Being a financial adviser is more than just numbers.
Journey to Adviser – Catherine’s Story
It’s such a great feeling when you know you’ve really supported someone to achieve their goal. In the Journey to Adviser series, we asked some of our delegates to share their success stories and what inspired them to pursue a career as a financial adviser.
In this episode, Catherine shares her incredible story, from accountancy to advice. A challenging experience as a consumer from an unregulated investment inspired her to help others make better financial decisions to create the lifestyle they aspired to.
Tell us about your journey, what made you decide to pursue a career as a Financial Adviser?
I started my working career as a chartered accountant and aged 25 years, working in large companies, helping improve processes and so that was great. I travelled the world, I got married, and I had a family in my early forties. I took some time out.
I didn’t want to be working and travelling with work the way I had been because I had young kids and I also got involved in an investment, which went badly wrong, I didn’t realise at the time that wasn’t regulated. As a consumer, I hadn’t really understood the difference. So I lost a bit of capital and it made me start to really think about how people build their money, save their money.
Reflecting on what happened to me, I realised that although I was a numbers girl, having done accountancy that was a world away from financial services and products that you put your money into, I ended up meeting an IFA firm down in Surrey where I’m based and then through lockdown started helping them to talk to accountants about why they would use financial advisors and finding the clients that might need help from a financial advisor and inevitably sitting and listening to the advisors, talking to the clients that the accountants brought in, I was sitting in meetings listening to people talk about their lives, their hopes and dreams, and seeing how the advice thing came in and played a part and help them manage their money and take their lives forward perhaps in a different way.
And I got the bug for it, and I thought, I think I could do this. I’d like to help people and I’d be an advisor myself. There was a guy who had recently qualified in the firm and he said, there are two routes, and that he’d gone down the CII route. He said, the CII has training, that there are other private firms as well, that you can do more intensive training. So I decided, right, I would self-fund it, I’d give myself up to a year and I would take the exams R01, 2 to 6.
I decided to go down the CII Route and I started investigating whether there were any sort of top-up study support materials or companies that I could use to further that quickly.
That’s quite a journey Catherine, thank you for sharing…
I think lots of people have more than one career in their life. Certainly, women have breaks for children. I see clients who have been employed and then become self-employed or vice versa.
I feel much more confident in my forties setting up now as a professional who needs a lot of technical skills, but also needs a lot of interviewing, listening, and empathising because they’re not skills I had at 21, I was keen to get on a plane and get air miles calls and travel the world and I wanted a salary.
I would never have considered self-employment. It was a different time in my life. I know people do get into it straight from school, but I feel and perhaps for the work that the niches that I’ll go into with this, that it’s more suited to me as a second career for sure.
How did the platform and different learning materials help you to study?
I was impressed fairly early on. A lot of the way I wanted to study, and I think a lot of people still do, is putting pen to paper and making notes. And I realised that I had to take this quite offline.
I did go through all of R01 (before using Redmill). Still, I knew that for the rest of the year or however long it was going to take, I had to find someone who would have PDFs that would let me download materials completely and potentially then be very much analogue instead of being connected.
And there are great things being connected such as the quizzes and having a Zoom call with a tutor. But I needed the rump of it. I needed the materials to be available offline to me.
And so I went looking for alternatives. And then I found Redmill and the platform itself was great. I mean, I could go online to buy the module, but then I downloaded it and from then on, I wasn’t at the mercy of my connection and I was just there in my own time with the materials.
And yes, the fact it was broken into the weekly stuff, was really useful as well, because if you’re not in a firm where there’s lots of you and they are driving the timetable, then you have to do that for yourself and there’s already a lot to do. You’re trying to get to grips with a new discipline and how to study again. And there’s so much that you’re trying to do, to have someone tell you a little bit, that will lead you a little bit was really helpful.
I was aware that there were people who I met who were employed doing it, but then their challenge is they’re working all day for their employer and maybe studying at night so the commuting time was key.
I became quite obsessive about the need to be able to download materials and take them away into whatever lifestyle I was in at that time; that month, school holidays, term time, you know, the peaks and troughs of how you can focus and do your studying and that’s so important as we know in terms of exam technique, you need, still and quiet.
And so I just had to have the materials available. It was appreciated.
How did you find the weekly structure of each module?
