Under-30 director: We have an audacious goal to 10x everything

Maynard fell into financial services after realising early on that her first choice vocation, to be a midwife, was not for her.

Now the 27-year-old is part owner of a local advice firm where she acts as director and practice manager, overseeing a team of two advisers and several support staff.

The firm, Maldon-based TFP Financial Planning, has a 10-year vision with a "big hairy audacious goal" to "10x everything", she says. But achieving that, as a firm that prides itself on its boutique vibes, requires some clever planning.

"Our focus is to grow everything to make sure that we become a proper business. Rather than a small company," says Maynard.

"We love that we are boutique. We want to keep that feel. I don't want anyone to feel like a number and we'll make sure we structure ourselves in a way that does that.

"But we also want to be able to help as many people as possible in a way that we know we should be able to help them. So that'd be like 10x in employees, whether that's in quantity or quality however it works, and yeah 10x everything." 

I always wanted to help people. That was my driving force.

Making an impact

Maynard had actually applied to go to university to be a midwife but after speaking to others in the profession she soon realised this wasn't for her.

In need of a job, she started in the call centre of financial technology outsourcing firm International Financial Data Services, speaking to financial advisers on a daily basis, which quickly made her realise "I wanted to work on the other side of it".

She says: "I loved talking to [advisers] and answering their questions and their clients' and everything, and I was kind of like, I don't want to be sat in this office talking on the phone. I want to be where you are."

Maynard looked for IFA administrator jobs when she came across TFP in Maldon, close to where she lives, in 2015. She has worked at the firm ever since.

If it got to the point where [growth] became a detriment, that they didn't feel this boutiquey feeling, then we'd stop.

At the time the business was tiny, she says, with two financial advisers, one administrator, and their wives working there part time.

What drew her to the job in particular was the idea that she "could have an impact" in the firm, not be "such a number" as was the case in her previous job.

She did her diploma within a year and went through an apprenticeship to become a financial adviser. But when she started her chartership, Covid hit.

So she worked as a paraplanner, then took a year out on maternity leave. When she came back she was set on working as a financial planner, but the tide quickly turned.

"My one purpose in life is to help people, like I've always believed that that's why I wanted to be a midwife," she says. "And before that I wanted to be a physio and I applied for the army, and I always wanted to help people. That was my driving force.

"And it just so happened that I fell into a job [financial planning] that I managed to see that impact first hand. And I think it was just incredible to witness."

But within three months of coming back as an assistant financial planner after maternity last August, Maynard's role changed and within months she became practice manager, director and part owner of TFP.

"It was very bizarre, I never saw it happening," she says. "We kind of had a reshuffle in the organisation. And I then started to pick up some of the board functions."

She says she'd known she was going to become part owner for a few years, it had been in the works. But she didn't realise she would enjoy the organisational role she was thrown into when the old practice manager left to the extent she did.

"I would have wanted to impact the entire firm and being in the practice manager seat kind of allowed me to do that because now I see over service and proposition and marketing and everything and I can just really help gear the company to where it needs to be to ensure that experience is felt and met by everyone," she says.

"I think [the other directors] just felt the director role suited me because of all of the stuff I've done and can do for the company and help to lead it in the direction we want to go."

Currently the firm consists of two adviser-directors, Dan Haylett and Casey Mills, Maynard as practice manager, a client service manager, two client service administrators, and a paraplanner but it is recruiting for more.

Scaling up 

TFP serves high-net-worth clients with £1mn investable assets and typically focuses on retirement advice.

It charges a fixed fee model, which means clients are charged for the service they receive, not according to their wealth, albeit charges are a hefty £500 to £900 a month.

The firm is also heavily involved in the local community, sponsors sports events and has launched a community fund to help the local community.

But its speciality is its small town feel. And this must not get lost in any growth phase, says Maynard.

Client feedback, she says, has been that the firm feels like a small boutique but gives the same experience as a London corporate would give.

Squaring that experience with growing tenfold could be tricky, she admits. But she says that is why having the right project plan is so important.

TFP is currently working under a typical hierarchy structure whereby advisers and directors sit at the top and support staff at the bottom.

But in its growth plans the firm is toying with a more horizontal structure, whereby several micro teams would be set up horizontally and then scaled up at the same time. 

"I'm very pushy on the fact that if you have a brilliant administrator why should they be less important than anyone else, because the business wouldn't be able to function [without them]," says Maynard.

"Although we have an organisational chart that asks us to follow that traditional thing at the moment, I hate it. I bring it up every time.

"I think at the end of the day, I've made it very clear that although there are career pathways, especially in TFP because we want to scale up so much in the next five to 10 years, there's so much opportunity for all of the people we've got now to become really big leaders of different departments [if they want to].

"There should be no weighting on different roles in my opinion, anyway."

When it comes to what this means for growing the business, she says: "If you can almost recreate 10 of what we've got now in 10 pods, then you can give that same experience to 10 banks of clients. 

"If it got to the point where it became a detriment, that they didn't feel this boutiquey feeling, then we'd stop. Because at the end of the day our focus is our clients and our team, so if it got to the point where one of them says 'oh this feels really corporate now', we'd shut it down. We're not doing that, that's not us."

Team comes first

Maynard says team management is often a "massively neglected thing".

"I've always wanted to make sure that our team is kind of first because I'm a firm believer in what you put in you get out," she says.

"If you don't give your team anything to be happy about and you don't focus on their wellbeing and stuff like that the outcome that you get is not going to be the best outcome for our clients or our community."

In fact, it was a problem in the team that led to her stepping into her current role in the first place.

She says upon coming back after maternity leave she noticed that something about the office culture was not right. "Something was wrong in our office and it was very dull and bleak," she says, adding it became clear to her the business needed a reshuffle of its staff.

This created the gap of practice manager, into which she stepped.

The management itself, majority shareholder Mills, Haylett and Maynard make decisions by committee.

"We manage to get on the same page more often than not," she says, "and I think if we're ever not on the same page, we always find a really decent compromise. There's no one who really has a final say out of the three of us."

At the end of the day, the most rewarding aspect of her job is the impact she has on the team and their wellbeing, she says. "The most rewarding thing is knowing that people come to work happy. It's really nice that they feel that this is a safe space to be and a happy place to be.

"Just seeing the impact that our culture and value has on our employees is just incredible to me. I love that and I can't wait to grow that team."

carmen.reichman@ft.com