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In this episode, Steve is joined for the first time by his business partner and Chief Operating Officer, Hannah Knight Niblett the person who runs everything that clients don't see, and the reason Steve gets to be the swan gliding across the lake while she does the paddling underneath.
Hannah has spent 25 years in financial services, starting in a bank at 18 and qualifying as a financial adviser at around 20, in an industry that was even more male-dominated than it is today. She and Steve first crossed paths at Norwich Union without ever meeting, and eventually connected through a LinkedIn message Steve sent at three or four in the morning from a tent while camping. Nine years on, she has helped turn Lucent from a one-person operation into a fully-fledged business and this episode is the honest tour of what has actually gone into that.
In this conversation, you'll hear about:
- Hannah's route into financial services at 18, and the comment from a senior adviser early on "you can't do this, you've got no life experience" that became a driver rather than a stopper
- The tiny bits of advice (like don't wear fluorescent nail varnish) that were meant to give a young woman in a male industry the best possible chance
- The Michael Kitces line on suits younger advisers should wear them to project authority, older ones shouldn't because it becomes intimidating
- The scale of the work behind every client meeting: evidence gathering, research, compliance, data protection, money laundering, reports, risk management, marketing and disaster recovery
- Why Lucent has 5 financial advisers but 18 people in total, and the external annual audit the firm has become an "example of what good looks like across the UK" for
- How Steve and Hannah actually met the four-figure number of people Steve says he tried to hire before her, the LinkedIn message sent from a cold tent, and the second-interview "coincidence" where a photographer just happened to be there
- The Christmas tree Hannah brought to the office on her first day in 2018, and the three years of Steve's health scare, COVID and network collapse that followed
- Steve and Hannah as visionary and integrator (courtesy of Gino Wickman's Rocket Fuel), why Steve comes back from every holiday with a hundred new ideas, and why Hannah occasionally wishes he wouldn't
- The Cambridge hotel story: Steve, recovering from an operation, overhearing another firm's adviser bore a couple to death with pie charts, and how close he came to throwing the china on the floor
- Hannah's take on what makes a great financial planner today empathy over qualifications, probing for feel rather than fact, and being properly human
- AI in financial planning: Hannah's view that it gives time back for the human bits but will never tell you what your actual goals are
- The two questions Hannah wishes people would ask a prospective planner instead of "how much does it cost", "how much better off can you make me?" and "what's the cost of not doing it?"
Key takeaway:
Steve and Hannah's argument is that a good financial planning firm is a machine of many hidden parts, most of which the client never sees. But the reason those hidden parts matter is that they free up the adviser to do the one thing no piece of technology or compliance policy can do: sit with another human being and actually listen. Financial planning isn't a pension, an ISA, a portfolio or a pie chart. It's a conversation about what you want your life to look like, held with someone who cares enough to ask, and backed by a team who care enough to make sure the answers hold up.
