Facets

Mark Loughlin is a Chartered Financial Planner and is passionate about offering high quality professional advice. He is also often shocked and embarrassed by the standards of advice offered by others within the industry. Yesterday he sent an email to me headed "As an IFA the thing that shocks me most is £200,000 in one fund". This was in reference to an article in the Mail. I thought this was worthy of a blog posting.

Mark is employed full time by Stiddard Financial Services Ltd and please take the time to review his profile. In his email Mark went on to say "Barclays have been recommending the investment of large sums into a single fund run by Aviva. To put 100% of risk into a single fund makes no sense. Stiddard investment portfolios would never have more than 7.5%  in any one fund. I have to question whether there is a hidden agenda".

The link to the article is as follows:

In corporate jargon, I am not sure what "The Stiddard Way" would be called but essentially it is 5 short paragraphs that reflect my personal values. I expect every person in the organisation to conduct themselves in a manner which reflect these ideals. I strongly recommend this process to any business that is serious about growing a united workforce.

1. Responsibility
We are Financial Company.  We are accountants, business advisers and  indpendent  financial advisers and our common identity is that we have our own unique approach to all financial matters.
As individuals we take responsbility for our own actions and how they impact upon the services we provide as a team.

2. Risk
We understand that in business there is always an element of risk. We do not shy away from decision making. We know that to make no decision is worse than than making a wrong decision.

 3. Quality
Whilst we aim to provide value for money and compete in our market, we will not compromise on quality of service and standards of professionalism. We are constantly improving on these standards and understand that "if we are not going forward, we are going backwards".

4. Purpose
Our overiding purpose is to do something positive in the profession; something which leaves a mark, engages the competition and improves service standards for everyone. Profit is a result of successfully working to this purpose.
The services we provide have an intrinsic value. That is to say that the benefit to the client is of a greater value than the fee charged.

5. Equality
Everyone is born equal and remain equal throughout their lives. Personal success is measured in many ways but is ultimately a function of the opportunities that are available and the extent to which they are grasped.

Future Facet entries will make ongoing references to "The Stiddard Way" be it in meeting notes, monthly reports or just office gossip.  

Facets is a financial diary which I believe to be unique. It is a working model of a small business. All financial data is actual data, all decisions are real decisions and the consequences of the successes and failures will be real experiences.

As professional advisers we are of course subject to total client confidentiality so how can this be possible. How can we publish monthly financials, meeting notes and other sensitive data without compromising our confidentiality agreements?

The answer is simple we are the model. The Stiddard group of companies are about to commit what some people would consider to be commercial suicide and share all our secrets with the public.

I of course totally disagree that this is commercial suicide. The reason being that I have no secrets.  I have nothing to hide. The way I run my business is exactly the way that I advise my clients to run theirs. I have been sharing my business methods for years.

We have our own “financial identity” and over the next 4 possibly 5 diary entries I will explain each facet of our identity and we can then track where the business is going day to day, month to month and year on year.