Victoria Ross: Being a good advice firm has nothing to do with headcount

I’ve read quite a few opinion pieces recently on the benefits of being a smaller company in the financial planning space.

Having started my advice career at a smaller firm with 10 employees and now being part of an international company with a headcount significantly higher, I’ve gained valuable experience from both and feel well positioned to provide a balanced view.

Small can be beautiful

A benefit that small companies share across many industries is having all your employees in one room.

While this might have reduced somewhat with the growth of hybrid working, there is huge benefit in absorbing information and knowledge from conversations and activity happening around you, especially in those formative years.

With planners, paraplanners and administration all in the same space, this learning potential is significant and I am hugely grateful I had this environment when I started learning my trade.

In my first role, our planners – and, indeed, our founder – were in arm’s reach and I was duly introduced to clients from day one. In this way, you can get involved with everything and gain experience of all parts of a company very easily.

Smaller firms can have the ability to be more agile, with the likelihood of a flatter organisational structure that can allow for quicker decision making and fewer processes to navigate, which some advisers will prefer.

I believe they can also often very much reflect the personality and values of their leader – which could be either a pro or a con, depending on your relationship with the person at the top!

I certainly viewed the head of my initial advice firm as a mentor and an inspiration for the planner I am today.

Being able to provide a more personalised service for clients is something often cited as being an advantage of a smaller firm, but I’d suggest this can be achieved in any well-structured company that puts clients at the heart of its proposition.

The benefits of scale

For a developing adviser, a key benefit of a larger company can be the availability of more structured learning and development opportunities, potentially in the form of an adviser academy or graduate scheme.

They also offer the prospect of learning from a broader range of advisers and, potentially, a more diverse range of clients and advice experiences to get involved with.

As well as the ability to be mentored, an often-overlooked benefit can be the ability to mentor others and, with a more regular flow of new recruits, larger companies can offer greater opportunity for embedding knowledge and skills, by sharing them with others.

As well as learning and development, there are further resources many larger firms can offer that make them attractive to advisers, such as access to tax and legal experts and in-house PR and marketing teams.

Larger firms are also more likely to be able to invest in best-of-breed tools and technology, something I feel is vital within the fast-evolving space of personal finance.

With the increasing burden of regulation, an ageing adviser population and the pressure to meet the changing needs of clients, the creation of larger firms is also just a natural product of viable succession planning for retiring advisers in many cases, allowing them to realise the value of their life’s work.

Room for everyone

In the face of a decreasing advisory population, the broader truth is that there is the space and need for firms of all sizes, with an appreciation that they have the potential to attract different advisers and clients.

A client can – and should – receive a quality, personalised service from a company of any size, so I believe it would be much more useful to move on from focusing on what makes firms different to what makes good firms the same.

We need to work together to help clients understand what first-class professional advice looks like, how it can help them and how to find it – and this has nothing to do with headcount.

Victoria Ross is a chartered financial planner at Progeny