Making the switch from financial advice to coaching

A former financial adviser has said that financial coaching is the way to plug the so-called ‘advice gap’.

Graham Wells set up his financial coaching company, GroWiser Financial Coaching in 2021.

His aim was to help empower people to make financial decisions on their own rather than having to rely on others to do it for them.

Wells, a chartered financial adviser, made the change of career after he lost his love of advice after six years in the profession back in the noughties.

Most people don’t need fully regulated advice Graham Wells

In the pre-Retail Distribution Review days, the profession was much more sales and product based.

“That didn’t resonate well with me at all,” Wells told FTAdviser.

He initially moved into training within the sector, and after having learned a lot about “how adults learn and what motivates people”, Wells began to toy with the idea of financial coaching.

“At that point, I started to research, ‘does financial coaching even exist?’ This was about seven or eight years ago and at that time, there was really only one person in the UK that did financial coaching.

“That’s a lady called Simonne Gnessen, who founded Wise Monkey Financial Coaching. I trained with her to become a financial coach and then eventually I made the move to become a full-time self-employed financial coach,” he said.

Wells described the move as “the steepest learning curve” of his career.

“And that includes all the exams I sat to become chartered and a fellow of the Personal Finance Society. Technically that was challenging, but to set up as a coach brings a new set of challenges.

“Becoming proficient in coaching is a shift in mindset away from advising to empowering others, and it’s a completely different way of being,” Wells explained.

For example, deciding what to charge was difficult initially as there are limited models to copy.

At the moment, GroWiser offers clients an initial 30-minute virtual meeting for free and if they choose to continue they will have different programmes available to them depending on their needs.

A block of six one hour coaching sessions with Wells costs £600, while a pay-as-you-go option is available for £125 a session.

Wells works with very few clients on a face-to-face basis. Generally his clients are based in the UK but he also has some scattered across France, America, Australia and Kenya.

“With the technology that’s available now, because financial coaching is generic and it’s more behavioural based, it’s not restricted to the UK,” he explained.