Space: My first frontier

Hello again all. Joe here.

A couple of weeks ago I got to attend my first conference in Financial Services, that being Fundment: LIVE - The Adviser Edge, hosted at the wonderful Outernet in London. After being in my role for only six months now, it was my first real experience of the wider world of finance.

It started with a lot of introductions to many, many, many people, which was slightly stressful, mainly as it takes me a while to remember names. Thankfully I’m good with faces, but that wasn’t very helpful at the time! Eventually I started getting to grips with it, and just did my best to soak it all in.

Getting into the actual event, Fundment introduced the day and welcomed everyone, before the first speaker came out to say a bunch of things that nobody would actually comprehend.

This isn’t me just being rude about the first speaker. I say this because the first talk was done by Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor). For the next hour, he proceeds to give a full show and tell us about the stars, space, and storytelling. There wasn’t much technical content about finance sprinkled into his session, but getting to see the man you watched on the telly growing up, give a full show right in front of you, was a real treat. His way of bringing everything together can still be applied to the profession - To be able to tell people about such complex things in such a captivating way is a skill that everyone can master, and in the world of financial planners, something that is extremely useful.

After all was said and done with the Prof, there was a panel talking about scaling your business, and it was great to hear from some wonderful women in the industry on this. As part of a company of three, the conversation on stage about growth was very relevant to FLP as a whole, and I’m sure when the time comes to expand further, panels like this will provide strong ideas to consider.

There was a short break after this to give us an opportunity to mingle more, where I had a few more chats and felt like I was starting to get to grips with this whole networking thing.

The final session before lunch was by Rachel Botsman, who gave a great talk about risk versus trust in client relationships, expanding on the way to go about navigating this, and when is the right time to lean towards one or the other. It was an insightful presentation, both for professional and personal takeaways.

After this was lunch, and sadly my final part of the day. Shockingly, this came with even more networking, including a chat with the Fundment CEO. Unfortunately, I found out he was an Arsenal fan, and had to boo him. Overall it was a great morning, a real taster into a large scale provider event, and an opportunity to meet good people. My LinkedIn connections have more than doubled over the last two weeks!

What I learned on my day out:

• Connecting and networking isn’t as scary as it seems. Everyone I spoke to was absolutely lovely, and very keen and happy to chat or connect about anything I needed help with.

• There’s something for everyone at these events. Whether like me, at the very start of my career, or others who have been in the profession for longer than I’ve been alive, so much was discussed and provided that you can’t not take something away.

• Space is scary, but equally pretty cool.

I really feel like I’ve grown a lot since my last blog, where I was relatively clueless on all fronts. In that blog, I said I was planning on starting to study and get qualified this year, and this is now well and truly underway. Ideally, by my next post, I’ll even have got one of my first exams done.

Fingers crossed, and ciao for now.