IFA Spotlight: Tina Weeks on life planning, Twitter and Project Eve

Professional Adviser’s IFA Personality of the Year Tina Weeks talks to Laura Miller about why financial planners are not meditating hippies and her plans to take life planning to the masses.

Tina Weeks is on a mission. After two years hard graft transforming her mortgage business into North London’s Serenity Financial Planning, she is targeting a dramatic growth in client numbers this year.

But as part of a niche group in the market – she was the UK’s first female financial life planner, and is still just one of a few hundred practitioners – she has a problem.

“The public don’t know people like me exist. The majority don’t really understand financial planning, let alone financial life planning,” she said.

Weeks’ solution is to fill the public’s knowledge gap with her message about advice and conquer market share while debates on independent and restricted post-RDR are still in flux.

Social media

Social media –which offers cheap, quick, and direct access to millions of potential clients – is one part of Weeks’ aggressive marketing strategy to convince the public it needs her services.

“We’re at a point of monumental change in our industry. People ask me what’s the point of social media? Well, it has helped raise my profile, get new clients, and increase the people I can spread the message to. It has been hugely beneficial.”

Weeks has over 6,300 Twitter followers across @SerenityTweets (her client twitter account) and @TheFinanceCoach (her industry twitter account), and tweets regularly to cultivate her client base.

In an UK IFA industry first, she now uses Quick Response (QR) codes on her website, at her seminars and client networking events to provide additional information and services to clients on their mobiles.

QR codes can be used to display the latest updates of text, video, PowerPoint presentations, website URLs, and PDFs. Every brand from Pepsi to Radio 1 is using them to talk to customers.

She also uses Foursquare, a location-linked web application which allows users to digitally and publicly check in and out of places and recommend them to others.

It offers little direct benefit to clients, but is a useful b2c marketing tool for advisers as it creates a sense of community and imitates traditional word of mouth referrals.

Weeks admits adopting social media requires “a lot of trial and error”, and constant evolution. A revamped Serenity

Financial Planning website is back this month after Weeks took it offline to overhaul its functionality.

The site now gives clients online access to their financial life plans and investments. Clients can upload documents to a secure area to store for future reference or share with the Serenity team.

Visitors can use the site’s ‘Ask the Experts’ feature to communicate and interact with each other and get answers on the site or privately.

“I want visitors to feel the website is for them. Consumers don’t want to be sold to. We’ve flipped that on its head now. We focus so much more on what fires them up and what they’re passionate about. I hardly ever talk about the money,” Weeks said.

Online sharing has also changed how Weeks interacts with her peers. Industry conferences charge hundreds of pounds for just a couple of opportunities a year to network. Weeks has discussions online in seconds, any time, at virtually no cost and with fewer office hours lost.

Project Eve

Weeks still attends the Institute of Financial Planning events but admits she has stopped going to other industry events because new ideas are often suppressed by ‘whinging’ about the RDR.

“The RDR is accelerating a natural evolution. You either adapt and make it work for you, or not.”

Instead, Weeks has teamed up with a circle of “positive, excited, enthusiastic people” to fire-up demand for financial life planning, beyond its limited stereotype of high net worths.

Project Eve may sound like a Cold War military operation, but it is Weeks’ latest campaign to drum up business by proselytising to the masses about the virtues of financial advice.

It is the brain child of Bruce Wilson, the former Helm Godfrey managing director, Adam Young of Dragonfly Financial Planning, Jeremy Deedes of Planning for Life, Dennis Hall of Yellowtail Financial Planning and James Harvey of James Harvey Associates.

Project Eve’s strategy is to get the public to free workshops – the first was in London in December – to find out “what financial life planners do, how we do it, how they can get access to it”.

Weeks said: “Most people spend more on eating out than they do on their financial planning. It’s a matter of priorities. The workshops will expand the knowledge and education of the general consumer base, and hopefully financial life planning will become accessible to more people as we go on, which in turn helps everyone within the advice industry.”