For the past fourteen years I have enjoyed the freedom to spend my time doing whatever I wanted to do without having the necessity of have to go to work. I am financially independent.
My working life has spanned forty-eight years; it has been very much a, “a life” of two halves.
……. But first,
“THE EARLY YEARS”
I was born in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II. Next to the youngest amongst five siblings comprising of two older females and three younger males, I still have vague recollections of my early childhood before age two. I enjoyed my own company and often listened to radio programmes, in particular drama during those pre-television, pre-primary school days. From these early years I grew accustomed to living in my own world, often fantasising and pretending I had imaginary friends.
Both my sisters were married and had their own homes well before I started school. I saw very little of my older brother who was eleven years my senior and my younger brother was born as I reached five. For this reason apart from the usual parental interaction my formative earlier years were spent very much alone in my own company, but I never recall actually ‘feeling lonely’.
My parents were ordinary working people, quite poor when they started out. My Mother worked as a cleaner at our local hospital whilst my father who started as a builders’ labourer progressed to running his own roofing business.
At age eleven I was the only one of my siblings to pass the Common Entrance Exam and go on to Grammar School.
My childhood to mid teen years was a roller coaster period with emotional highs and lows. Looking back now I can see that during this time I learned the precepts of business by observing my Father who worked much of the time from home. From my Mother I believe I developed sensitivity for the feelings of others. She was someone to whom many friends and family came to seek help and to share their worries and personal problems.
By my mid-teens I had developed into a slightly under confident and shy yet thoughtful youth. I was blasé about my academic studies and like many of my peers from that period I was if the truth be known somewhat adrift of the real world.
However it was during this period that I developed the ambition to become a journalist. I was very much interested in English including reading both poetry and novels. Academically, it was only English Language and Mathematics that I seriously wanted to study.
“THE WORKING YEARS” ….The First Half
Leaving school at age sixteen in 1962, over the following twenty-three years I went on to be employed in eight various positions. The first was in journalism as a cub reporter for my local newspaper. It had been my ambition, my dream job to be a newspaper reporter ever since my early teenage years; however in the job it was a different story; I failed and six months on at the end of the probationary period my employment was terminated. I was devastated whilst at the same time I was an immature shy teenage boy with no idea of what I was to do. Within a matter of just a few weeks I received the news I had passed for entry to the civil service; an exam I had taken in the last week at Grammar School as a fall back to enter into employment as a clerical officer if I didn’t settle in journalism.
In those days the civil service offered maximum job security and a gold-plated pension from age 60; a dull but safe prospect my Mother was over the moon about. During the following two years I grew up a little, making the transition from a shy child to a more confident young adult. I met my future wife amongst work colleagues and I knew I had to move to a more satisfying and challenging career offering the prospect of immediate higher earnings potential; I had passed my driving test at seventeen and to enable me to run my own car I had needed to increase my income and therefore embarked on a part-time weekend and evening job, canvassing for a local egg and chicken delivery service.
Leaving the Civil Service; almost nineteen and discovering from my canvassing experience, I enjoyed working in sales, and after an unfulfilling two and a half years office bound I joined a domestic central heating company. Arriving at 8.30.am on the Monday, my first day I found myself with twenty-four other new starters in the cramped sales office of my new employers to begin an induction course in my new career. Six months later I found myself, one of the six longer term sales consultants still remaining with the company. To my chagrin although one of the most successful salesmen I had not so far received any of the hard earned commission promised in my contract and was still subsisting on a modest basis weekly wage of just £15 along with a meagre allowance for using my own car.
Seeing a nationally advertised position for a sales representative with a well-established branded kitchenware manufacturer I successfully applied to work the north west of England area on their behalf. The post came with an increased salary company car and expenses allowance.
My financial position had now improved sufficiently to enable me to marry, buy my own house and contemplate starting my own family.
It was now 1968, the economy was relatively buoyant and the company I worked for was becoming more successful and consequently became the target of a takeover by an acquisitive conglomerate, Pinnock Finance. No sooner had the takeover been completed than it became common knowledge in the City that Pinnock’s financial health was not all it seemed. A few weeks went by and various cost cutting measures had to be introduced within our operating procedures, and rumour became rife that our kitchenware business would either have to be sold or possibly worse closed down.
The operation stumbled on with no pending sale of the company appearing on the horizon and by early 1969 a new opportunity presented itself when the post of Regional Sales Supervisor for the stainless steel hollo-ware division of Lucas Industrial plc was offered to me.
My responsibilities included supervision of a group of self-employed sales agents covering south Lancashire, The Midlands, The South of England including London, Cornwall and Wales with the brief to also manage newly employed sales representatives.
