After four years Rachel moved to the much larger Oval Group as a technical adviser, and in June 2010 she joined Cooper Parry Wealth.
Rachel says her experience and technical grounding as a paraplanner, as well as the broader insight and knowledge base that she has acquired from working in companies of different sizes, have been instrumental in helping her to progress to this point in her career. “I think one of the best things I did was to have experience in paraplanning in a number of different environments,” she says. “At Chestertons I experienced holistic planning for a small number of clients, then I went to Oval, which was a big firm where you could get hit by absolutely anything, which broadened my expertise even further. Then I came here, to Cooper Parry Wealth, where I’m working with different sorts of professionals including chartered tax advisers. All of that has helped make me a rounded paraplanner, planner and manager.”
Company restructuring
In 2009 Cooper Parry Wealth underwent a restructuring. The firm went from being “a typical IFA financial services part of an accountancy practice, with a SIPP and employment benefit business” Rachel explains, to a “focused holistic financial planning service for high net worth clients.”
Rachel was hired in 2010 as a paraplanner, and she quickly headed up the paraplanning team, taking on a technical and managerial role. In 2013, having achieved Certified status, she also began advising clients. She stopped advising when she was promoted this year but she is still the firm’s pensions transfer specialist.
In 2013, Cooper Parry Wealth CEO Stephen Jones, looked at the firm again and decided to make some managerial changes. Rachel explains: “Basically, he stepped back looked at the business and said, ‘If I was starting from scratch what’s the structure that I would want for this business’.” This resulted in four new managerial roles, heads of technical, client delivery, business development and head of Operations, the role into which Rachel was appointed.
The Cooper Parry Wealth team now consists of 15 staff, including the management team of five, serving some 135 clients. The firm has £135m under management. There are four wealth planners who are served by a client services team of six paraplanners and administrative staff.
In her role as head of Operations, Rachel has responsibility for the client services side of the business, as well as “the management information, financials, learning and development, and our processes and technology, ensuring we are using the best in class and keeping an eye on what’s out there in the market,” she explains.
The restructuring of the firm that put in place the managerial team also established a clear growth path for the years ahead, primarily through referral business from existing clients and via the PKF accountancy connections.
This will see the team expand, Rachel says. In that respect, there is a defined recruitment process that she now oversees, via which people come in to the firm at graduate level and “follow a very structured plan to move through client services, into paraplanning and then into giving advice, if that’s what they want to do. It’s very much about growing people’s skills,” Rachel says.
Each paraplanner is part of the client facing team, Rachel explains. “When a prospective client initially comes in for a discovery meeting the paraplanner attends that meeting with the wealth planner, and the tax adviser if that’s appropriate, and starts to forge the relationship at that point.
“They help with collecting the information, and they make sure that by the end of the meeting we’ve got everything that we need for them to start doing their job. They work very much alongside the planner to formulate the advice; so they will come out of the meeting, have a de-brief, then take things away and start crunching the numbers, building the cashflow models and coming up with a few ideas. Then we will have a case conference meeting where we will look at the initial analysis and decide which way we are going to take it. After which the paraplanner will write the plan.”
