'We were told we could make more money with the old model, but it's a gap in the market'

"The three of us [Schwarz and co-founders Rob Bell and Scott Millar] worked at a firm together prior to launching our own business. That’s where we learnt to do the job of a financial planner.

"But it got to the time where we wanted to go into the big wide world and launch our own firm. But we wanted to do things a little differently.

"The financial planning we gave at the company we were at before was holistic, focused on long term objectives, matching money with purposes, using cash flow planning. And we are doing much of the same stuff now but we weren’t in a position to help a lot of younger clients or clients who didn’t have a big pot of money to invest on day one.

"For us we had stories in mind of people we hadn’t been able to work with based on that percentage fee model. That led us to that idea of creating a hybrid model. It’s a fixed fee to provide ongoing planning advice and if clients want us to manage money for us there is a smaller AUM fee.

"But we were concerned that if we do it that way, how do we justify complexity? So we build a matrix to establish how much time we will have to spend with a clent in a year. We put a client's situation through the matrix. Things that go through that are their income position, whether there’s a business interest, whether there’s complex tax advice, whether we’re advising one person or a couple. How much time we will be spending with them each year. That way we can go on a journey with them.

"That fixed fee can change year to year. For one client it might be getting them through a certain event but after you’e gone through that process, the actual complexity scales back a bit.

"There are three main groups of folks we categorised. Tier one is what we call 'foundations' which is our digital offering. That starts from £100 a month. Then we’ve got tier two, which is our core offering which is much more traditional. More in-person meetings, tax modelling, cash flow planning. That starts from £300 a month.

"Tier three is our family office offering where you’re dealing with mulitple family entities, family investment companies, education planning, trust structures. That starts at £2,500 a month. For us it is all about that wealth transfer and being that point of contact.

"Underpinning all of that is optional wealth management and if clients want us to manage investments we charge 0.25 per cent of any assets we’re managing for them.

"We decided to start as an appointed representative of the Sense network. They have been brilliant in terms of getting us up and running. We have to use Intelliflo Office as our CRM system and every decision we made really had to integrate with IO. We want to be tech enabled and we want everything to talk to each other.

"That was the starting point and we went down the funnel from there. We wanted it to have a good ESG offering, we wanted it to be tech enabled.

"We decided to outsource our investment proposition to the Timeline portfolios. The two main reasons were we believe in taking an evidence-based approach to investing so Timeline’s investment philosophy fits with that, and the portfolios are incredibly low cost which has a major impact on long-term returns.

"We thought about how we would want a business to look if we were clients ourselves.

"A lot of advisers have told us we’re leaving a lot of cash on the table, we could be making a lot more profit on the old model. But the folks who don’t think it will work are the people who say we need to bridge the advice gap.

"That sounds like the gap in the market and it sounds like the reason financial advice has a bad name is because it is not transparent and people charge unnecessary fees.

"One of the biggest risks to businesses is overspending and by using tech we have reduced costs on our side. We don’t have a big London office, we don’t have staff. We’re trying to be efficient.

"At the moment our clients have been a real mixture. A lot of family friends. We have done it quite organically. Some good professional connections, creating those relationships with accountants, lawyers, people who like what we’re doing. We’re trying to do a lot on social media.

"We haven't brought any clients with us so we are starting from zero.

"Historically you’d deal with people in a set area but this week alone we have taken on clients from Bristol, Norwich, all over the shop. We want to embrace that and help as many people as we can do.

"Going quickly through the authorisation process was one of the massive benefits for us of using a network. Sense have been fantastic in streamlining that process. Sitting down in front of clients is what we’re used to. The business owner hat is something we’ve never done before so we’ve had to grow.

"Having the network there to help with compliance and any problems with the FCA. If we had gone directly authorised from the start it would have been incredibly hard. There are costs involved in joining a network but for us its an investment. I hear horror stories about it taking six months to a year to get a response if they are going directly authorised.

"I’m glad I’ve set up this firm with two other business partners. Credit to folks who do this by themselves. We all seem to have a good spread of skills. We’ve got people who enjoy the business generation work, we’ve got people who enjoy the compliance work.

"We’re all learning. We’re in a really good place to grow now. We’ve got the business live in a short space of time. What we seem to be talking a lot about are our learnings from setting up.

"When we’re in a position to hire it feels right to get people in at an early stage and bring them on that journey with us.

damian.fantato@ft.com