Loyalty Has to Run Both Ways: The Inside View

What a Firm Owes Its Advisers

The industry spends a lot of time, rightly, talking about how to look after clients. Far less is said about what a firm owes the adviser who has spent 25 or 30 years doing exactly that.

Peter Gollogly thinks the two are more connected than most people realise. Give clients a better proposition, and advisers end up with happier clients. Look after advisers properly, and clients get looked after properly too. That’s how loyalty is built over the long term, and it’s clients who benefit most.

On the client side, Skybound has deliberately strengthened what it offers, adding tax and mortgage expertise and a wider investment proposition that can flex to very different needs in different countries. Better tools in an adviser’s hands mean better outcomes for clients.

When Advisers Are Treated as Disposable

Here’s where Peter thinks much of the industry gets it wrong. Advisers are too often treated as disposable, with plenty of churn and little long-term investment in the people looking after clients.

When an adviser leaves badly, or retires with no real plan, the clients usually pay for it. They get passed around, left wondering whether anyone knows their situation at all.

Then there’s the question few firms ask. An adviser spends a career helping other people plan, protect their families and step back on their own terms. What happens to that adviser at the end of their own career? Too often, the honest answer is a forced sale of their clients, or a vague arrangement nobody has written down.

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Skybound’s answer has been to build it into the contract. Death in service support, clear exit policies and proper retirement pathways, all set out in black and white. Not a verbal promise, not a gentleman’s agreement, and not a “don’t worry, we’ll look after you” that has a way of disappearing at exactly the moment it’s needed.

In practice, an adviser can step back on their own terms. There’s no forced sale. Their clients move into a team that will keep looking after them properly. The adviser leaves well, and the client keeps the continuity they value.

When advisers know where they stand, they stop looking over their shoulder. They go deeper with their clients and think in decades rather than quarters. And clients can feel the difference between an adviser who’s secure and one who’s worried about their own future.

A Question Worth Asking

The industry is consolidating, and plenty of good, experienced advisers are quietly wondering whether their firm will be there for them when it counts. If that’s you, Peter’s point is simple. You’ve spent a career giving clients straight answers. You’re entitled to one yourself. Has your firm written down what happens to you, and to your clients, at the end of the journey?

There’s a question for clients too, and it’s worth putting to any firm: what happens to me when my adviser retires? Is the answer in writing, or is it a reassuring shrug? Is it a named team, or whoever happens to be free?

Watch the third episode of The Inside View, then ask the question.

“You can’t really ask people to be loyal to a firm that isn’t loyal to them.”