Our journey from being independent to becoming ‘restricted’

Giving up a way of working that you’ve been committed to – and the value of which you’ve been extolling – for over 25 years is a big decision.

It is certainly not something we did without first having done a whole lot of soul searching. But in the end we found it could work for us.

We made the decision to become restricted as the dawning realisation mounted that, to continue operating as we had been – doing all our own research, our own admin and our own compliance as we kept pace with the litany of regulatory changes – would take us further and further away from doing the thing that we actually love about being financial advisers: interacting with our clients.

‘Restricted’ doesn’t cut it

The term ‘restricted’ conjures thoughts of limitations, of things that are not available to the client.

It also comes with a (in some cases justified) fear that it inevitably ends up meaning operating within a very ‘prescriptive’ environment for advisers.

In short, everything our business was not.

“We believed our clients valued our independence over everything else”

We have spent our careers striving to reach the pinnacle of advisory practice, we’re both chartered financial planners, while Paul is a PFS fellow, and were able to say we were “independent”, which felt integral to our professional identity.

We believed our clients valued our independence over everything else.

We thought, with a knot in our stomachs, that they would react badly to the news that we were becoming ‘restricted’.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out, it was a non-event.

What we should have known all along, is that what our clients really valued was impartiality and being on their side – that we will always put their needs and what’s suitable for them first.

We now believe ‘independence’ is an old construct. Alongside ‘restricted’, it could do with being reimagined.

The range of models sitting under the one homogenising ‘restricted’ banner doesn’t do justice to the broad spectrum of options actually on offer, especially when it comes to degrees of prescriptiveness.

That is something we both only came to appreciate fully after the first rounds of initial meetings when we walked our clients through what ‘restricted’ would mean to them in practice under the model we had chosen.

The delivery and the outcome had to be the same for our clients, regardless of the model.

You can also read the full press release on FTAdviser.