“The absolute key is you are there to look after them through heightened times of stress,” says Brooks Macdonald CEO Andrew Shepherd in the context of vulnerable clients – a topic he returns to more than once over the course of our conversation.
To illustrate the point, he highlights “this fantastic married couple” he took on as clients shortly after he began his career as an administrator at a financial planning firm in 1994.
“We started off with a couple of hundred grand and over the years, and despite taking out an income, it grew to £800,000,” he continues. “We did really well for them and, almost 30 years on, they are still clients today. Well, ‘they’ are not – and that is kind of the point of the story as we got to a stage, five years ago, where the husband was terminally ill.
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“I remember going down to meet them with another investment manager from here and the wife opened the door. We had a big hug, we went in and we saw the husband, who was downstairs on what ended up being his deathbed a week later. And then we went and had soup – and all the financial planning we had done and everything we had done to create returns for them really was secondary.
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“It was the fact we were there to put an arm around her shoulder and guide her through the most difficult part of her life – that was the value we were adding. For me, it is all about trust and being there to help people – so it isn’t always solely about a financial plan and investment management – but of course that element is hard to define in terms of value.”
To read more, visit the December edition of Portfolio Adviser Magazine
