Jason Butler, the founder of Bloomsbury Financial Planning, is having a kind of epiphany.
For years, he has been running London-based Bloomsbury, building up a client base and making a successful business. But now he has sold out of his company and is busy pursuing his passions.
One of his choices has been to become a motivational speaker, visiting schools – preferably in the state sector. He said: “My number one message is this: you can define your outcome to your life – it’s where you’re going that matters. You have a choice to make about what you do with your money, time and energy.
“You can choose to spend your money on stuff, or on making yourself better. You can choose to take or you can choose to give; it’s got nothing to do with how wealthy your parents are, it’s how you deal with or respond to your circumstances. You need to be the best version of you.”
Mr Butler believes he has a compelling personal story to back up his message. He came from a single-parent household with three siblings, and there was very little money.
He said: “We had no money, we had debt collectors coming round, we couldn’t afford investments, and I taught myself to play the piano.
“I could have gone one way, but I fell into financial services, and found an intellectual outlet.”
After going to night school to make up for the gaps in his education, he found himself at home in the financial services industry, starting in direct sales at Howson Investments, an appointed representative of Cornhill Life. Over the next five years he moved to an IFA business, taking the AFP qualification. He was charging fees by 1994, and became a certified financial planner in 1998.
He set up Bloombsbury Financial Planning in 1998, and the business initially did well, but in 2003 the company nearly went bust, because, Mr Butler said: “We had too many clients; too much overhead. The technology wasn’t good enough and it didn’t fit together.”
So Mr Butler sold the business to a consolidator, the company that became Thinc Destini, then bought it back a year later, paying in instalments over many years.
He said: “We almost ran out of money. I learned the hard way to always make sure you’re spending your money wisely, and the promises you make you can deliver on.”
In Mr Butler’s excursions around the UK, he plans to use his life experience to tell schoolchildren to adopt a sensible attitude to money.
His message will be: “Don’t spend your money on crap. Save 10 per cent of what you earn, or 50 per cent of your pay rise. What matters is how much you spend. If someone had told me that when I was young, that would have stuck in my mind.”
He thinks he benefitted from being in the business at an early age, because he started his pension at the age of 20. Having now sold out of his business, in which he had a 47 per cent stake, he claims to have the financial freedom to pursue his plan of public speaking, which he will do for free, although he would like a corporate sponsor to pay his costs.
Another project is his involvement with an online advice business, Advicefront, that aims to link financial advisers with people who are engaging with financial advice for the first time.
The company, which is to launch in the first quarter of this year [2016], will put together financial plans for clients through an automated system, before they are signed off by advisers.
Mr Butler said: “It’s not robo-advice, it’s cyborg advice. Rather than meet someone and fill out a fact-find, the client can do most of that online. If their affairs are really complicated, they can fall back to the firm for additional services.”
He believes that technology is the way forward for advisers who can use digital platforms to reach new customers, and is critical of advisers who are overly reliant on very affluent clients.
He said: “Even high net-worth clients are balking at paying over the odds for something that’s becoming a commodity. Firms will continue for two to three years before their existing customers will start to say: ‘I can buy that portfolio for X. What are you doing?’
“That does not mean to say they not continue paying, but the firms have to reinvent themselves. Price will come under pressure.”
In his mind, Mr Butler has certainly moved on from Bloomsbury, which he left last September. He said: “You’ve got to learn when your time is up and your job is done. I think the firm was probably going to suffocate with me being in it.”
Now with newspaper columns to write, and a financial education mission to accomplish, he is more than happy in his new, self-created, role.
Melanie Tringham is features editor of Financial Adviser
2015 – Present
Board adviser,
Advicefront
1998 – 2015
Founder, Bloomsbury Financial Planning
1995 – 1998
Financial adviser,
Jackson Batten Financial Group
1991 – 1995
Senior consultant,
Lamensdorf & Co
