Do you want to create a sustainable and profitable business by doing more of what you love, and less of what you hate about the job?
Do you want to earn while you sleep and create a great work-life balance with ‘nocturnal’ income for life?
Where are you now?
Maybe, you are an IFA who has reached capacity on the 121-planning side and wants to set up a scalable NIFP side-line on the QT to future-proof the business and income you proudly built up over the years.
Perhaps, your network cannot handle invoiced fees and have got you all tied up legally as they seek to ‘hoover’ your assets onto their platform, and you feel trapped, worried, and responsible for your clients.
Potentially, you see yourself as a professional financial planner rather than a product salesperson; and want to learn contemporary planning skills that clients would value and pay for that are broader than just product.
Possibly, it has dawned on you that investment solutions are commoditised and no matter what you do in-house, after fees you cannot beat market returns. Prospects are looking to run their own money, and you cannot see how you will get paid.
Maybe, you are being bullied by the network, compliance or PII insurers and your authorisation is at risk or has been limited, all the fun has gone out the door, and all the available cash is not far behind.
Perhaps, you have left or are leaving the industry, feeling forced out by circumstances beyond your control and you’re going to miss the best part of the job you love, helping people, your calling, your vocation.
Where would you like to be?
What if, you could take a proven ‘business-in-a-box’ for your NIFP firm and be up and running on the QT in no time at all, with no licensing or trademarks to worry about?
Here, you are a valued champion and impartial expert for your clients, on their side with no conflicts of interest, hidden agendas or perverse regulations getting in the way.
Imagine this, you keep what you earn with no other bosses taking their percentage, no high fees for intolerable regulators, and ridiculously low PII premium renewal quotes that make you smile.
Picture this, preparing a client report is fun and easy, completed in a fraction of the time, getting powerful, life changing, yet simple, easily understood, relevant plans across to your clients.
Imagine you’ve no tedious pointless returns to complete for regulators, auditors or networks that would otherwise eat up your time and drain your energy.
What if continuous professional development was about learning genuinely useful planning skills; rather than having to sit through countless, pointless and boring presentations about impractical regulations or from providers trying to sell you something?
Here, your business is scalable. Not just 1-to-many. But None-to-many. You exchange know-how for money, not your time. Your time is your own. Because your know-how is unlimited the upside is unlimited. The scalable lifetime ‘nocturnal’ income and freedom enables you to earn while you sleep and live the life you love without outliving your capital.
What if, you had wisdom, security, freedom, and a legacy, delivering these same qualities to your clients?
If that’s where you are, and this is where you’d like to be, then I’m sure you will agree that you need an adviser support network and a system, vehicle, or solution, to get you from here to there. Well, that is the Academy of Life Planning and The GAME Plan GeneratorTM.
Why is running a NIFP Firm important?
- The regulated financial adviser market has been contracting for decades, and the outlook for firms and adviser numbers looks set to continue in decline. Driven by obsessive regulation, restrictions to working practices, onerous reporting, time-consuming red-tape, hikes in regulatory fees, raised barriers to market entry, and hardening PII premiums.
- The ever-increasing cost of running a regulated IFA firm, combined with the limited capacity of delivering a 121 service, has forced the market to concentrate on ultra HNW. Leaving the mass-affluent disintermediated and underserved. With the advice gap leading to increasing wealth inequality in society. A gap that NIFP has the potential to fill.
- Product is commoditised. Product advisers can no longer deliver better outcomes for clients through research, recommendation, and maintenance, after costs, when compared to buy-and-forget passive retail-multi-asset funds; as accessible direct and as easy as on-line banking. The value add is now in the non-regulated planning, not the regulated product selection.
- A regulated firm is a lability taken to the grave. With NIFP there is no liability because there is no recommended product. There can be no malpractice, malfeasance, or miss-conduct by the mischievous minority when there is no product. There is no need for FCA registration & authorisation, FOS, and FSCS disappears. These labels are not benefiting clients when all you sell are plans. The risk of client detriment of getting a plan wrong are miniscule according to insurers, when compared to intermediaries.
- There is a need to mitigate the legal risk to your regulated business. The FCA has flagged issues with conflicted payments, such as asset-based fees for ongoing services they judge as unnecessary. A policy decision could impact your regulated firm ongoing revenues and business valuation multiples, overnight. You may be left with debt. You may not have the window of opportunity, or there might be restrictive covenants in place, when you later seek to migrate clients to a fee-for-service financial planning model.
Why now?
The FCA flagged the issue of conflicted payments in the Policy Statement PS20/6 in June 2020. Further decisions can be expected in the FCA’s Assessing Suitability Review 2 paper due early 2021.
Why AoLP?
In 2005, AoLP founder Steve Conley, as the Business Development Director of Berkeley Independent Advisers in Coventry, sold the UK’s fourth largest IFA network to Tenet Group, when regulators threatened to remove the licence for the business, with interruption to the authorisations of its twelve-hundred members, on the grounds of long past mistakes.
He learnt what it is like to be on the receiving end of threats of closure by the regulator and the need to act quickly to save the livelihood of advisers.
In 2012, the FCA completed the Retail Distribution Review. The resulting ban on commission and raising the regulatory bar on standards for financial intermediaries, led the banks to conclude that the regulated financial adviser market was a zero-sum game.
The regulator once again threatened the livelihood of advisers with their intervention. All banks laid off all their bancassurance advisers.
Steve was Head of Investments at HSBC at the time, and had successfully trained, piloted, tested, and proved the NIFP model. The banks were not interested, as ROI for the allocation of shareholder capital was deemed higher by raising levels of unsecured debt for naïve consumers.
Steve disagreed with the conclusions and ethics of the banks and left the banks to prove his point by championing the consumer.
Since then Steve has been an award-winning campaigner for improved market integrity; has run AoLP successfully as a NIFP firm creating wealth, accolade and happiness for many satisfied clients; has authored an Amazon bestseller on NIFP; presented 1-to-many on NIFP at events globally; and trained advisers to run Times best 250 nominated FP firms.
AoLP broadened its remit in 2020 in response to the deepening global life and money emergency, to offer an adviser support network to aspiring NIFP practitioners to spread the good work.
AoLP is the world’s first NIFP adviser support network. It is a work in progress, but many high-profile advisers have already seen the light and joined the ranks; the network is fast-growing and as NIFP crosses borders has gone global.
What makes us different?
When financial planning there are four key areas to address, in the right order.
GOALS: Set goals in every area of your life, not just financial goals.
ACTIONS: Build a project plan to achieve your goals, just like you would in business.
MEANS: Model the wealth you need to create and manage to achieve your goals throughout your lifetime. Create ‘What If’ scenarios to identify solutions to shortfalls. Note products do not create wealth. People do. So, you need to add a 3-year business plan for the ‘business of you’ into the Financial Plan.
EXECUTION: Provide a personal coaching service on-line.
For this AoLP has developed the unique system, The GAME Plan GeneratorTM
Contact us today to find out how the Academy of Life Planning can help you transition from Financial Intermediary to Non-Intermediating Financial Planning firm.
☎️ 07850 10 20 70
📧 steve@aolp.co
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Academy of Life Planning 