Gilly Green

But I think one thing that astonishes me is how little time is spent on really understanding some of the emotional side to advisors, moving businesses, losing their brand, because that's usually one thing that should happen, moving to another business, understanding new products and selling them to clients.

So I think

the more time you can spend on that, the better.

And that is probably the one thing that's either going to be great or disastrous.

If you start losing those advisors, it can have a very negative effect.

If you get them on board, get them growing quickly, it's going to be fantastic.

It's a great question.

And actually, this is one thing that came up in pretty much every interview that we did.

I don't think there was anybody who contradicted us when we were asking this question.

So I think there's three things that really detract from organic growth while you're doing consolidations.

The very first and probably the key one is the advisers.

So the incoming advisors from your acquisition, they don't know your new proposition.

They're focused on what's going to happen with incentives.

Are those going to change?

They're learning new processes and they're trying to talk to their clients in a sensible way about the acquisition at the same time.

Almost the last thing they're going to do is go out and do new business development to talk about something they're unfamiliar with.

So absolutely key for the acquiring company is to really, really sell the new proposition.

I mean sell because it's actually about convincing them that it's a good thing to do and talking to them in detail about the suitability for their existing clients.

Because there's no doubt they'll be moving platforms.

They might be making new investments into a new NPS or other investment process.