Father and Son: Would you encourage your child to become an IFA?

While the thought of their children joining the family business leaves some advisers shuddering, others have encouraged their offspring to follow in their footsteps. What would you do?

Father and Son

Kim Barrett is a chartered independent financial adviser who owns Barretts Financial Solutions. He works with his 26-year old son, Joel Barrett, who he hopes, to one day, leave in charge.

“There will come a time when I’m not in possession of many faculties and one hopes the business is still going and that Joel takes over,” he says.

Their business relationship started when Barrett saw his son had the qualities needed to make a good IFA and decided to nurse him through his exams. The younger Barrett has since focused on investment and is one exam away from becoming chartered.

“Despite being a chartered financial planner, I have not had to take any degree of investment qualifications to get there. So my son going down the investment route helps me enormously because I can advocate responsibility in that regard to him.”

Barrett says he and his son have a good business relationship, which is a great comfort to his clients.

“We are both strong, volatile characters, but we get on and it works. We complement each other very well and I think the business is profiting as a result.

“People like dealing with someone they can trust,” he adds. “That is imperative with financial services. We act in unison whenever we deal with clients and it is often said we are the perfect complement because we are both of the same character. You have the two complexions: the youthful complexion and my more elderly, more longstanding complexion, so we are like two peas of the same pod.”

Barrett senior adds: “If we come to the party, with me as a chartered financial planner and him as chartered within the investment sphere, I think we will be dangerous.”

Mother and Son

Diane Weitz is a chartered financial planner, who runs Ashlea Financial Planning in Cheltenham. She saw potential in her son, Christopher, and encouraged him to pursue a career as an IFA. When he was 28 she spent two years training him, while allowing him to gain experience working in her business.

She says: “He is a good communicator and relates well to people and I thought it would be the sort of job he could get his teeth into.”

He has since been headhunted and is working at a different IFA practice, but Weitz says the few years she worked with her son were great. He brought many benefits to the business, including a good chemistry with his mum, which clients liked. He also helped to modernise the company, for example setting up the company website.

“We know each other so well, which can be built upon and turned into something very positive for work,” she says. “He also helped me to look at things in a modern light. He had lots of ideas and was very supportive.”

Weitz says she has not discounted her son returning to the business and hopes he will one day take over from her. But if he doesn’t, she says, there is always her daughter.

Weitz adds going down the family route can have some disadvantages. They may, for instance, be over confident and assume you will agree to any business ideas they have.

“I think one of the difficulties is they come in with all sorts of ideas and, because of the relationship, they want to put those forward very quickly and expect you to jump to it.”

So it is important to make sure you develop a business relationship with them, which is different to your family one, she says.

“You need to have an invisible barrier, which puts things on a different footing so you are treating them like you would any employee and not your son or daughter,” she says. “When I was in work mode I saw my son as a contributor to the business rather than my child.”