A recent report by AKG has found that up to 50% of advisers could leave the profession as a result of COVID-19 as costs and compliance demands increase. While I’m sceptical of the exact numbers, the study raises a good point: what are we doing to secure the future of our profession? For our practice, it means reaching out to the next generation of potential planners.
This is a subject I have been passionate about for almost 20 years, having been the next generation and successfully taken over my father’s firm. I would like to share what I have learned from 7 years of making mistakes, and developing structured programs to help develop young people. Here are my top 5 tips.
Get involved with universities, colleges and even primary schools. At a very early stage in my career I engaged with my alma mater. While I didn’t really have a plan at that stage, I knew that I would want to recruit new talent when the time was right.
From my experience, universities want the business community to get involved. This gives you the opportunity deliver guest lectures, workshops, sponsor prizes and offer internships or even graduate positions. At Murphy Wealth, we’ve run internship competitions. One example is a competition through the Investment Society at a university, asking participants for 500 words on what they thought would be the biggest disruptors to the profession over the next few years. We held an evening at our offices that included a lecture and Q&A with our staff. We then announced the winner of the summer internship who has now gone on to join us full time.
The usual lazy stereotypes about this generation or that generation are nonsense, everyone has their pluses and minuses, but I can tell you I have faced way more challenges hiring from within the profession than I have ever had with any of our graduates. That said you will need to have really clear roles and responsibilities, development plans and a track to a successful career otherwise you will not be able to keep the best people. The ad hoc way small adviser firms (ourselves included) used to approach recruitment will not cut it for those bright young stars looking to make their mark.
Creating your own graduate program takes time, and money, and did I say time? You won’t see the rewards overnight. However, you will see the rewards. The staff that have come through our graduate program over the last 5 years are still with the firm. We have just recently promoted some of them to financial planners and other more senior positions, with the added bonus of taking over their own client banks.
Your business will have to be up to scratch, forward looking, flexible and tech enabled. No one in their 20s coming out of uni wants to join an old crusty IFA practice with rubbish tech and a bunch of folks waiting around for it all to be over. Our office environment is designed with collaborative working in mind as well as being funky. We made sure that our new recruits were in front of clients and participating in meetings as quickly as possible and we are constantly introducing new tech to help them do more of the job they love and less of the jobs they hate.
Don’t promise the earth then not deliver. We have heard from many young people over the last few years about the discrepancies between the job description in their interview and their actual work. They ended up stuck doing admin with no career progression. We are really clear with our new recruits about their development plan from day one. It is then up to them to accelerate that timeframe with enthusiasm and initiative. While the business will continue to evolve to meet their ambitions, it is up to them to grab opportunities.
One of the best decisions I ever made was creating the graduate program. We have had our ups and downs but now we have a fantastic team of brilliant young planners who are the future of our profession.
Adrian Murphy is CEO of Murphy Wealth and a Financial Life Planner. Adrian was awarded Financial Adviser of the Year in the 2019 Growth Investor Awards and has been increasingly acknowledged for his bold vision of making an impact in the industry and community. The firm is taking life planning and behavioural insights and developing a unique proposition with the client truly at its heart.