I run a little firm called MFP Wealth Management based in Mudeford in Christchurch, Dorset.

We’ve been going about 12 years now and we serve about 70 families, most of whom are in retirement, with a few who haven’t got there yet. It’s a life planning practice, and I do a lot of coaching with clients just trying to deliver great outcomes for people, as most if not all financial planners do.

Many years ago I did a coaching programme with CEG Worldwide in the United States. Their thing was “you’ve got to have a nitch”, or ‘niche’ as we would say here.

I didn’t know what my niche was, but I looked around my area, and realised Christchurch has the highest population of retirees in the UK. So I’ve gone fishing where the fish are. There was big demand for retirement advice where I am, so it made sense to set out my stall to do that.

Once that was decided, it was a case of positioning myself as someone who has expertise in that area. I got involved with Martin Bamford’s Boom! documentary about the baby boomer generation, and from there we co-wrote a book: Ready, Steady, Retire!

As a business we started putting on what we called Retirement Café events, as a way of getting good information out to people. The Retirement Café podcast was born out of that, and then more recently my YouTube channel as well.

Behind the scenes

For advisers and planners looking to produce more or better quality video or digital content, there is the question of what kit you need. It’s a bit like when you talk to a cyclist, they always need one more bike. So there’s always another bit of kit you can buy.

You can get going with relatively little – phone cameras now are really quite amazing.

A clip on wired lavalier microphone that plugs into your phone will produce great sound. Good lighting is important, whether that’s natural light if you’re outside, or lights for indoors.

I use a teleprompter so that I look straight down the camera lens and can see the people I’m talking to, or else to see my script if I’m giving a talk. And a tripod helps too. But you can do all this quite cheaply, and still produce good quality.

Earlier this year, we were looking at rebranding the firm, and we spoke to clients about what they thought and what they valued from working with us. They gave us so much rich feedback.

Off the back of that, one weekend I was out walking in the New Forest with my family, and I took five minutes to record some quick videos thanking my clients for taking the time to help. And I got a massive response.

In fact, I got a new client enquiry as a result – one client had shared the video with a friend, saying: “Look, this is our financial adviser. This is how he communicates with us.”

I’ve actually started doing that more. There’s a service called Vidyard where you can film little videos, maybe for things like following up after a review meeting.

Video doesn’t have to be for everyone; we’ve worked perfectly well all these years without it. We’re not all going to start getting on TikTok. I’m just saying video is another way of doing things. If it’s for you, great. If not, don’t worry about it.

The art of client testimonials

When it comes to getting impactful client testimonials, we need to go to clients and almost coach them – not tell them what to say, but ask them some really good questions, like ‘what was the pain point that brought you to us in the first place?’

You’re trying to identify the types of clients you work with, and the types of problems they have. And if you can get clients to put that in their own language, not your’s or some marketing guru’s, the authenticity of that comes across.

For example, one family we helped involved a grandmother in care, the son acting as power of attorney and the granddaughter wanting to buy a new home.

I explained to the son how a care annuity could secure the care for his mum for the rest of her life, which in turn would give her the peace of mind that she could provide the deposit for her granddaughter’s home.

The son also had peace of mind, not only that his mum’s care fees were taken care of but that he saw his daughter get on the housing ladder. So that was the plan that came together. The story wasn’t: ‘We do care annuities – this is how.’ It was the impact the care annuity had.

Finding more to life

My start in financial services was at KGJ Insurance Brokers in Stourbridge, run by Martin Wood, who’s an amazing guy.

I then went travelling for a bit, ran a pub in London, and long story short, after doing some more travelling, I returned to the brokerage not one but twice, first to work as a financial adviser then as a director at about 27 years old.

At 30, I had one of those crazy years which didn’t go particularly well. My girlfriend and I broke up, and a few months later a few friends and I thought we’d go and ride our motorbikes round the Nürburgring. On the way there in Belgium, a guy did a U-turn in front of me and I hit his BMW at 35 miles an hour.

I had to get resuscitated at the scene, and ended up in intensive care for 10 days. When I came back to work, I just thought: “There must a bit more to life than this.”

I came up with the random idea that I’d like to learn to sail yachts, so that’s what I did. I became a yacht master, moved to the south coast, and started sailing professionally for a living. I also became a lifeboat runner here in Mudeford.

Then one fateful weekend teaching sailing, I met my wife Kathy, and we settled down and decided to create a future together.

She mentioned that I might need a proper job, rather than jumping on and off boats, which was a fair comment. So that was how I returned to advising, and how MFP started.

But I knew there was something missing from my relationship skills. So I enrolled on the Kinder Institute’s Seven Stages of Money Maturity workshop, then the five-day Evoke course, to bring coaching skills into my financial planning practice. And 12 years later, that's kind of where I'm at.

The accident probably prompted a bit of an awakening moment, a realisation that life is precious and can disappear in an instant. It just allowed for some navel gazing, and for me to reassess who I was, and what I wanted to do and achieve.

I suppose that’s what life planning is about as well – helping people discover what’s truly important to them. Because you don’t know when it’ll all be gone.

I've got 10- and 12-year-old daughters, and I still read a story to my 12-year-old in the evening. I know that one night soon, it's going to be the last time.

I've already done lots of the last things. Like the last time I meet her off the bus from school. All these moments are just drifting away. So we've just got to make sure that we're present and we're with them. And that we don't look too far in the future, just embrace what's going on today.

But also that we have some kind of plan to make sure the things that nourish and fulfil us are in our lives. If there are phone calls you want to make to someone you love, or friends you need to see, or something in your life that you’re going to get around to doing, please do it.

Wanting to help

Since 2017 I’ve been doing some coaching for the Kinder Institute, helping people go through their mentorship programme.

Everyone's so different in my work coaching advisers in terms of what they're trying to achieve.

But the one common denominator I come across is that people have big books of business. They've got a lot of clients, which causes all types of problems.

Unless you’ve got really strong back-office systems and processes, trying to review and regularly meet so many people is really hard. I often see people trying to deal with 200 to 300 clients, and I have no idea how you could do that, or do that well, at least.

Advisers want to help people. So when another human being comes in, maybe they don't meet your criteria, but you say to yourself you can help them.

I just think we've got to be really careful about our own time and energy. We're all very cautious about how we spend our money, but we’ve also got to be really cautious and thoughtful about how we spend our time.

Because every time you spend time on a client, you are saying yes to that and no to something else. So it’s worth taking a moment to ask yourself: is this the right thing to do?

It comes down to working out who you really want to serve, who you really get enthused about working with, and working with them.

You've only got so much energy and time left on this planet. Just be conscious of who you're going to spend that time with. And let the others go kindly with compassion and with empathy.

There will be an advisory service that is happy to work with people like them. Among the NextGen Planners, there’s a lot of people starting businesses, building client banks and offering different propositions.

There's a lot of opportunity rather than just cutting people loose. But be mindful that you're probably not getting paid correctly for working with these people.

It's causing you a headache and you're being run ragged. It sucks a lot of energy away from your quality of life, and we've all got a restricted amount of life left. We never know how long it's going to be. I for one know that.

To find out more about Justin and MFP Wealth Management, visit mfpwealthmanagement.co.uk