It is important for advisers to bring their own personalities to client meetings with space in the profession to recognise people's differences, according Tarnia Elsworth, director and financial adviser at TP Financial Solutions.
Speaking to FT Adviser, Elsworth discussed the importance of being yourself in the profession and the difficulty of trying to bring your own personality to the role.
“People see financial advice as a quite serious profession. They feel like you can’t have a laugh or a joke and that you’ve got to be serious because if you don’t people won’t trust you to give such important advice.
For me that’s just no way to live,” she said.
Elsworth argued financial advisers “have our own personalities”, adding she is very keen on football and cricket and enjoys talking to her clients about it.
This is in contrast to a position she held before setting up her own practice where she was told she had to dress in a certain way and wear professional formal wear.
As a result, she felt “a bit like a fish out of water” especially as it was target driven and rewards were based on monetary targets, celebrating the people who had written the most amount of business.
“There’s space in this industry to be a bit more holistic than that,” she argued.
Elsworth described the industry as a “culture of the egos” in which everyone is competing to be “the alpha”.
“If you are not one of the lads having a beer sometimes you can feel on the periphery,” she explained.
“For young women in particular coming into the industry there’s still a little bit of work to do there.”
Male centric workplace
As well as encouraging people into the industry, Elsworth discussed making people from different backgrounds feel comfortable once in the profession, specifically identifying some aspects of the workplace as problematic due to their male centricity.
Before starting her own firm with her wife, Elsworth remembered experiencing this aspect of the industry, saying “some of it was very direct”.
As an example, she recalled instances of going to conferences and being asked “who’s PA are you?” with the underlying assumption that “if you are a female in the industry you were a PA or a secretary”.
She also remembered being referred to as a “lady adviser” and, as a result this culture made her automatically feel that she was the odd one out.
Relatability
Elsworth pointed out the benefits that those from different backgrounds bring to the industry, identifying how her identity as a gay woman has aided relationships with her clients.
“What we’ve heard from our clients is that they feel more comfortable speaking with us, so we have just naturally attracted some LGBT clients,” she explained.
She attributed this to a sharing of common values as “if you’re an LGBT person, people assume that you’re inclusive, and you appreciate people’s differences”.
She recalled attending an appointment at a bank and being asked if her husband would be attending.
“It’s just that assumption and, if people get in contact with us, they’ll know that we don’t make the same assumptions that perhaps other advisers or firms do.”
Elsworth said the profession should make it more widely known that advice is a good sector to work in and spread this message to people from a variety of backgrounds.
“I look at the lifestyle I’ve got from running my own financial advice firm. We can have time off if we want, if the kids have got something at school we can go there, it’s really flexible and really rewarding,” she explained.
“Most advisers in the industry are middle class or above, degree educated people, whereas I come from a really working class background,” she said.
“It gives you a unique perspective on helping people and you can empathise with how cautious people are with their money having been in a situation where we didn’t have any money.”
tom.dunstan@ft.com
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