Rebecca Lucas ran Lime Outsourced Paraplanning for over a decade. Then in 2022, she took the decision to move back into advising. Rob Kingsbury spoke to her about why after 10 years running her own paraplanning firm, she decided to start advising again and how she went about it.
When Rebecca Lucas won Professional Paraplanner’s Paraplanner of the Year award in 2018, she had been running her own outsourced paraplanning business for five years. She started her financial services career in 2000 and had been an administrator, paraplanner and then an adviser for a number of years before setting up her outsourced paraplanning business.
So, the big question to ask was, why after some 10 years of successfully running Lime Outsourced Paraplanning had she decided the time was right to go back into advising?
She says: “I’m a real people person. My outsourced paraplanning business was remote working, which meant I was often working on my own and most of my paraplanning clients I had had for years, so there wasn’t a need to talk to them too much either.
“The flexibility was ideal when my children were at primary school and I needed to do the school run, but as they grew older I found myself having less and less contact with people on a daily basis and at a crossroads as to where I wanted to take my career which coincided with both children being in secondary school. When I’d been an adviser before, I had loved it, particularly meeting the clients and building up the relationships with them. So, I started thinking maybe it was time to go back to it.”
Rebecca spent a year as an employed adviser before decided to set up her own advice firm in 2023.
After speaking to a number of advisers about their start up experiences, Rebecca decided to advise as part of a network rather than going directly authorised. In part this was because of the compliance support a network provides. “I’ve joined INPartnership, which has been really good because they have whole departments doing compliance and providing T&C, etc. So you know that as long as you follow their guidance, you’re always going to be doing the right thing from a regulatory perspective and that really helps.”
Rebecca set up as a limited company. It took a good couple of months, she says, to get the authorisation she needed because the network also had to do extensive due diligence before sending the application on to the FCA.
When setting up she had the advantage of starting from a blank sheet of paper. “I had no clients when I started, so from day one, I had the opportunity to do things in my own way deciding who I would most like to work with and how I would like to work with them.
“As an outsourced paraplanner I’ve worked with some of the best advisers in the UK, some of the most amazing planners, and I had a good idea of how I would want to do things and the service I would like to give my clients.”
As part of her transition back into advising in 2022, Rebecca says she immersed herself in the Lifestyle Financial Planning approach started by Paul Armson. She also become a Certified Money Coach last year because she had always been interested in the psychology of money and behavioural finance. “Knowing why people might behave in a certain way and how people feel around money helps so much.”
As might expected, Rebecca does her own paraplanning, but as the business grows she says she’ll consider outsourcing. “The difficulty I will have,” she says, “will be selecting which firm to use, as I know so many great paraplanners!”
She charges a flat fee for initial work and creating a cashflow model and then if the client wants to put the plan into action, an implementation fee. Any ongoing advice is on a percentage of assets.
Ideal clients
Rebecca has established her business working with people over 50 coming up to retirement or who are in the early stages of retirement. As she says on her LinkedIn profile: “Helping successful people aged 50+ get their in a row.” She also specialises in working with women of that age group who are going through divorce.
Retirement work is her sweet spot, she says. “People in a job or running a business who are on a hamster wheel and who would like to get off but they don’t know if they can retire. Then it’s about going through their finances with them and if it is possible, showing them that they can actually retire now and that they don’t have to keep doing what they’re doing. That can become the start of a new life for them.”
“I also like to hold my clients accountable. For example if they tell me they want to go on that dream holiday or buy a camper van. I want them to have the best life possible and will be there to remind them of their goals and keep them on track.
Her specialism in financial planning around divorce is very different, she says.
“Someone who’s thinking about retiring is probably in a happy headspace and they look into the future and it’s usually a very positive and an exciting time. Someone who’s getting divorced may have been through a very difficult period before I speak to them.”
With clients going through a difficult time such as divorce, it’s about meeting them where they are, she says. “There’s a lot more emotion. You could be dealing with someone who’s quite distressed – they could be angry or sad. So, there’s no point having an agenda and thinking you’re going to fill in a fact find, because they might just cry for that first hour. They might not be able to even talk about financial matters.”
She finds that often, the woman has not been the money person in the relationship. “They can lack confidence, coupled with all of the emotive side, the anxiety. Sometimes divorce can be quite nasty. And they can be divorcing someone who isn’t very nice.
“But once they are through it, it can be like the start of a new life for the women I help,” she says.”
A key part of all of Rebecca’s work is cashflow modelling, using Voyant. “This is the first part, otherwise what is the money for if we don’t know what we are working towards,” she says.
“It’s been over two years now since I closed my paraplanning business and started advising again but I have to say it’s been really, really good. I think having that experience of running my paraplanning firm has been very useful to take into this business because although they’re quite different, from a business perspective there is a lot of experience I’ve been able to carry across.
“In a paraplanning business, once you get the work coming in, the turn-around is quite quick. You do the work, you get paid and the overheads are generally smaller. Whereas, in an advice business it’s a lot longer process. You might see somebody and start working with them and it might be three to six months before you actually complete the work that you’re doing with them.
“I think it’s been really good to have that knowledge and the confidence from having run a business before. I know what I’m getting into, even though the business is a different side of the market.
“And it’s satisfying the people person part of me. I get energised from being in front of people.”
While Rebecca has begun by building her business locally – most of her clients live within an hour and a half radius of her office in Cambridge – as the business grows and with digital technology and virtual meetings, she says, “I can take clients from anywhere in the country.”
