Mandy Kemp – Tilney Bestinvest

24 June 2015

Leading a team of some 20 paraplanners that are spread around the country presents a range of challenges, Mandy Kemp, director Paraplanning at Tilney Bestinvest tells Rob Kingsbury

Helping a client find a dead body is one of the tasks that Mandy Kemp, director Paraplanning, Tilney Bestinvest, has performed in the course of her career – although, it should be stressed, not as part of any paraplanning duties. This particular task was one of the more esoteric ones she was challenged with as private office manager for a legal firm where she was responsible for co-ordinating the legal and financial affairs of the firm’s top clients.

Explaining that particular task, Mandy says: “The client hadn’t noted which funeral directors the body had been taken to and I had to ring around and locate which one it was.” Other tasks in that role included managing property portfolios, sourcing mortgages, dealing with domestic staff and on one occasion, finding a VW Beetle with a specific number plate as the client wanted to give it to his wife for their 25th wedding anniversary. “It was the most diverse job ever and what I really liked about it was the freedom and responsibility that was placed on me,” Mandy says.

It could be said that particular job stood her in good stead for her current role, as director of paraplanning at the recently merged Tilney Bestinvest, where the individual challenges may not be so exotic but she still has a wide breadth of responsibilities.

Mandy was appointed as director of paraplanning, which sits within the financial planning arm of Tilney Bestinvest, in 2013 and she is part of the senior management team, alongside two joint managing directors, a director of compliance and a director of financial planning operations.

The scope of the role includes HR (recruitment, appraisals, training and personal development of paraplanners), the IT side such as maintaining templates and standard paragraphs, managing and motivating the team, helping advisers onboard to the company, responsibility for the financial planning team’s research systems, and streamlining of the paraplanning operations, among others.

Her paraplanning team has rocketed from seven to 20 paraplanners in little over 18 months with seven working remotely (from home), five in the company’s head office in Mayfair, and the others based in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, High Wycombe, and Newcastle with a couple more in the pipeline. As a rule of thumb the company works to a ratio of one paraplanner to three financial advisers, although it can vary depending on the volume of work being generated by the office and the level of support in each office.

Her own paraplanning experience she gained while working for Queensgate, the financial advice firm she joined in 2001, when she quit the legal firm role and relocated from Tunbridge Wells to the west country to be closer to family. “Although I was employed by Queensgate as the office manager, it quickly occurred to me that the adviser’s time would be better spent if he was out seeing clients and I took over the report writing. It’s a different skills set and it meant he could be seeing 3-4 clients a day while I dealt with the paper work. It worked very well,” she says and she continued to develop the paraplanning role whilst working for Westward Counties (which became part of Tilney Bestinvest)

“Now I check a lot of reports and when we’re under pressure, such as now with the end of the tax year coming up, I’ll help out but mainly I’m working on the management side of the business.”

Managing the virtual team

Key to managing a large team spread around the country is to be able to see the bigger picture “rather than just my bit of the business,” Mandy says. Being part of the senior management team, therefore, is essential to ensure all parts of the business are streamlined towards the end goal.

“But it’s mainly about the team,” she says. “It’s recognising that the central paraplanners work remotely, which typically is from home and on their own, which means it can be an isolating job. I try to speak to all the central paraplanners several times a week.”

Report requests to the central paraplanning team come in to Mandy and she allocates the work according to the individual paraplanner’s current workload and their experience. “The relationship is based on trust to get the work done to the quality needed by the deadline and part of my job is knowing the personalities of the people and where their strengths lie and providing the right level of support for each person.”

One of the key issues when managing a widespread team is getting to see the team face-to-face on a regular basis and as well as travelling to London for two or three days a month Mandy tours the country whenever possible.

However, one of the most difficult challenges, she says, is ensuring consistency of information delivery. “When you’re in an office you can address everyone and everyone gets the same message at the same time. With a remote operation, if I’m discussing a technical issue with someone on the phone, for example, then I have to remember to ensure I pass the same information on to the rest of the team.”

To date that has been done through email and holding regular team telephone calls, however, she is now looking to make use of technology to reduce that need to travel. “We’re going to be doing more via Skype and we’re also introducing video conferencing facilities in some of the offices,” she says.

Another initiative she has recently introduced is a structured exam and training programme “to ensure we have consistency across the board,” she says. “Where we have an adviser and a paraplanner doing the same exam it makes sense to co-ordinate that so we can provide support such as bringing in external trainers to help people progress through the exam levels.”

Professional Paraplanner