Setting the Foundations workshops

Setting the Foundations workshop is now an established workshop that we run for financial advisors and compliance managers as well. It's generally aimed at new advisors coming into the market, although just recently we've been able to attract some more experienced advisors who might not have done as many cases, so they're a bit rusty, want to build up their confidence. We've seen them coming along to the course as well.

As an advisor, certainly when you're starting off, you can feel quite isolated because most people work from home these days, not many people go into the office anymore.

So going on these courses, you're making good connections, you're having the opportunity to either ask myself or Chris about things from what we found from other advisors, but also you've got the opportunity to ask other advisors that are either on the webinar or they're in the meeting room with you. So it's, yeah, it works really well. We wanted to help advisors make that transition from going from the exam, where everything is very much theory-based, into the real world.

Being able to adapt and sort of put all of that knowledge into practice, really. Before the workshop, I had knowledge in theory, but I lacked the confidence to kind of put everything into practice and take on a real world client and help them, you know.

So you think as a new advisor, all you're thinking is, this is a massive decision that I've got to help someone with. So going on the workshop really helped to understand that you can put it into practice and you can take the first step towards making it a reality for not only yourself, but for your clients as well.

We try and take the advisors on a journey from start to finish, looking at a lifetime mortgage in its entirety. So that could be maybe starting off with some information about the market, how it's performing currently.

Then we look at lead generation. We will also look at fact finding. We talk a lot about vulnerable customers as well, because that's quite key with the FCA currently.

We run the course two different ways. We have a virtual course where we do it on teams. We also started to do some face-to-face workshops as well as some of our key energy offices. The event is completely free of charge. So it's something that we do to help advisors build their confidence and get ready to go out into the big wide world, as it were. All the details could be found on our website as to where the dates are, what locations and whether it's online or not. If you're on the fence about attending the workshop, I'd just say join in, jump in. You know, what have you got to lose?