As you may have noticed, we’ve just launched the lang cat’s biggest research study of the year, State of the Adviser Nation.

This is our fourth year of conducting our omnibus study, and this time just under 450 advice professionals took an average of 32 minutes each to answer 87 questions on life, the universe, the profession, the industry, and everything.

(If you were one of them, we can’t thank you enough).

As a Platform Analyser subscriber we wanted to share a couple of our findings with you in this launch week for free.

This week our premium subscribers get all this but also some awesome analysis on adviser fees and platform reviews. Next week they’ll also get a special free gift – we’ll give every premium subscriber a free copy of the platforms section of the study.

So if you’ve been thinking about upgrading to make the most of all the analysis and functionality inside Analyser, now’s an excellent time. Thanks!

Before we dive in, a bit of background. SOTAN – as it’s inevitably become called – was born from a collective sense of frustration around what we felt (and still feel) is a proliferation of simplistic, over-reaching statements  from research that claimed to speak on behalf of the whole profession.

"All advisers think this.”

"Most advisers want that.”

We know from speaking to scores of firms each year that it’s more complex than this. So in SOTAN we try to get behind what’s going on and what might happen.

This is a complex sector – you’re all very special – and to say the advisory profession thinks one way about anything is daft. So we try to embrace that complexity too. We don’t just measure what you do, we measure how you feel about it.

Let’s have a look at a couple of findings.

Business performance

First up, we're well into the new year now, and many of you will be totting up the scores on the doors for your full year business performance.

We asked respondents how they thought things were looking in October/November for the full year, and here’s what they said:

One little bit of explanation – we use the term ‘influencer’ to mean someone who is able to make strategic decisions about their firm – usually an owner or director. Respondents were asked to self-identify as one of these.

‘Non-influencers’ is an ugly term, but just means folk who work in, rather than run, an advice business.

So, what do we know? Well, things are looking good.

Concentrate on the yellow bars for influencers for now – 78% of firms who took part reckon they’ll be up on the year before, with more than a quarter predicting a rise of more than 20%. That’s a real vote of confidence in the profession.

Conversely, only 1% think they’ll be more than 20% down. If you know one of them, buy them a drink. They’re feeling lonely.

It’s an interesting quirk that the numbers for non-influencers and influencers don’t match, especially at the yeastier end of the chart on the right. T

Either through accident or design, this suggests business owners aren’t keeping staff in the loop about strong performance. In our experience, only good things happen when you can share good news like this with staff. Maybe everyone is worried they’ll ask for a pay rise.

Regulatory costs (your favourite subject)

We asked what kind of rises firms had seen in their FOS and FSCS levies, and chucked PI cover in as well. Here’s what we found out:

OK, so most firms are seeing a rise. Such is the world we live in; my home insurance is going up by 11% this year with no claims to worry about.

We do hear a lot of noise about brutal rises in these entirely unwelcome but necessary (or are they?) costs of running regulated businesses. But at least our respondents are clustered in the sub-20% rise area, with the biggest single chunk under 10%.

Nothing gets cheaper, and it strikes us that in other professions firms increase their charges each year slightly to take account of this – this is definitely true of your accountant if they’re anything like ours.

Increasing asset values maybe take care of this for advice businesses who charge a percentage of assets, but then again maybe not.

As these – and electricity, and gas, and other – costs start to bite, it may not be unreasonable to think about whether your current fee schedule is getting you to where you want to be.

So there you have it – just a couple of findings. If you participated in SOTAN back in October / November, none of this is news to you because you already have the full report as a thank you.

If you would like to get the results of the next wave, the best way is to get involved. Join the lang cat adviser insight panel by emailing our insight director Steve Nelson on [email protected].

Once again, if you would like to access loads more insight and research, along with freebies like the annual State of the Platform Nation guide and a free copy of the Platforms section of SOTAN, then just upgrade today and insight nirvana can be yours.