I worked out that your weekly X, Y, and Z could be my plan for X, Y, and Z as well. And it just gave me manageable chunks to get through. And I always felt after the end of the week, I needed to kind of go back and perhaps do some quizzing or some extra reading or go through the videos. And it was just a great pause in the material because otherwise you have no you have no structure. You’re in the hands of the material.
As I got further through the exams, I came to realise and as a lot of people felt, that the CII’s materials were quite dry and sort of one-dimensional. I downloaded it and found it really quite unwieldy. So my sense was that Redmill’s materials were quite different but quite focused, which for me is the really important point. It’s about passing the exams. I felt that the skill of how your materials have been put together is absolutely laser-focused on passing the exam. I don’t mean they’re not trying to teach you, but based on the fact you’re sitting on your own in a room rather than sitting in a classroom, it’s giving you the most sort of important angle on the key concepts. And you have summaries at the end.
As I got to R06, where it’s all about the technique, just the complete focus on this is what you need to take away from it really helped me to try and imagine the job at the end. Which is about helping people in their lives. It’s not about knowing every threshold or every capital gains tax limit.
It’s about learning the skills to help people. So I really felt it was valuable.
The content, I sense is a bit hard. I know that some of the questions that I did in the training and the mocks with yourselves, the exams didn’t feel as hard. So maybe I have this sense that you’ve over-prepared me, I don’t know.
What support did you get from Redmill?
I felt very impressed early on that I would get a quick response from your team. I had the materials, direct quizzes and there are videos. There were lots of things I could go back and reexamine because things tend to need to drip feed in. If you think of the whole syllabus, maybe you’ve been a paraplanner and you know lots about one area, but maybe you’ve never done anything around tax or in my case, you know loads about tax. But I knew nothing about protection.
So, you come to each module with maybe some knowledge, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Sometimes you don’t even know how to learn it and so you maybe read, and if there’s a lot of heavy text, you might get to the end of the page and think, I’ve been thinking about the school run, I haven’t taken in any of that. And then you go look at a quiz and you go, great. So the mix of learning techniques is really helpful.
It was helpful to have the study guides and then other forms of study. And then I started emailing, I had to find my feet because I thought, well, I don’t know whether I’ll get an answer quickly. I really need to clear this up to go on to the next chapter. But I got an email, often within a day. I just thought this is brilliant.
I didn’t know how many people or branches or what was behind your company, but it didn’t really matter because I was sitting at home and I had a question and somebody came back to me really quickly and that was really, really appreciated. So very helpful.
The guides, the quizzes, the email and phone calls. I mean, that was all the support that you offered. There was a range of things, and I took advantage of all of that.
Would you recommend using Redmill? If so, why?
Absolutely and I have, I’ve bigged you up on LinkedIn. It really helped me get there. I felt really secure going into each exam, that I’d learned a lot and that I was ready to try and take the exams. I think the fact that you’re in Scotland and I’m at the bottom of the country, you know, it just shows it doesn’t really matter where you are because people work virtually.
And so. Absolutely. Yes! Complete endorsement. So hopefully I’ll be using you again as I do some more exams, but not for a while.
What’s your plans for the future? What’s the next step?
So at the moment, I’m self-employed and I’d like to keep it that way because the big change for me has been going from helping fixed companies to helping people with their lives.
So I want to have a client bank that I can build for the next, let’s say, 15 or 20 years that I’ve got left to work, build up something of my own. I don’t know what that model looks like. I’m talking to networks, I’m talking to small firms with perhaps retiring partners.
I’m in the firm that I was an introducer for and I’m morphing from a business development role into being an adviser with them. But, you know, it’s a big profession. There’s lots and lots of opportunity. There are lots of different models. There’s obviously the role of technology. And there are niches, I’m really interested in helping women.
And because of where I live and my sort of catchment or contacts, I can help people who perhaps have lost a husband and inherited money who have never been the person that had education around money. So I think there’s something about taking on money and learning how to do the right thing with it and that leads to inheritance tax as well. Divorce is another area in which the parallel is the same.
Perhaps you’ve got to take on some money and manage it for yourself for the next phase of your life, and you didn’t have to do that. So there’s a definite flavour for me of helping women with changes in their lives. And I hope in the Southeast there are plenty of clients for me to find that I can help do that.
[End of Interview]
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