There is a tell in a first meeting, and it has nothing to do with money.

People arrive with a folder. Statements, a policy schedule or two, a retirement annuity certificate, sometimes a will that was drafted before the second child. And for the first twenty minutes or so, the folder stays on the lap. Not on the table. On the lap, closed, occasionally held with both hands. They will answer every question politely and fully. They will tell you what they earn without hesitating. But the folder does not move until something has been settled that nobody in the room has said out loud.

What they are waiting for is the turn. The moment the friendly questions stop and the presentation begins, and a document comes across the table with a space for a signature at the bottom of it.

The guard goes up for good reasons

It would be convenient to treat that wariness as a misunderstanding. It is not. Most people have either sat through that meeting themselves or heard about it in detail from someone who did.

There is also a quieter reason, and it has less to do with the industry than with the room. Saying no is difficult. It is particularly difficult when the person across the table is fluent in a language you are not, uses terms you would have to interrupt to have explained, and appears entirely confident that this is the right thing for you. Very few people are comfortable pushing back on a technical recommendation when they are not sure they have understood the technical part. So they prepare a defence instead, and they hold the folder.

The interesting thing is what happens when the turn never arrives. When the first meeting ends and the second one begins and there is still no product on the table, the shape of the conversation changes. Not because anyone has been reassured. Because they have worked out that there is nothing waiting behind the questions.

What the questions are actually for

We do not open by asking how much someone would like to invest. We open by asking about their life, and we take longer over it than most people expect.

Where the career is going, and whether it is going there willingly. How stable the income actually is, as opposed to how stable it looks. Whether there is a business in the plan, or a move abroad, or a wish to stop earlier than the retirement date on the fund statement. Who depends on them now, and who is likely to depend on them in ten years, which is a different list and usually a longer one. Children, and the education they are hoping to fund, and the harder question of where support for an adult child should stop. Ageing parents. A sibling. A former spouse. A business partner whose circumstances will one day become a feature of this plan whether anyone likes it or not.

And then the part that no product brochure has a field for: how the person actually behaves around money.

Some people are excellent savers who cannot bring themselves to spend, even when the arithmetic says they comfortably can. Others earn very well and have never built the system that turns income into anything durable. Some treat all debt as dangerous. Others have grown comfortable using it to fund a standard of living their future income may not carry. There are clients who will not take investment risk because they were badly burned once, and clients who take far too much because they are trying to buy back years they feel they have lost. And there are couples, often, where one person is organised entirely around security and the other around flexibility and enjoyment, and both of them are right about something.

A plan has to be built for those people, not for the spreadsheet version of them. Financial decisions are not made in an emotional vacuum, and a plan that assumes otherwise gets abandoned in the first difficult year.

A product is a tool, and tools are chosen last

None of this is an argument against financial products. A product very often ends up being part of the answer. It is an argument about sequence.

Before recommending an investment, we need to know what the money is for, when it is likely to be needed, how much access the client wants in the meantime, what the tax consequences are on the way in and the way out, and how it sits alongside everything else they already own. Before recommending life cover, we need to know who would actually be financially prejudiced by this person’s death, how long that dependency runs, what assets and debts already exist, and whether the cover is there to settle debt, replace an income, create liquidity in an estate or fund a buy and sell agreement. Those are four different jobs and they do not all want the same policy.

The same discipline applies to disability cover, retirement annuities, living annuities, endowments, preservation funds, tax free savings accounts and every other instrument on the shelf. They are tools. A sophisticated tool used for the wrong job is still the wrong answer, and it is usually a more expensive wrong answer than a simple one.

Which means the work has to run in the honest direction: understand the position, identify the risks and the opportunities, weigh the strategies, and only then reach for an instrument. Not start with a preferred solution and reverse engineer a justification for it.

Sometimes the right advice is that you need nothing

Some of the most useful advice we give results in no product at all.

Settle the debt first. Build a reserve you can reach in a week before you lock anything away for thirty years. Keep the policy you already have, because the underwriting terms you were given at thirty two are better than anything available to you now. Reduce the cover, because the child it was bought for has been earning for six years. Leave the property purchase until the income is more predictable. Fix the will, which is out of date and currently contradicts the beneficiary nomination on your retirement annuity. Do nothing at all for six months, because the situation is about to change and any decision made now is a guess.

Advice that cannot reach those conclusions is not advice. And a practice can only reach them if it can survive reaching them.

A practice that can only be paid when something is sold will, sooner or later, find something to sell.

That is the real answer to the wariness people bring into a first meeting, and it is not a matter of character. It is a matter of structure.

Where our money comes from

So it seems fair to be plain about ours.

We are paid in four ways, and which one applies is agreed before the substantive work starts, not after it.

Some work is done on an hourly basis and invoiced, in the same way an accountant or an attorney would bill it. This is usually where the question is a defined piece of thinking rather than an ongoing relationship. A second opinion. A retirement projection someone wants tested. A structuring question with a decision at the end of it.

Some clients are on a monthly retainer and we invoice them each month. No commission is paid to us on that work by anybody. They are buying access, oversight and thinking, and that is the whole of the arrangement.

Where we manage an investment portfolio, we charge an ongoing fee based on the assets under management, disclosed to the client and reflected on their statements.

And where a risk product is put in place, whether that is life cover, disability cover or income protection, we are generally paid a commission by the product provider.

That last one is the one worth pausing on, because it is the one a sceptical reader will fix on, and they are right to. It is the only part of our income that depends on something being implemented. We think it can be handled honestly, but only on conditions: the client is told what the commission is and who pays it before they sign anything, the recommendation is made across the market rather than out of a drawer, and the risk advice sits inside a plan we were already engaged to build, so the plan is not being constructed backwards to arrive at a policy. If a client would rather pay us a fee and have the commission reduced where the provider allows it, that conversation is available too.

There is nothing daring about publishing this. Under the FAIS General Code of Conduct, an adviser has to tell you what they will be paid and by whom before you are committed to anything, and any adviser who is doing their job properly already does. The reason it is worth writing down is that most people do not know it is their right to ask, and the ones who do know often feel awkward asking. It is a great deal easier to have that conversation with a page you can read beforehand than to raise it across a table while someone is being helpful to you.

Clients are not paying for access to a platform or a policy. They are paying for the thinking that has to happen before either one is chosen.

That thinking is the product. The analysis, the modelling, the tax and legislative knowledge, the judgement about what is actually likely to hold up over twenty years, and the ongoing oversight as the law changes, the markets move and the client’s own life refuses to stay where it was. It also includes something less comfortable and more valuable: independence of thought. The ability to challenge an assumption, name a blind spot and ask an awkward question without a pending sale bending the answer.

Most of all it is the ability to tell the difference between what is urgent and what merely feels urgent, and between a real financial priority and a product opportunity that happens to have arrived this week.

What this asks of you

None of this requires you to become an expert. It requires three questions and a willingness to sit through the pause after them.

The folder on the table

Somewhere in the second meeting, usually without any announcement, the folder ends up on the table. Open, generally, and turned around so we can both see it. Sometimes there is a page in it the person has been quietly deciding whether to mention.

That is the point at which the work can actually start. Not because a product has been chosen. Because it has become clear that one is not the point.

This article is general information and not financial advice. It does not take your personal circumstances into account. It describes how our practice is remunerated in general terms; the specific fees, commissions and charges applicable to any engagement are disclosed in writing before that engagement begins. Regulatory and legislative positions are stated as at September 2026 and may change.