July 2025: Where does the time go?
It seems like only yesterday I was announcing that Emily had had a baby boy. Emily’s enjoyed a year with her son, Charlie and is now very happy to be back at work. We’re delighted her return has been seamless both for her and the rest of the team (and hopefully Charlie as well!).
We were conscious that returning to work after maternity leave could be a challenging transition, with the likely changes in the team, workflows as well as all the logistics and emotional factors Emily would have to face.
As a key and valued member of the team – Emily’s worked with me since she was 16, knows the business inside out, as well as many of our clients – we were keen to get this right.
So, as well as an extended maternity pay, we offered her regular paid, keep in touch days, where she was able to come in (sometimes with Charlie, which was lovely) maintain contact and stay involved in some training and team meetings. Provided this was fewer than ten days during the maternity, Emily was able to keep her maternity pay.
Emily’s now back four days a week (you won’t get hold of her on a Friday!) and so far, she feels that’s the right balance for her, Charlie and us.
It’s staggering the number of changes we made in operations over the last year and the additional training Emily has had to get back up to speed.
We’ve introduced a new onboarding portal for new clients, a portal for existing financial planning clients to update their details once a year, negotiated a better deal for our clients invested with Parmenion and moved most clients to the Advisory portfolios, launched an online system so we can take payment by direct debit and credit card and improved a huge number of processes.
We’re also shortly moving our paperless system (Virtual Cabinet) to the cloud-based solution (Workiro) which is more intuitive to use and will provide an easier, user-friendly experience.
With advances in AI and the number of IT solutions we’re now being offered, the story we’re confronted with almost daily is that if we don’t invest in these, we’ll fall behind.
But is that really true?
On the topic of technology and women in the workplace, we went to an IT conference a few weeks ago and one of the breakout rooms was being hosted by three women. Their take was unanimously that IT was crucial BUT it was more important to make sure you get the rest of your business sorted out first in terms of people and process before you get on to the IT issues.
The presenters made it clear that technology should be a tool to support and enhance the work that the people are doing and the effectiveness of processes, rather than the other way around. It was an interesting and very different perspective to all the other presentations we saw discussing countless IT tools and apps to make us – apparently – more efficient. It’s easy to get carried away with some of the amazing apps on offer.
It’s inevitable we will adopt AI into our workflows as all businesses are now, but we’ll make sure that we only invest in this when we can evidence it supports our team and our workflows and is likely to have a positive impact on the advice and service we can offer to our clients.
Given the pace of change, I’m looking forward to seeing what I can report back on next summer!
The stock markets
As a reminder, this is what stock market returns have been over the last month and 30 years.
How we helped
One of our clients was recently given a cancer diagnosis, but hadn’t mentioned it to us. It was only because of our formal annual planning meeting process that they remembered they had the plan. The client has now received a very welcome payout from their insurer.
And that’s not the only recent claim.
Several other clients have also unfortunately had to claim on their insurance plans – both for critical illness and income protection. The good news is that these plans were all set up correctly, the claims have been successful and the clients are more secure financially as a result at what is typically a period of instability.
Quote
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.
The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Bill Gates
We hope you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter.