Sometimes, I daydream of being back in my first ever job: Sales Assistant in the Books Department at Selfridges. I never had to explain what I did for a living. Just stating my job title, or even “I work at Selfridges”, was enough.
To get paid (£3.25 an hour if you can believe that), I had to turn up on time in my white shirt and navy trousers and not do anything stupid. (Not guaranteed at 18 years of age but I managed it, most of the time.)
How do I explain what we actually do at Monmouth Capital? What’s my actual job? People make so many assumptions based on their prior experiences and knowledge.
For instance, I’ve lost track of how often I’ll say, “I’m Faisal Sheikh from Monmouth Capital” and the person I’m talking to will respond, “Ah yes, Monmouth! I know you guys!”
And I know they definitely don’t know us. But we must sound like a firm they ought to know. And maybe I sound like a person they’ve come across before.
These are some of the comments I often hear:
· “You must be good at numbers”
· “Beating the market” is the primary goal
· We are constantly “trading”
· “You need 24/7 access to the value of your investments”
For the avoidance of doubt, yes, we are good at numbers. But numbers don’t tell even half the story.
In fact, probably 80% of the job is nothing to do with numbers, the markets, trading or the value of investments.
It is all about getting to know the people I am advising and understanding what they are like.
Getting to know their personality, their life story, what matters to them. All of that informs the investment journey they need.
Earlier this year I was in hospital for a procedure which meant I was pushed around in a wheelchair for most of the day by a kind nurse, Charlie. We chatted about my job. He said he was surprised that it sounded more like a coach or counsellor than anything to do with money and markets.
That makes sense to me. All of us have such a complicated and deep-rooted relationship to money informed by experiences from the earliest stages of life. Yet I don’t think this is given anywhere near enough attention in mainstream therapy, considering the far-reaching impact on our lives. Something I will come back to.
For now, as I explained to Charlie, it often feels like a counselling role. You can explain everything and the client gets it but for a thousand reasons they might not want to do it. So a lot of the job is understanding and pre-empting this. The journey matters.
My conversation with Charlie was a reminder that the service we offer isn’t like selling books at Selfridges. Don’t get me wrong: I loved that job and have the utmost respect for people working on the front lines in retail.
It’s just that finding potential clients, getting to know them and figuring out if we might work well together is the slowest of slow dances. And even that is just the beginning: our longest relationships now span over a decade.
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