What event stood out to you in 2023 as crucial to advisers and how they do business?
I’m going to say that the standout event for me in 2023 is actually the FAAA Congress being the first joint event of the FPA and AFA, where huge amounts of people came together. The atmosphere was electric, the connection was great, just meeting the people, talking about how they do business. That I think is crucial, because at the end of the day, that’s what matters most.
How do you feel going into 2024? Is it optimism, trepidation, or a bit of both?
I’m optimistic and I’m excited. I see a lot of people going out on their own at the moment, there just seems to be a spark. I think we’re seeing a lot of advisers just go, “You know what, I can do this. I’ve been grinding for a while; I can do it”.
What are your expectations and wishes for 2024 and what do you expect will be the reality?
Related to the previous answer, I actually think we’re going to see more and more single authorised representative practices appear. I think this is coming from a confidence in themselves and the language in the industry around licensees and the QAR, and people are optimistic about the future, and therefore they’re willing to invest in themselves so that they benefit the most from it. That’s kind of where I’m optimistic. I’m cautious in the sense that I don’t think everyone realises how hard it is to run a single AR practice by yourself. But I’m hoping that with greater communication and collaboration, perhaps they won’t need to worry as much because they’ll be able to connect with others and share wins, successes, pains, momentum, all the rest of it. So that’s I think we’re going to see that pop up a bit over the next 12 months.
What will your personal focus in 2024 be?
My personal focus is really going to be around niching hard and doing less. From an advice perspective, it’s going to really be around specialising even more into the high emotion, high technical cases that I really enjoy. Maybe more one-off pieces of advice in that regard. What I’d love to see is becoming a specialist where other advisers would come to me to help with their cases.
Do you expect the advice landscape to change next year?
That plays into what I said before around the emergence of a lot more single practices. I think a lot more people are getting confident and having a crack themselves. The inhibitors around that are obviously going to be economic, because they’ve got mortgages and kids, all the rest of it. But I think the outlook in advice is turning such that people are more confident to go out on their own and don’t feel like they’re going to need the scale. There are probably enough well-established individuals, whether they are in businesses or not, that people are looking at saying “I could do that”.
