With the Professional Paraplanner awards 2025 open for entries, over the next few weeks we are talking to different award winners about the awards process and what benefits they and/or their teams derived from being Award Winners.
Have you entered the awards or nominated your favourite providers yet? Look out for our Awards emails and get entering and voting.
Team of the Year 2024
Crowe Financial Planning scooped Paraplanner Team of the Year at the 2024 Professional Paraplanner Awards. Rob Kingsbury caught up with team leader Zoe Hitchcock to find out what has happened to the team over the past year.
Zoe Hitchcock, Paraplanning Manager at Crowe Financial Planning UK, heads up a team of 14, split between paraplanners, annual review paraplanners and paraplanner support.
When we speak, she is in the middle of conducting annual staff appraisals for the team; the formal process which she complements with regular one-to-ones throughout the year.
In the year since winning the award, Zoe has seen one member of staff transition into a consultant/adviser role, with another also looking to head that way in due course; another move into operations within the Crowe business, where they are involved in the testing of new systems and software, including how the business can use artificial intelligence (AI); one member of staff is returning from maternity leave as another is about to go on maternity leave; and she has just recruited a new staff member to join the paraplanner support team.
In addition, two of the support team are looking to move into a paraplanning role, and one of her paraplanners has been promoted into a team leader role, looking after the team undertaking the annual reviews.
“So, we’ve had a few changes,” Zoe jokes. “But what’s nice is that people have options, depending on where they want to take their career.”.
Introducing AI
One of the biggest impacts on the team this year, Zoe says, has been the use of AI.
“Strategically the business is looking to grow in and transform, so we are looking at how we can improve efficiencies, which includes starting to use artificial intelligence.
“The consultants use it for their client meetings and the AI transcribes the meeting and divides the content into sections, picking out areas like income, expenditure, vulnerabilities, which means when as paraplanners we are working on the clients plan, we can easily see each of the key points we need for the suitability report.
“Having the transcript also means we can go through it for the finer details and we know that everything that was talked about in the meeting is there.
“We also use it for our internal meetings and I’ve been using it for my appraisals as well, just taking the meeting notes.
“Across the board, AI is saving us a huge amount of time. And this is just the beginning of how we might use it.”
Entering the awards
Having been a guest at the Professional Paraplanner Awards in 2023, Zoe decided to enter the 2024 Team award.
“I’ve always thought my team is brilliant, but it’s a bit like when you tell people you’ve got wonderful children, you’re probably a bit biased.
But we’ve got a lovely culture here and we work really well together and really efficiently; it’s certainly the best team that I’ve worked with. So I thought we’d go for it.
“It was the first time that we’ve put ourselves forward for anything like this and we never really thought we’d win at our first attempt. So when we heard our name called out, I nearly fell of my chair; it was massive.”
Raising the team’s profile
“Winning the award was a huge boost and validation for the team. We work remotely, with paraplanners all around the country, so when we had our annual team building get together, we made sure we took a picture of us all, with the award, alongside our Managing Director (see main picture).
‘It raised our profile both within the business – highlighting our head work – and externally. As a result, we’ve had paraplanners looking to join our team and students asking to do work experience with us.
“We all use the logo on our emails, which gives us additional credibility when writing to clients.
“The awards made us look back and reflect on what we’ve done and what are we doing and put it all down on paper. And it also gave us drive going forward; It made us look how we can do better and work harder to achieve our goals for the team.
“Above all, it really was worth the time to enter and go through the process. We were thrilled to win.”
