Out and About Archive – Archive

My third book in the “Terrible People”series has just come back from the editor. The good news is that she commented: “What a fabulous follow-up to Terrible Brothers! Again, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this – your ideas and storyline are great and once again I was captured in the story, dying to know what was going to happen.” The bad news is that as usual there are countless tracked changes and “suggestions” as to areas that need amendment. I really enjoy writing fiction but working through 85,000 words once again is no fun at all.

The book, “Terrible Choices”, has several of the characters that were in the first two books and to a large extent it focusses on the so called “County Lines” of drug dealers – mainly vulnerable kids sent out to provincial towns and cities where the competition is less than London and the Lines meaning cell phones. It will be published in August or September.

If you like thrillers you may like this series. The first book is “Dirty Money Terrible People” and is available on-line from the usual places. I write under my friends and family name of Calum Kerr.

I was intrigued to read that Aviva will be buying Succession for £385 million and I wish both parties the best of luck. However, experience suggests that there will be some significant challenges ahead. In fact, there is little evidence that institutions acquiring financial advice firms achieve their goals. Sometimes the issue is weak due diligence such as the recent debacle where Quilter found £35 million of DB to DC  liabilities after the deal with Lighthouse Group was done. But most of the time I think it is down to culture.

The product of IFAs and other professional services firms is people. Clients buy people and perhaps a brand. Life insurance companies are manufacturers of products. It’s a completely different business. Most of the people in a professional service business spend most of their time with consumers. Very few of the thousands of people working for product providers ever meet their consumers, most of them don’t even speak to them, and even fewer ever meet the IFAs who recommend their products. Two completely different cultures.

The mind set of executives in insurance companies and asset managers tends to be quantitative and analytical. They pay attention to details and are ruled by logic. And that’s how it should be. On the other hand, financial advisers tend to be qualitative, intuitive and creative free thinkers. As a result, teamwork between these two groups of people can be very difficult to create.

As we all know, Private Equity firms have been increasing their exposure to retail financial services; in particular networks, financial advisers, wealth managers and technology solutions. Why? Because the market has substantial potential and because it is still to some extent a “cottage industry”; ripe for consolidation. And most PE firms have access to low cost loans to facilitate acquisitions.

Having served as a NED at Fairstone Group (which has now acquired about fifty firms) I have to say that in my experience PE will probably enhance the market for owners, staff and client proposition. They bring skill sets that can compliment most Financial Advisers’ mind sets and can delver constructive criticism. However, I have some concerns about the prices PE investors are paying.

Last November I was engaged to help a relatively new PE firm who were considering purchasing an IFA. And I have to say it looked like, and probably is. an excellent business. It’s AUM was less than £5bn, it’s EBITDA was very small.  My client was out bid by another PE firm which paid over £100m for the business. Very interesting engagement from my perspective. I’m glad my guys didn’t buy it.

The 13th Chiswick Book Festival took place this month. It’s a major event that brings together top authors and their readers for inspiring and entertaining events in a variety of genres – fiction, history, politics, crime, biography, TV, food, workshops and children’s books.

Waterstones hosted a Local Authors Party in the George 1V pub in Chiswick High Road which has a sizeable performance space. Twenty authors were invited to speak and I was delighted to be one of them. Our task was to “sell” our book in two minutes. I have to say I was a  bit intimidated. To make matters worse they used a random number generator to decide the order of the speakers and I was the first author who had to speak.

My book, “Dirty Money Terrible People” features several  Chiswick locations and  that went down well. I summarised the style as: “Short chapters, short paragraphs, short sentences, short words, and tall stories. Not for the faint-hearted!

If you would like to see more about the event and look at some photos, just click on this link:  https://chiswickcalendar.co.uk/chiswicks-local-authors-at-chiswick-book-festival-2021/?mc_cid=f1466e60d9&mc_eid=7468405170

Once again, I have been asked to judge one of the categories, and this year I have been looking at the submissions for “Best Network.”

It was good to see that in 2020 all but one network has beaten its 2019 revenues. Given the pandemic, that’s some achievement, and I think it confirms the resilience of the sector.

I agree to judge because it keeps me up to speed as to what is happening. I also like the discussions with my fellow judges and as our meeting is in September I assumed we would be sitting around a table. But no; I was told it would be online. And that got me thinking: ‘Why?’

In my experience, one on one online conversations work very well and I have regular virtual drinks with pals. No worries about getting a table or being overheard and the wine is half the price! But when the meeting involves half a dozen people things are different. The small images give you no signals as to what others are thinking. And many British people tend to hold back from interrupting and instinctively communicate with facial expression. I hope Money Marketing re-think.