Keith Barr started his working life in a role that many would consider rather glamorous: he was a professional footballer.
“Before I left school, I already had a contract with Newcastle United,” he says. What that meant for his interest in academic work was that it was largely non-existent. “You try telling a sixteen-year-old boy to work hard for his exams when he already has a professional contract,” he says, smiling. “It’s not going to happen.”
What the sixteen-year-old didn’t anticipate, however, was that three and a half years later he would be back home in Edinburgh, looking for a job at the urging of his parents and about to start a university course.
“I gave up the hope of pursuing a professional career very early,” he says. “I thought, I’m not going to be in that top one to two percent where I’m going to earn enough money to retire indefinitely. So, I got a job part-time at Standard Life, just working on the phone, and ended up forming the customer relationship team dealing with complaints, then going into relationship management.”
Initially, Keith didn’t really consider what impact his work might have. “I just wanted the job. It was only when I started working in the sector that I really thought about it.”
Financial advice, he points out, can look pretty dull from the outside. “People are much more impressed when you say ‘footballer’,” he says. But once he had found that financial advice can have a huge positive impact, he was both really interested and keen to work hard.
“As cliched as that sounds,” he says. “It’s true. I really wanted to be in financial advice because of the large impact you can make on people’s lives. That is, if you ask the right questions. I quit my degree three months after starting at Standard Life.”
That didn’t mean that he quit ongoing learning, though. “When you’re doing professional qualifications, you have a real sense of purpose behind what you’re studying for,” he says. “I’ve never viewed it as a chore, and I’ve done my diplomas and my chartership and I’m also a Fellow of LIBF. But university and schoolwork, it was just tedious.”
What makes for great financial advice?
Though Keith views getting the best possible qualifications as fundamental – and all of the staff at Strategic Wealth Solutions are encouraged to continue learning – he argues that they are not really what makes the difference between good and great financial advice.
“If you care enough about people and you listen to people enough and you ask the right questions you can do so much good in their life,” he says.
What does a good outcome look like in practice?
Keith says that he has a client with terminal cancer who recently called to ask to arrange withdrawing £20,000 from his pension pot. That is a sizeable sum within the context of the family’s overall wealth.
“I went to see him,” he says, “though I don’t do many house visits, and asked what the withdrawal was for. It turns out that he got a cold call at the door from someone who wanted to render the side of his house. Which was when I said, ‘I’m looking at your house, and I’m not a builder, but these houses look great’.”
Keith had already prepared a cash flow analysis of what would happen to the family’s finances if the money were withdrawn, which he explained to them. He also took the time to help them sort out their tax code with HMRC, which took 45 minutes on the ‘phone and saved them ten thousand pounds.
Keith points out that he could have just had a short phone call from the office and carried out the man’s instructions. “But if you’re not asking the right questions, you’re not doing a good job. What’s more, the clients won’t know that in that moment. Later on, those questions will make a huge difference to his wife’s life.”
He says that what financial advisers ostensibly charge for is things like technical planning, investment performance, asset allocation but, ultimately, if you pin it all down, what they offer is peace of mind.
Attaining peace of mind for clients, though, can often be about helping them to deal with issues that are not really about money. Keith has a young woman client who, on paper, was in an excellent financial position. She had a good career, and she had inherited around £300,000 – but only because her parents and grandparents had all died in quick succession.
“She sat with it in her bank account for five years,” he says. “It was clear that she was mentally vulnerable because she had lost her support mechanism at a young age. She had asked family what to do, and they had told her to invest the money, but she had done nothing. She felt completely overwhelmed.”
What Strategic Wealth Advisors did for her was model three scenarios. “We’re not here to tell the client what to do, even if that’s what people often think we’re paid for,” Keith says. “I showed her all three, gave her the pros and cons of them, showed her the end result through analysis, and she picked the scenario that was right for her – and with conviction.”
Keith says that financial advisers have to try to put themselves into the client’s position. If nothing else, after all, vulnerable clients often fail to see their vulnerability.
“You have to challenge the information you receive,” he says. He says that he found out just how important careful research and persistent questions can be for someone’s financial wellbeing when he sorted out some mistakes around the transfer of a client’s defined benefit pension scheme and got £250,000 in compensation for them.
What makes for a great financial adviser?
But how do you know who will be a really good financial adviser and, if you’re building your own advice business, how do you choose the right team?
“Through mistakes,” says Keith. “It’s my eleventh year running my business now and, in the beginning, I very much relied on CVs. Now I want to meet the person and find out whether they have the right values. The qualifications are just the basic requirement.”
The base line expectations he has for new recruits are: integrity, transparency and doing the right thing. But he also wants to see commitment, ongoing learning and development, and teamwork and service. “If someone has the right values and demonstrates the right behaviours but needs a bit more training, you can work with that. But if someone’s very competent and just has the wrong values, you can’t.”
Keith wants his staff to aim high. “I’m a big advocate of chartership. I feel it’s a differentiator between advisors. It shows you’re seriously committing to your role. The more you put into your own development, the better the outcome for your clients in my opinion.”
“We’re trying to be professional financial advisors and for me ‘professional’ means you provide consistent, high standard, tailored, bespoke advice time after time. Bad financial advice is not like getting a bad haircut. A bad haircut is obvious to the client, and it will grow out. Neither of those things is true of bad financial advice.”
Finally, Keith argues that the sector can also do a little to help itself. “Even if someone doesn’t have much money,” he says, “You can still give that person a little bit of guidance and a little bit of support and a little bit of faith in the industry.”
