Gem & Co. Financial Services
GEM & Co are an award-winning Chartered and Accredited Financial Planning firm. Here’s how I helped them grow from £470,000 to more than £1.8M over a 10 year period.
GEM & CO. FINANCIAL SERVICES
When I started working with the partners at GEM & Co. (Gareth, Elliott and Eamon) they were looking to make changes. If you want to be great you have to do things differently, not just better. The team at GEM & Co. embraced that idea.
I’ve worked with them on two separate occasions over a 10-year period – initially as an external consultant and the second time when they joined Uncover Your Business Potential (UYBP). The second stint really put the icing on the cake.
WHAT GEM & CO. WERE LOOKING FOR:
They knew that the financial planning business model provided a lot of wins for them and their clients. They’d discovered the model from their own research and eventually found the Institute of Financial Planning (IFP) (now merged into the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment – CISI).
With most firms that kind of attitude would have made me nervous. It’s great to make changes, but everyone has to understand “why” and buy into the new way of working. I’ve had other firms ask for things to be done quickly, but to be honest, that rarely achieved much. What those other firms were really saying was, “ I don’t want to spend the time, money and effort required to make lasting change.”
With GEM it just felt different. They had genuine ambition, but weren’t merely focused on achieving bigger numbers – they wanted to build a great business for their clients too.
So we went for it and changed a bunch of things within a 6-12 month period.
The results?
I think they speak for themselves.
Here’s a short film we created to show the GEM & Co journey:
“Working with Brett accelerated our growth exponentially. Sure, we may have got there on our own eventually, but my view was why waste time through trial and error? Brett helped us form a clear sense of direction and purpose from day one and continued to add value continuously. Having his knowledge and experience on speed dial when we had to make tough strategic decisions and hold us accountable was invaluable.”
What We Did
There are six core areas that businesses must have in good shape if they want to succeed:
Here’s what I worked on with GEM & Co. in each of these areas:
Culture (Values)
We defined their core values and made sure everyone on the team understood the story behind them. Now the business ‘lives’ their values. These are the ‘North Star’ by which all decisions are made.
- Changing people’s lives for the better
- Building positive relationships and family ethos
- Making things simple, easy and hassle-free
- Always doing the right thing by our clients, team, and community
People
Getting the team right was critical.
Their revenue per staff metric was £94,000, which was bog-standard – neither good nor bad – compared to other financial advisory firms. High performance is more like £130,000+ pa. Their revenue per adviser metric was unspectacular at £235,000. High performance for that metric is in the £500k – £600k range).
These financial indicators provided clues as to what we should work on first.
Reorganising who did what was the first step. The three partners started to focus on their core strengths – Gareth as adviser and managing partner, Elliott as lead adviser and super-salesman, and Eamon as head of administration.
As the firm grew we added an Operations Manager (and now Ops Director), Dean Wright, to professionalise the day-to-day management of the business and to free Gareth up to be more strategic. Dean’s addition was the turning point for continued growth even as the complexity of the organisation inevitably grew.
The team headcount is now 4 advisers and 8 full-time equivalent staff. Revenue per adviser has grown to £464,000 and revenue per staff is now £154,833 (at the time of writing).
Process
We really went to town in a short work window to get the core processes of a great financial planning business in place.
The first port of call was changing the way they did first meetings with new clients. That meant some skills training on how to ask good questions and more importantly, learning to shut up and let the client fill the space afterwards.
Gareth and Elliott were great learners and really embraced this approach.
We also introduced proper cashflow modelling. And while that might seem a bit passé today, 10 years ago it was still only a minority of firms that actually did it (believe it or not).
The next piece of the puzzle was simplifying the investment approach and after some discussion and market research, they elected to adopt an evidence-based, low-cost investment approach, which has served them and their clients brilliantly ever since.
And the last initial process improvement was simplifying and streamlining their ongoing review process – keeping the high-value stuff that clients loved, but eliminating the over-engineering that’s so common in advisory firms. That saved hours of unnecessary work in the back office and started to get work flowing more smoothly through the sausage machine.
Business Management
Like with all firms I work with we created a scary and exciting (in equal measure) business plan.
They adopted the weekly leadership team meeting process that we teach everyone as part of the Uncover Your Business Potential curriculum and adding Dean into the leadership team created better quality discussion and follow through.
Financials
Since we completed our Uncover Your Business Potential journey together, GEM & Co have broken through £1.8M of revenue and have laid the right foundations to take them through to £3M over the next few years.
Getting their pricing strategy right was critical in ensuring they had the right net profit margins to continue investing in their team and technology.
Client Profile
As a result of all the changes, client quality has also increased significantly. That happens with every firm I work with before we actually do any serious marketing work. Just getting the basics right starts to attract a new level of client.
Gem & Co. have also been consistent in their approach to marketing and their work with professional introducers. That has allowed good quality leads to flow into the business over a long period of time.
The Results
In just under a decade I helped GEM & Co. grow total revenue by 15% pa and increase the saleable value of their business by over £3.5M.
Revenue per planner increased from £235,000 to £464,000 (with the addition of 2 extra advisers in that period).
Productivity also improved 64%, with revenue per staff increasing from £94,000 to £154,000.
“We often joke that becoming an overnight success takes about a decade or two!”
Summary of Success
GEM & Co have not only achieved significant growth but also laid the foundations for continued growth into the future. This is just the start.
All it took was some guidance and some graft.