships and, certainly for a company our size, we’re trying to say that it’s not just me or it’s not just him or her, it’s the whole group,’ said McGovern. ‘We’re trying to create that family feel.

‘There are a lot of mergers and acquisitions going on at the minute and the industry has been turning these very personal client relationships into commodities. Those big advisers are going to lose out at some stage if they lose that personal touch.

‘We do a private client lunch every year and the last few years it’s got bigger and bigger and our clients are asking, when are you going to do it, you didn’t do it last year? As a growing business, we want to make sure that if we get to a certain scale, we retain that family feel and that personal touch.’