Our financial advice process- part 1: the enquiry

When it comes to dealing with businesses, I always like to know what I’m in for. This may be a millennial trait, but if I don’t know what is involved straight away, I’m hesitant to even interact with the business.

I think about this regularly when it comes to our business. We are always trying to put out information about our process but because it can be unique depending on your needs, it can be difficult to explain succinctly. That’s when it occurred to me, I can do a blog post!

So what happens when you seek advice from Bounce Financial? In this multi-part series, I’ll lay out our process from your first enquiry through to having a financial plan in place. In this part 1, we will talk about what happens when you reach out to Bounce Financial about getting advice.

Our Website

The first step our client’s usually take is checking out our website. Here we have links to our social media and hundreds of blogs which explain a lot about who we are and how we see the world. Bounce has been around for 5 years and in that time, we have put out a lot of content. This allows you to get to see what we are about and whether we are a good fit for you.

Once you’ve decided you want to find out more, you can make an enquiry on the front page of our website.

The Initial Meeting

After you have made an enquiry, we will contact you to arrange a free initial meeting to discuss your needs and whether financial planning is a good fit. In preparation for this free initial meeting, we will send you a survey to complete which will help us get some basic information about you. This helps us be prepared for the meeting.

Personally, I’ve always been hesitant about free meetings thinking they are going to lead to some pushy sales tactic, but this isn’t the case.

The thing is, we aren’t a great fit for everyone. Until we understand your particular situation and your goals, we can’t say whether our style of financial advice would suit you. In addition, we firmly believe that you should feel comfortable with your financial adviser and that may be a personal decision.

We offer this meeting for free because we don’t like the idea of charging somebody for something when we haven’t offered value yet. It’s that simple.

At the initial meeting, we tend to ask a lot of questions about your life, family, job, goals etc. The reason we do this is to get a good understanding of where you are at, and where you are looking to go. Once we have covered all the topics we will briefly explain how financial advice works and how we would tailor our advice to make sure it caters to your needs.

For example, a client may be focussed on buying their first house. If I didn’t go through this process and simply gave them investment recommendations, this wouldn’t really address their needs. We have clients come to us for all sorts of reasons and we think it’s important to understand what these needs are and whether financial advice suits them.

At the end of the meeting, we will provide you with a pack containing some forms we need completed if you want to go ahead with getting financial advice.

As a general rule, we will usually send a follow up email a week later just to check in to make sure you didn’t have any questions. If we don’t hear from you after this, we generally won’t contact you again (apart from as part of our newsletter list). In our experience, for some people, it may not be the right time for advice for them and we as a business do not believe in being pushy or contacting you constantly.

Many times, we have people come back to us months later once they are ready and that is fine. Financial advice is a personal decision and we are always happy to go ahead when you are ready. Next time, I’ll cover what happens if you decide you want to go ahead with getting financial advice.

This post is from our resident Financial Planner Ben Brett, check out his details in the About Us section.

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Posted in: Ben Brett, Financial Planning