The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 24, Part 2 – Jonathan Tweedie: Financial Advice in a Changing World
16 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best, and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development, and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers.
Welcome back to the Growth Workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best, and Jonny Adams, and continued discussion with Jonathan Tweedy from RBC Brew and Dolphin. Jonny, I had a cool conversation with one of those US firms just around what the government in the US are mandating in terms of its benefits and things that need to be in place. You talk about corporates and the regulator. So corporate...
What are some of the things, and I know we're going to potentially open some cans of worms, but for me, there's a couple of things here. There's a bit of a kind of mandating what the future needs to look like. There's going to need to be some policy that helps drive that forward, but there also needs to be that sort of willingness. Which of those things do you think is going to happen fastest?
Do you think it'll be corporate saying, you know what, this is a sufficient benefit for our employee base that actually we're going to provide a service that helps financial health of our employees? Or do you think it's more likely that the government will do something first?
I suspect they'll both happen at the same time. Yeah. But my view, corporates are already starting to look at this and starting to understand that they need to make sure, from a fairly selfish point of view, that they get better productivity if they can deliver a better working environment and less stress for the people. What stresses us out most of the time?
It's working out how we're going to pay the mortgage at the end of the month, how we're going to pay for kids' school fees, whatever it might be that's stressing you. As an employer, you want to remove that from your employees and therefore providing them with access to good and trusted advice is going to be crucial.
And when you look at every employer today who's mandated to provide pensions for their employees, making sure their employees understand the value of that pension, again, is hugely important to them because it enables them to make sure that their employees are motivated to protect themselves and to protect their families. So I think employers will drive this quite quickly and will demand it.
I think that the reason I think government will do it at the same time is we're in a tight space financially. The government recognizes that they need to find ways of removing some of the costs from the state. Right. And by encouraging and potentially even mandating employers to give their employees access not just to services but to the advice, may help them reduce some of that long-term burden.
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Chapter 2: What challenges does the financial advice industry face today?
I look at my own family and go, they save safely because they're risk adverse. Well, I go, actually, that's quite a high risk strategy because it's unlikely to meet your needs and objectives. You've got to know when you can afford to take risk and you can afford to take risk when you've got time on your side.
Yeah.
You said some fascinating points around your time in the army. You sort of teased us a little bit by saying the leadership course you did in Sandhurst. And I'll just do a bit of pre-framing. We've supported a number of leaders within wealth management across the UK and the US.
And we deliver commercial leadership support, so frameworks and tools that might help organizations grow, retain their clients, for example. But you reference it as leadership within Sandhurst. What's the difference, do you think?
And if you had a chance to bring in one or two frameworks from your time at Sandhurst, what would they be into the corporate world, which you might have already done already?
So I think the biggest difference is is you have to develop trust really quickly. I mean, effectively, let's be really clear about what the military does. It takes very young men and asks them to put the young men, young people these days, and asks them to put their life... on the line by putting it into clear and present danger.
And to do that, they're unlikely to do it for the king and country. They do it because they're protecting the person next to them and they trust the person who's leading them. So you've got to create an environment where your junior leaders are trusted by their soldiers almost instantly. It's really hard to do because when you leave Sandhurst, you're not very good.
Yeah.
And you need to recognize that you're not the finished product, but you've had enough training and development to be competent. And then you need to learn how to become good. Now, I wasn't an infantry platoon commander. I disappeared straight out of Sandhurst to Northern Ireland. I learned from listening to the people around me.
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Chapter 3: How can employers improve financial health for their employees?
But to have drawn in enough information so that you understand the decision you're going to make. And then agility. So I think the other thing Sandhurst teaches you is that old Mike Tyson quote, isn't it? That everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. You get punched in the face on a daily basis. And you have to adapt. And you need to be flexible in the way you adapt. Yeah.
We're not talking about war here in the corporate world, but we are talking about every day is different. You build a plan. You mentioned that earlier.
There is proof and also baked an opinion with the world that we work in that traditionally leaders in financial services have been recruited because they're good performers within their technical role rather than potentially being out and out leaders. And then the development that they provide is actually below par. What I'm hearing is Sandhurst.
may have actually had those individuals come from all different backgrounds. You might have not been an innate leader, but actually the training and the support that you got given in the Sandhurst gave you the foundation. When we look in organizations, the leadership functions are some of the most critical roles towards transforming and changing.
But they're actually some of the most underdeveloped people.
Why? Because, and again, think about the difference. So, The military is able to recruit people specifically because they are looking for leaders. I was not the best infant here. I wasn't selected on my ability to be a great soldier. I was selected on my potential to be a great leader. And we don't do enough of that in industry.
We fall into the mistake of taking the very best car salesman and putting him in charge of running the garage. That is often the wrong outcome. You are looking for different skill sets. And we need to get to a mature state within our businesses where I can have a conversation and go, Johnny, look, you are a brilliant salesperson.
You don't want to be encumbered by this bit of leadership because you are more effective and adding more value for yourself and for your clients and your prospects in the role you're doing. Let's teach people how to coach for that. Because the bit I think that What we've probably got wrong is we try and coach people to follow our own career paths quite often. And that's always a mistake.
You've got to be able to coach people for what's right for them. And I don't think I was a particularly effective. I was a terrible stock picker. I was an adequate investment manager. I was really good at building relationships with people.
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Chapter 4: What role does government play in financial advice access?
Whereas actually what I think AI will enable us to do is to create an environment where we can develop the advice specifically for you. And we can show you what it looks like in your world and in the way you think. So we talked about it a little bit earlier on and said, when we talk about how we plan for our wealth journey, and by the way, no one plans for their wealth journey.
Yeah.
But when people are in that environment, we always talk to them about risk. And when I talk about risk, what we actually mean is standard deviation. Now I start talking to us about standard deviation, they close over and go, I haven't got a clue what you're talking about and why would that be remotely relevant to me?
We need to be able to convert stories into understandable dialogue for individuals. So you take whatever is relevant to them and you take their story and you take their experiences and then you try and... put that into the context of then, well, what do I mean by risk? How do you make decisions in your everyday life, which are actually about how you take risk and how you view risk?
And then how do I show you what that looks like in the world of investments? And then why you need to be able to adjust your thinking on that as time progresses.
I love it. It's purely custom centric, which is where the industry can go and should go. And the last sort of question with all this evolving potential change, we've worked together, we've known each other for a number of months as a business and as people, which is lovely. Where does consulting fit into this? Because, you know, you've got change on the horizon. It may or may not be appropriate.
Businesses may be able to do all of this amazing change that we've discussed. But do you have an opinion on that?
Yeah, so I do. I think our industry, in fact, industry in general, uses consultancy in two ways.
The first way I think is fundamentally wrong, but is used probably the most regularly, which is simply to validate decisions so that you abdicate responsibility for the decision you make by bringing in a consultant to effectively support your thinking and ideas to go, that's all right, the consultant said this was absolutely the right way to go, and no one ever gets fired for doing that.
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