In Focus: Managing the cost of living  

‘I set up on my own out of sheer frustration’

Moss currently looks after about 70 families, having started his business with half that number. He says his maximum capacity is 80 families.

The aim of the business was to replicate what the service feels like for clients of an "old high street IFA", with added modern-style rigour on the investment and tech sides.

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Moss outsources most non-advice functions, and having worked at law firms and accountancies, he knows how to work in partnership with these professionals to give clients an all-round service.

"I hope that gives them the feel of having all of this stuff covered, if not in-house then through connections that we have, so that they don't have to source other advisers to help with other bits separately," he says.

Eleven.2 offers different service levels, but most clients get two reviews a year — one periodic review and one extra catch-up meeting.

"In reality, I'll speak to most of my clients a lot more regularly than twice a year," Moss says. "And that's very much part of the proposition that I try and run, [which] is that if clients have a big financial decision to make it's unlikely to fit neatly into the sort of review process, and so I want them to feel comfortable coming to me and running it past me and getting my views.

"And we can use things like cash flow planning that we've got in the background for them to test the impact of different decisions, and most clients take me up on that."

Understanding fees

When it comes to fees, he keeps these flexible, offering fixed fees, asset-based fees and time-based fees depending on the needs of the client and the nature of the work involved.

"When we take on a new client, the first thing I explain is what each element of cost that you incur with an advised portfolio is, what it's designed to do, what the typical range is for that cost, and sort of benchmark that," Moss says.

"And they're all the way from nothing, go and source your own funds [and] not having an adviser, through to a fully advised portfolio where you've got platform costs, advice costs, underlying fund costs, investment management costs, potentially.

"It's really important in those first meetings that a client should understand what all those elements are, what they're there to do, and also to know what I think is a typical cost for those elements so that they can make an informed decision."