We sat down with James Wallis, Founder and Chartered Financial Planner at Aristotle Financial Planning. In this interview, James discusses his journey into the financial planning industry and his experience of being part of the Sense Network community of IFAs.
TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF?
"I knew I wanted to get into financial planning, but only having been to university and undertaking my master's degree then having the opportunity to gain work experience through different placements. This was in 2009 when the UK was just coming out of the great financial crisis that we all experienced so I then had to call and email around just to try and get first meetings with people in order to get into the professional and thankfully someone saw something in me and took me on as a trainee.
That then led to me onto paraplanning and after a period of time then moving onto advising. I was happy doing that, but then everybody has trigger moments in their life and for me, I got married and then we had our first child and it made me think what are you doing? Where are you going with your life? What's your career all about? And that led to a succession for me thinking that I wanted to start my own business and do things in a more modern Innovative way. I wanted to explain things in a simpler manner for people and to really just try and move things forward in the financial planning profession.
What we try and do here at Aristotle Financial Planning is we try and deliver great financial planning to clients. Planning is at the forefront of everything that we do, but we try and deliver that in a simplified manner for people. So, we try and take complex arrangements and complex scenarios and try and simplify that down. Sometimes that means using props and such as airplanes or toy toolkits and sometimes it means using a puzzle to unlock things to get people to talk during a first meeting.
We then try and make sure that all our documentation also follows through on that simplified manner. We try to make things interesting and engaging. We're not putting things in to documents for the sake of it, we're just trying to give people what they actually need to know and what's actually important to them."
WHY DID YOU JOIN A NETWORK?
"As part of our requirement to approve our firms' Implementation plans. We encourage feedback and conversation with our membership where we are signing off their business models, documents and and advice propositions. Maybe slightly differently to other firms, I was setting up a business from scratch for the first time. I'd previously worked in a larger business with compliance support who are also part of a network, so I was aware of the network model, but setting up on my own, I wanted to have that reassurance and a ‘third party’ making sure that what I was doing was the right thing at all times.
Therefore, I decided to go down the route of looking at a network as opposed to looking for the ability to go directly authorised.
In terms of why I chose Sense, I guess I did a ‘beauty parade’ really in terms of looking at the different offerings the different networks that were available and there were a couple of things that stood out to me from Sense.
One was the complete independence as an organisation themselves and the second thing was that it certainly seemed, and has been the case since, that they were there to give you support and make sure that what you're doing was right.
They did this without being too onerous and they didn’t provide an enforced compliance for the sake of compliance. It maybe does sound a bit cheesy, but everything did make sense in terms of the rules and the expectations really. Ultimately, you get a good feeling about something when you start to do research and then when you interact with the people and that's certainly been the case for me."
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ANYONE INTERSTED IN JOINING THE NETWORK?
"I think what I'd probably say for new members is embrace the idea that it's okay to ask questions. I embrace that within my business and I’m never afraid to ask questions. I would definitely reinforce that to anyone joining that you need to pick up the phone, send an email to people, even reach out to other members because actually you’ll find that they can often be quite supportive as well.
I think I would say make sure you are open to communicating and never feel like any question is a silly question."
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR THE INDUSTRY AND FOR ARISTOTLE FP?
"I think for quite a long time now we have heard about lots of older advisors who are going to retire and wondering what's going to happen to the industry. Personally, I'm a member of NextGen planners where I see other people starting to build their own brands and businesses and I’m starting to do the same.
What I'd like to think is that the future is really positive in terms of things being delivered in a much more client friendly approach and in a much more innovative way by using lots of different methods in terms of us here at Aristotle.
We want to continue to try and be towards the front end of that and lead by example, but equally if someone else comes up with a fantastic idea and we think we can implement it, we are open to that too because I’m completely aware that not all of the ideas in my business are completely original. Some ideas are taken from other people and adapted to us in our business, and I think that we’ll probably see a lot more of that, and hopefully lots more innovation to come moving forwards."
WHAT ELSE KEEPS YOU BUSY?
"Aside from running Aristotle financial planning day-to-day, I have two young children under five, so I'm quite busy from that perspective and it's always difficult to try and maintain my work life balance.
I do also get involved in a few other things. The first thing, and this also relates back to the business, is we try and support a local charity called Me & Dee, which tries to give breaks, holidays and support to families who have people with a life limiting illness. We donate on a monthly basis out of the business, with every financial plan written we send £100 to the charity, and we are trying to give as much of our time towards helping them as we can. The other thing that we do is we run a local podcast. The idea for that really came from thinking, you’re starting a new business, how do you go out and meet new business owners? The idea isn't original, I know someone who's done it but not in this area.
I started the Inside Derby podcast to get to meet new business owners personally, but also for them be able to showcase their story and give them publicity locally. It’s also allowed me to learn some lessons from them because although I know what I know in the financial planning profession, there's lots of other things which are applicable in business from other people.
I've now recorded over 45 episodes of the Inside Derby podcast, I’ve got to meet at least 45 fantastic local business owners and some of them have become clients, some haven’t, but that doesn’t really matter from that point of view as it has really helped to build a presence in the local community and starting from scratch during the COVID-19 lockdown, the podcast has been an enabler for me to get out and meet people and I’ve also taken lots of things from it."
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