Ross Leckridge was pleased with the financial plan he'd put together for his wealthy new client, but he was in for a shock when she turned around and instead of giving praise ended the relationship there and then.
Leckridge, a chartered financial planner at Edinburgh based Aberdein Considine, says he couldn't quite believe the snub at first, especially as he thought the work he'd done was very good.
He'd reviewed close to £4mn worth of investments and come up with several new products to match the client's objectives, get better performance, and optimise her tax bill.
But over time, upon reflection, it dawned on him what might have gone wrong, and he reconsidered his approach to financial planning, with some big changes ahead.
Leckridge has been a financial planner for a decade now. He worked at several Edinburgh firms before joining Aberdein Considine in January 2024. His current role is chartered financial planner but he is due join the firms' executive team shortly.
Originally wanting to be a lawyer, he blamed his high school grades for opting for a job at a bank instead.
His first financial advice job came some years later after he'd already spent a decade in a mortgage brokerage. But it was not an easy entry point.
He'd got his diploma in financial advice from the IFS and had started to work as a self-employed financial adviser when he realised the jump from theory to practice was too big a leap at the time.
"I've gone from, you know, reading a textbook about what investments and pensions were to actually in the real life having to try and explain them to people and recommend suitable investments to meet somebody's circumstances when all I've done is read it in a textbook. I had no experience. So the leap was too big, and I decided to take a step back."
He took a job as a paraplanner, which allowed him to get a grounding in the technical knowledge needed, before returning to advice some 15 months later.
Finding the ideal client journey
When Leckridge started out the client journey he adopted was much shorter than it is currently.
He would typically spend 1.5-2 hours with a client in the first meeting, telling them about the company and process, and attempt to go through a full fact finding process as well.
In hindsight, this did not work well for either him or the clients.
He says the problem was that at this stage the client may not have yet decided if they wanted to work with him. At worst this meant they had to sit through two hours of personal questioning when they'd already made up their mind they weren't going to engage.
Another problem was that many people did not know all the information the adviser needed at that stage.
