A Year in Review – Life at boosst - Financial Planning Insights and Guides

A Year In Review: Life at boosst 2022

Hello! It’s Josh here. I hope you enjoyed the festive period and found time to both enjoy the celebrations and recuperate for what comes next. We have all taken a good break over the festive period and are ready to start 2023 anew.

I always enjoy writing this annual reflection and it never ceases to amaze me just how much has happened since I last wrote this letter, just 12 months ago. I am sure we can all be guilty of forgetting to take a moment to pause and reflect on what has been and past. This year we have the advantage of a larger team, which I certainly used to my benefit when we held a team brainstorm to recall all of the highlights that 2022 provided.

Casting our mind right back to the beginning of 2022, our collective energy and focus was spent embedding the 6 team members who had joined us over the previous 9 months. This important groundwork continued throughout 2022 and has fortified the growth we had enjoyed as we emerged from the various lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

2022 was a tricky year for markets. Both equity and bond markets struggled, which is a rare find in the history of investing. Equities (the value of The Great Companies Of The World) fluctuated wildly as Russia/Ukraine, supply chains issues and global uncertainty spread. Bonds (loans to governments and large companies) fell in value as interest rates rose to combat inflation. Of course this becomes good news for longer term bondholders (as you will receive more interest in the future, recouping those losses and then receiving greater income than previously expected) but the short-term losses are never appreciated. Unbelievably the FTSE 100 actually finished up over the year and, if you look carefully, there are many positives to be found in markets. Headlines state that portfolios fell by 25% or more in 2022… but if you check the value of your well-diversified globally-spread portfolio you’ll see your fall has been dramatically less. We are content with this. Clearly we all prefer when markets are kind and portfolios rise as they have for the past decade, but markets have to fluctuate on their way to long-term growth above inflation. If there were no risk, there would be no reward. When these ‘negative’ years come, it’s important to use the opportunity if you are a net saver and still adding to your portfolio, and to not panic if you are a net spender and withdrawing from your portfolio. No matter which side of the equation you are on, careful planning and our helping hand will help to guide you through this period. Across the year we shared insights on the topics of Inflation, Uncertainty, keeping faith in humanity, forecasting, and currencies and interest rates.

Natural organic growth continued through 2022 as we continued to grow the number of families and companies that we serve. Our client surveys this year confirmed that our growth remains sustainable as client satisfaction remains incredibly high.

I would be remiss to not close with a thank-you for your continued support as a client of boosst. Special thanks must go to those clients who make our work so pleasurable and to those who continue to introduce friends and family to our services. (Also, those clients who bake a cake when they come to the office… you know who you are! 😋)

I hope you enjoy this reflection on the past 12 months and take every opportunity you find in 2023 to ensure that your reflection in a years’ time brings you happiness and fond memories.

And so, without further delay, let’s start reflecting…

January

After our business planning and objective setting sessions in December 2021, we launched into January and began tackling the projects we had identified to improve our business and the services we deliver. A highlight was the introduction of an internal Knowledge Base system. This has given us a central system to host our processes, resources, ideas and training manuals. Very little of the content is new, but the new system is fully searchable and much easier to use. We now also share responsibility for updating and improving the content, with different team members assigned to the sections most relevant to their roles and specialisms. We now include video guides which enables the team to self-diagnose any questions, freeing up Jennie to work on new things in her role as Practice Manager. We expect to see huge dividends from this introduction as new team members join us in the future.

I was also able to graduate in Manchester (after some covid-delays) to formally receive my Masters Degree in Financial Planning and Business Management, which I complected back in 2020.

February

I mentioned above the 6 new team members who joined us within 9 months. The last of those was Nicola, who joined us in February to work alongside Avril in our client support team. Avril & Nicola are the administrative engine which ensures client accounts are setup promptly, new investments and withdrawals are actioned smoothly, and they are the invisible barrier between our happy clients and cumbersome pension providers. Nicola joined us from a local financial planning business with working experience of the same software systems and investment platforms, allowing her to start at a running pace… and she hasn’t slowed down since!

February also brought Nick’s wedding, to his wife Martina. The team were all invited for a celebration of their union and enjoyed the social occasion. In fact, it was a memorable party for many reasons! You’ll need to ask Nick nicely to learn more…

March

In March Gabby was awarded the (pretty incredible) achievement of gaining the highest grade in her Certified Financial Planner qualification for the UK. She was invited along to Mansion House in the City of London to celebrate amongst the CISI’s other highest achievers in the other exams that they offer. With the Certified Financial Planning qualification being the peak of our profession, we were all very proud of her achievement.

April

By April the severity of Russias’ invasion of Ukraine had become evident for all to see. Tom and Mel, our Wellness Ambassadors, found a local van which was taking much needed supplies for families displaced by the invasion and we hosted a collection at the office. This was very different to the food bank collection we run in November, with the most requested items being medical supplies, warm clothes and nappies. A special thank-you to the clients who were coming into the office to add to this collection. We were able to send five crates of supplies to families in need of support.

May

May brought us two more Certified Financial Planners in the team, after Nick and Tom achieved this tricky qualification. The length and detail required within a time pressured window makes this a very tough title to achieve. With less than 1,000 CFP holders in the UK today, we are very proud to have 5 of them working within our team for our clients.

Once again we had four keen volunteers for the MK Marathon relay, with Dawn, Riah and Jo taking part. The fourth leg was completed by Riah’s partner Harry, after Tom suffered an injury and had to step back. Tom is now back to full fitness and raring to go in 2023. June

In June we published another of our ‘You Asked’ insight posts – this time focused on the new rules and the (then) imminent deadline for Trust Registration. This continuation of the series followed our guidance on Carbon Offsetting, on Planning Your Own Care, guiding A Family Member Who Needs Care and more recently our advice on the McCloud Judgment for Final Salary Pensions.