I was based in Hapton near Burnley in East Lancashire. My employer was part of the vast auto components group of ‘Lucas’ car battery fame and the tiny stainless steel hollo-ware division represented a miniscule proportion of the Groups total turnover. Over the next six and a half years I built up the business in my region gradually expanding the salesforce whilst at the same time forming strong connections on a personal level with major national retailers and mail order companies.
Then in 1974 and 1975 came political unrest; Conservative leader, Ted Heath became Prime Minister and the Unions and the Government came head to head in an ideological battle for the rights of workers to strike. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ that followed included power strikes and a three day week. Shops and offices nationally had to try to operate without electricity and heating. Some shops continued operating their business using candles in place of electric lighting. It was a disaster for trade and the economy. My employers decided to close down their relatively small hollo-ware operation in order to reduce costs and overnight I became redundant.
I was determined not to let the adverse circumstances get me down and began to seriously consider going into business on my own account when early in 1975 I noticed an advert in the Daily Telegraph offering an opportunity to develop sales and marketing for a new start up company based in Carlisle. The products were quite revolutionary to the UK, in so far as they were a range of ceramic floor and wall tiles and at that time the home market was dominated by two major British manufacturers, Pilkington and Johnsons whose ranges comprised mostly of plain coloured wall tiles. The tiles of the new company were to be imported from an Italian manufacturer who were also to take a 49% stake in the UK venture.
I was offered the job. It involved travelling the country with a multitude of samples, approaching architects, builders merchants, wall and floor tilers, and kitchen designers. We had thousands of different designs as our Italian parent company was the 4th largest manufacturer in the world! We needed to get the range down to around 40 designs so that we could hold stocks (in an old disused hanger at Carlisle Airport !). Almost everyone liked the unique designs but nobody wanted to hold any stock themselves. Three months into the operation we had not managed to secure any sales and the new company with its increasing operating costs needed to obtain income. I finally hit on the idea of offering geographically strategic distributors the sole agency for the product in a given area. The sales started to roll in.
Within twelve months we reached a profitable level. We had national advertising featuring in premium house and garden magazines and displays in top retail outlets such as Harrods . Eighteen months on I was very happy and content with the product and many of my clients as well as the staff I was managing but I sensed my immediate superiors, the board of directors were getting involved in a struggle for power and taking their eyes off the ball and I also wanted a change in my career path; a new profession.
In late 1976, I joined the Trustee Savings Bank as a District Sales Adviser, informally referred to as ‘A Unit Trust Rep’. I was attached to a number of bank branches selling unit trust and insurance plans to customers of the Bank. I was reasonably successful in gaining a good relationship with the majority of clients and my results were amongst the best achievers. Within two years I was given a team of advisers to supervise and manage. During this time I studied and through examination successfully achieved industry recognised qualifications.
I left TSB in 1982 to join The Scottish Provident Institution were I was able to broaden my technical knowledge to individual and Corporate Pension Plans. Based at the area office in Manchester as an ‘Inspector’, a position later to be renamed as a ‘broker consultant’ I was responsible for developing life assurance, pension and investment business through intermediaries such as accountants, estate agents, pension specialists and other financial advisers. My geographical territory was north-west Lancashire and Cumbria and in effect I worked from my home on the Fylde Coast only visiting the Manchester office once a month. Within two years I was selected to undergo a ‘potential area manager’ course at head office in Edinburgh with a view to being promote to that position at some point over the following twelve months. I enjoyed my work with Scottish Provident and also took part in developing a trainee ‘Inspector’, however I came to the conclusion that my future lay in advising individual clients in practice on my own account rather than in technical support for independent intermediaries offered by a product provider.
The Second Half
In 1985 I decided to become an Independent Financial Adviser and Financial Planner and join the ranks of the self-employed and continued on this basis for the next twenty-five years. It was during this latter half of my working life advising private clients on their personal financial planning that I felt most fulfilled and rewarded, however I firmly believe it was my earlier varied ‘employed’ career that provided the experience and honed the personal skills that made my later professional practice business both a successful and self- satisfying enterprise. Whilst running my practice I carried on with my studies in the evenings and at weekends to achieve greater technical knowledge and took a whole series of exams to achieve professionally recognised advanced qualifications. During the earlier years of being an adviser I was remunerated by commission earned on the sales of products and transactions I made for clients as was normal in the industry at the time. In 1999, however I decided to change over to a fee basis with clients because I felt it to be more transparent, and professional. Very few advisers were doing this at the time and so it posed a risk to my relationship with not only established clients but also any new potential clients. There was a lot of confusion amongst the public, many of whom who had been encouraged by the opaqueness of the ‘commission system’ to falsely assume they were getting ‘free advice’.
In 2007 aged 61 with an eye on my future retirement and concern for my clients ongoing care and advice I decided to form a company and invite another experienced qualified adviser to come on board as an equal shareholder and director. The company developed and grew and in 2010 on my retirement we had fifteen employees of which there were seven advisers.