IFA Spotlight: Tina Weeks on Life Planning, Twitter and Project Eve

Tina Weeks is on a mission. After two years hard graft transforming her mortgage business into North London’s Serenity Financial Planning, she is targeting a dramatic growth in client numbers this year.

But as part of a niche group in the market – she was the UK’s first female financial life planner, and is still just one of a few hundred practitioners – she has a problem.

“The public don’t know people like me exist. The majority don’t really understand financial planning, let alone financial life planning,” she said. Weeks’ solution is to fill the public’s knowledge gap with her message about advice and conquer market share while debates on independent and restricted post-RDR are still in flux.

Social media

Social media –which offers cheap, quick, and direct access to millions of potential clients – is one part of Weeks’ aggressive marketing strategy to convince the public it needs her services.

“We’re at a point of monumental change in our industry. People ask me what’s the point of social media? Well, it has helped raise my profile, get new clients, and increase the people I can spread the message to. It has been hugely beneficial.”

Weeks has over 6,300 Twitter followers across @SerenityTweets (her client twitter account) and @TheFinanceCoach (her industry twitter account), and tweets regularly to cultivate her client base.

In an UK IFA industry first, she now uses Quick Response (QR) codes on her website, at her seminars and client networking events to provide additional information and services to clients on their mobiles. QR codes can be used to display the latest updates of text, video, PowerPoint presentations, website URLs, and PDFs. Every brand from Pepsi to Radio 1 is using them to talk to customers.

She also uses Foursquare, a location-linked web application which allows users to digitally and publicly check in and out of places and recommend them to others. It offers little direct benefit to clients, but is a useful b2c marketing tool for advisers as it creates a sense of community and imitates traditional word of mouth referrals. Weeks admits adopting social media requires “a lot of trial and error”, and constant evolution. A revamped Serenity Financial Planning website is back this month after Weeks took it offline to overhaul its functionality. The site now gives clients online access to their financial life plans and investments. Clients can upload documents to a secure area to store for future reference or share with the Serenity team.

Visitors can use the site’s ‘Ask the Experts’ feature to communicate and interact with each other and get answers on the site or privately. “I want visitors to feel the website is for them. Consumers don’t want to be sold to. We’ve flipped that on its head now. We focus so much more on what fires them up and what they’re passionate about. I hardly ever talk about the money,” Weeks said.

Online sharing has also changed how Weeks interacts with her peers. Industry conferences charge hundreds of pounds for just a couple of opportunities a year to network. Weeks has discussions online in seconds, any time, at virtually no cost and with fewer office hours lost.

Project Eve

Weeks still attends the Institute of Financial Planning events but admits she has stopped going to other industry events because new ideas are often suppressed by ‘whinging’ about the RDR.

“The RDR is accelerating a natural evolution. You either adapt and make it work for you, or not.”

Instead, Weeks has teamed up with a circle of “positive, excited, enthusiastic people” to fire-up demand for financial life planning, beyond its limited stereotype of high net worths. Project Eve may sound like a Cold War military operation, but it is Weeks’ latest campaign to drum up business by proselytising to the masses about the virtues of financial advice.

It is the brain child of Bruce Wilson, the former Helm Godfrey managing director, Adam Young of Dragonfly Financial Planning, Jeremy Deedes of Planning for Life, Dennis Hall of Yellowtail Financial Planning and James Harvey of James Harvey Associates.

Project Eve’s strategy is to get the public to free workshops – the first was in London in December – to find out “what financial life planners do, how we do it, how they can get access to it”.

Weeks said: “Most people spend more on eating out than they do on their financial planning. It’s a matter of priorities. The workshops will expand the knowledge and education of the general consumer base, and hopefully financial life planning will become accessible to more people as we go on, which in turn helps everyone within the advice industry.”

At the moment, the Project Eve team work pro bono, seeing the effort as a way of giving back by enhancing the financial education of consumers. They hope the knock-on effect of having more advice-savvy consumers will also help grow the potential client base for all advisers. After some initial sponsorship from UBS, the team want more support from the banking sector and the government to set Project Eve up as a charity, with a nationwide network of advisers hastening the mass market conversion to financial life planning “so the word gets spread a bit quicker”.

Weeks is keen to emphasise financial life planning is not just for HNW individuals. A client she saw recently was 25yrs old, on £28,000, with no savings, investments or pensions but was keen to put a financial life plan in place, so Weeks adapted the process to meet her needs. “The client had less face to face time with me but was still able to get the plan in place she needed at a price she could afford.” While the general public are mulling the idea, Weeks is looking to run a series of her own financial planning “taster” sessions, designed to find paying clients who want to work with her now.

Banishing stereotypes

Underpining all Weeks’ campaigning is banishing the myths around financial advice and the people who give it, from images of high pressure salesman to meditating life planning hippies. “I know both sides. I spent three years at Allied Dunbar where they tried to get new people to take on a lot of debt because they thought it would make me hungrier to work harder. It was my baptism of fire, but it was a different world to the one we live in now.”

“At the other end of the spectrum, life planning is so hard to explain to people, including other advisers. We don’t all have to be hippies and Buddhists and meditate all the time. It’s just about learning customer skills, how to communicate with another person in an understanding, non-judgmental way.”

Weeks says Serenity Financial Planning is still a work in progress “but I’m almost there”.

“It already looks the way I want it to look, I just want it to be bigger. I’m having the time of my life right now. It gives me such a buzz to see clients come out of my office all buzzed and ready to go. I never thought this job could be like this.”

Weeks’ words of wisdom

Clients must like you

Clients have to tell me really personal things. They must be able to feel comfortable and trust me. If you’re talking to me and you’re thinking ‘I don’t like her’, it’s not going to work.

 Outsource everything

Going from a mortgage firm, to financial planning, to financial life planning, I needed the freedom to not be tied into paying salaries and huge expenses. Now I outsource everything – paraplanners, compliance, investment research, admin, accounts.

 Get and stay slick

I want to systemise every process, so I can hand new staff a manual for that part of the business and say ‘This is how we do it here, my way’. In an efficiently run business everything is replicable, scalable, nothing is a surprise.

 Stick with it

The transition has been a huge learning curve and probably the lowest part of my career. But it is also the highest. Every day my business is becoming more like the picture I had in my mind. If I can do it, from almost a standing start in two and a half years, then anybody can.

 Aspirations

I’m documenting everything we do to create almost the prototype of the ideal financial life planning business. Peers could adjust it to what suits them. I would like to write a book on transformation, because that applies to so many areas of my life. Transformation – that might be what I call my book.