Greg Moss: Why we can’t hold on to the decent new talent

One of the most frustrating things in advice is our consistent failure to bring in and retain decent new talent.

When I first became an adviser, around the time the dust was still swirling from the Chicxulub impact, the prevailing culture was Glengarry Glen Ross meets Wernham Hogg.

As cynical and broken a human as I am, there’s no denying advice is a better, safer place for young people to work.

The job itself has been expanded and professionalised, made infinitely more intellectually rewarding.

So, why do we still struggle to sell this to new entrants?

You certainly don’t hear the grim stories you used to quite as often, like the senior person at a national who hung a noose by an adviser’s car when they were behind target by way of hilarious banter, for instance.

Almost every time I talk to a young adviser or paraplanner, they are so impressively smart and full of insights it swells my mean little heart

On the aggregate, we’re more knowledgeable and kinder about stuff we used to dismiss, like mental health and diversity. Even if we still have a long way to go, that’s not unique to our sector.

I’m confident the overtly nasty sales management is on the wane in real life (even if it’s making an unwelcome comeback in some dark corners of LinkedIn, but that’s another article). But the numbers don’t lie. We’re still terrible at bringing in new young talent and persuading them to stay.

It’s not them. Almost every time I talk to a young adviser or paraplanner, they are so impressively smart and full of insights it swells my mean little heart. The emphasis has shifted firmly from sales to technical knowledge, and this has opened the door to a much higher calibre of candidate than we used to attract, back when it was only complete losers like me signing up.

But the big issue seems to be failing to make them stick.

Why do we expect young advisers to fill their diaries with prospecting busyness that has a phenomenally low hit rate, as well as being soul destroying?

I think some owners and managers still get the fundamentals wrong. When I speak with these young men and women, what comes up again and again is that things go well at the start, when the emphasis is on technical training and exams, but, once they qualify, they aren’t given a job description anything like what they were promised.

They don’t get to use any of this newly-acquired knowledge in their work. Instead, they’re told to create all their own appointments out of thin air, when they don’t have the network and the skills to self-generate.

Even if they did have these things, why do we expect young advisers to fill their diaries with prospecting busyness that has a phenomenally low hit rate, as well as being soul destroying for anyone who doesn’t happen to have sociopathically thick skin?

If anything, it’s a sign we’re failing – as business owners – to run a successful marketing and brand building strategy that brings enough enquiries through the door. That’s an ‘us’ problem, not a ‘them’ problem.

All this kind of wee-man energy does is erode their trust in your business as a meritocracy

But it’s often even worse than that. In previous lives, I’ve been that new adviser with an empty diary and the supposed recipient of inbound leads, only to find they all got nicked by established (often monstrously busy already) advisers, including the business owners themselves.

Owners can develop a blind spot when it comes to providing meritocratic access to work. Partly because of “too big to manage” established advisers, but often because the owners are at it themselves, too insecure to be above the willy waving.

In the most ridiculous example, I was once tasked with setting up a new office an hour’s drive away from the nearest one, only to find one of the shareholding advisers was ripping through low-profile Pirellis, driving out of his way to nick the Unbiased leads on my patch.

He gained nothing except more work and boasting rights in the office kitchenette. All this kind of wee-man energy does is erode their trust in your business as a meritocracy.

Young workers are very conscious of fairness. If you don’t give them this, the talented ones will bin off your investment in them

Young workers are very conscious of fairness. If you don’t give them this, the talented ones will bin off your investment in them and leave you for somewhere else where they can thrive, be it a competitor (a problem for you) or in a different industry (a problem for all of us).

The other thing I hear a lot is that young employees’ views aren’t taken seriously by management. They aren’t to bother their little heads with the serious stuff.

This makes no sense to me. Young people in any sector might not have the lived experience but they are often more naturally inquisitive, with a fresher perspective and more up-to-date technical knowledge. Why wouldn’t you want to tap into that?

I still remember the head of team at a large firm famously resisting platform technology and cashflow modelling because they were ‘snakeoil’. Funny but not funny.

Having some intransigent brontosaurus in the way of their good ideas is guaranteed to turn young employees off

I get it, we all develop a bit of scepticism in this industry. But it’s on us to retain some humility about where our strengths lie and remain receptive to good ideas from younger advisers. Having some intransigent brontosaurus in the way of their good ideas is guaranteed to turn young employees off.

After 20 years as an unhappy employee, I’m now a happy self-employed adviser. Because the job is fundamentally enjoyable, when you get to do it right.

We have a really good thing to offer young entrants. The next challenge for owners and managers is to stop getting in the way of it.

Greg Moss is founder of Eleven.2 Financial Planning. He is a chartered financial planner and fellow of the Personal Finance Society