June also offered a great opportunity for Nick, Riah, Mel, Tom and Gabby to attend the NextGen Planners Conference at the Concorde Museum, at Manchester Airport. For all of the development work that we do internally, there is still a lot to be said for socialising with and learning from other financial planners across the UK to cross-pollinate good ideas. It’s also a nice way for us to reward our team members who are committing hundreds of hours outside of the office to their own exams and personal development.

July

In July we launched our ‘Uncommon Sense’ client essays. So far we have covered a variety of topics, from the ‘Power of Compounding’ to the ‘Allure of Certainty’ and why we believe there is a ‘Case for Rational Optimism’. Clients can access our latest and historic essays through our Newsletters, which we send every other month.

We also hosted our Summer Team Day on the river by Cookham – we started with a picnic lunch, followed by summer sports on the green and finished with a team meal at Malik’s. The picnic lunch was pretty spectacular… as you can tell from the number of bags in the photos below!

August

August tends to be a quieter month for us, with many of our clients and team members using the summer for holidays and trips overseas. We use this opportunity to work through our various external assessments, compliance audits and British Standards assessments.

We also hosted our summer Professionals Event, for local accountants, solicitors and mortgage brokers. We maintain this important network so that we can always connect our clients with external professionals as and when required. At the summer event we ran educational presentations on:

How retirees need to plan for a range of market returns, including how different economic climates impact clients going through retirement and the tools we use to model and forecast this, to give clients confidence in retirement.
An open discussion on how we can all work together to provide vital financial education for young adults.
Estate Planning – specifically ideas and strategies to reduce Inheritance Tax that families pay upon death.

September

In September we hosted a brand new event, that we called ‘Summer Camp’. This wasn’t a typical day at boosst HQ… which became evident as the car park slowly filled with other Financial Planners from across the UK. One even travelled from Scotland!

boosst Summer Camp was a new idea which was given life when Tom made a small throwaway comment that “we should run our own event”. Tom had been with us for around 6 months when he uttered those words… and he hadn’t yet learnt that any good idea, regardless of the effort and time involved, is usually met with a ‘Yes” by Josh and Keith.

We welcomed 10 attendees to our inaugural Summer Camp and we loved the opportunity to share our unique approach to Financial Planning. The ticket price of £50 (including fresh Pizza!) made it clear that this was not an event run for profit – rather our motive was simply to contribute to the growth of ‘proper’ financial planning in the UK. Our attendees made it clear that we hit the brief, as when we asked “ignoring the price you paid for the event, what was the value you gained in £££?”... the AVERAGE response was £12,800 per person! (Maybe we should revisit our pricing!).

October

In October all five of our Certified Financial Planners ventured up to Liverpool for our professions’ headline event; the CISI’s Financial Planning Conference. The sessions throughout the day gave plenty for us to think about before the evening awards dinner.

Having recently won the Financial Planning Firm of the Year Award, Keith was invited to judge this years’ award. The process involved detailed written applications, case studies and interviews to tackle the nitty gritty details. Of course knowing the winner of this award should have meant there were no surprises for Keith on the night.. until he himself won an award!

Keith was awarded the Tony Sellon Memorial Prize. This is a particularly nice award to win, as you do not nominate yourself or apply to win. People outside of boosst have taken note of Keith’s contributions to the profession and gone to the effort of completing a formal nomination, which is a wonderful gesture. Of those nominated, the judges deemed Keith to have given the most to our profession.

Keith was invited on stage to collect his award and asked to give a short speech… and of course delivered the perfect words for the occasion with no notice. Some might say he is a ‘Good media-trained Egg’ too!!

November

November proved to be another very busy month at boosst. Tom and Gabby were invited to the Personal Finance Societies’ Graduation Ceremony to collect their Fellowship and Chartered awards and Gabby was subsequently included alongside Josh in Citywire’s ‘Top 35 Next Generation Advisers’. This is a shortlist of 35 notable financial planners aged under 35 – this was her second consecutive appearance on the list and Josh’s sixth.

As a business, boosst were again included in Citywire’s ‘Top 100 UK Firms‘ shortlist for a fifth consecutive year – which is a 100% track record since our rebrand in 2018.

November brought us another Chancellor and another Budget – which we summarised with our Guide to the Autumn Statement. This was an interesting budget for us, with plenty of change that will impact clients planning – giving rise to new tax issues and planning opportunities. Rest assured we will flag anything to you that particularly impacts your own financial plan.

We undertook another Client Survey of our Individual Clients in November and loved reading your feedback – both constructive comments and flattery! 169 clients took time to share their thoughts and you can read the outputs here on our Client Survey Infographic.

December

In December we held our second professionals event of the year and again hosted our friendly accountancy and legal professionals. This time around we invited an external speaker who specialises in hosting meetings virtually on Zoom/Teams to help our professionals adapt to the ‘new normal’ – where virtual meetings are far more regular. Keith then ran through a deep dive session on all of the changes announced within the recent Budget (and the opportunities they present) before Josh talked through 8 examples of times that our financial planning has fundamentally changed or improved a clients life.

We always like to divide the final month of the year neatly into two halves. The first two weeks are always devoted to any final client work of the year, followed by one last week together as a team before closing the office for the festive period. We spend that last week together reflecting on the past 12 months and planning for the year ahead. It probably isn’t a surprise to hear that your financial ‘planners’ like to plan ahead for the upcoming year – and this is when we set our projects, goals and milestones for the new year. We were joined by Michelle Hoskin and as a team we have set some exciting goals and projects in motion for 2023.

The office was then closed so that all of the team had the opportunity to take some rest over Christmas with family and loved ones before we catapult into 2023.