Cultural integration is the most important thing when it comes to growing a nationwide advice firm through dozens of acquisitions, according to Finli’s chief distribution officer Simon Goldthorpe.
Goldthorpe started Beaufort Group in 2010 which was bought, alongside its asset management company You, in 2022 by Solomon Group.
Since then, it has rebranded to Finli which is buying up financial advice firms across the UK.
In the past 18 months it has acquired seven regional hubs and is working on buying more firms to create ‘spokes’ attached to these hubs.
Finli’s purchase of Clark Gillone back in January this year marked its 15th acquisition, bringing the total number of employees up to more than 300, including 82 advisers.
It now has £4.3bn of assets under administration, around £3bn of which sits with investment management business You Asset Management.
When it comes to bringing together advisers from all over the country under one brand, it is all about cultural integration, said Goldthorpe.
“You are taking people from being a big fish in a small pond to a larger organisation - that transition can be quite painful,” he said.
“It is less about technical integration and more about cultural integration. It is very difficult to do and very easy to get wrong.”
He said key to this was respecting advisers’ relationships with their clients.
So far, for Finli, this process has been a success, said Goldthorpe.
He added: “We now have 80 advisers and of this group we have only lost one.
“Client retention is also 98 per cent. I think that says something about how we culturally work.
“The emphasis has been on how we understand advisers and how we understand clients.”
‘We’ve got to respect the local importance of firms’
Goldthorpe said there has been an effort to take a hybrid approach to centralising services.
He said: “In my experience if you centralise everything you lose what you have bought. What we have bought is good advisers and their relationships with their clients .”
Firms acquired by Finli are “gradually rebranding” he said, adding: “We are building a national business but if we don’t respect that local position in the company, we will become unstuck.
“We have got to be sensitive and do it slowly. Most clients don’t care about what you are called just that they are getting the same service.
"Now we have got a bank of people who have been through the process so people can speak to someone who has been through it.”
tara.o'connor@ft.com
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