Tony Pound has been in financial services for over 20 years. He's worked in banks, networks, and corporate firms. He knew how to advise clients. He was good at it.
What he wasn't sure he could do was build a business. Not because he lacked the knowledge — but because running a business requires a completely different set of skills, and not all of them felt natural.
He describes the anxiety that came with going self-employed. The years of worrying whether he'd done the right thing. The constant question: should I just go back to being employed?
"I probably took a longer time to get to a position where the anxiety had started to move away than a lot of people," he says in Episode 2 of the NewIn Podcast.
Then one morning, last September, about four years into building Journey Happy Financial Planning — he woke up and something had changed.
"I remember waking up and thinking I've got a legitimate business now. I had clients, referrals coming in from those clients, other leads coming in. It was a real moment for me."
Episode 2 of the podcast is about the NewBusiness side of our mission, including our Ready?, Steady... and Go! programmes and the advisers going through them. Tony is joined by co-host Hannah Pendlebury, who is also herself setting up her own practice from scratch.
What this episode makes clear is that "going solo" isn't a single decision. It's a process. Fften a long, messy, anxiety-inducing process of figuring out the right structure, the right network, and crucially, your own identity as a business owner, not just a financial planner.
One of the most practically useful parts of this episode: Tony's explanation of how he decided between going Directly Authorised and joining a network. Not a generic comparison, but a lived one.
"They've all got challenges. You just have to work out which challenge you're happy to work with."
He ended up choosing Two Plan. He talks through why, and what the structure gives him in terms of time back to actually focus on clients.
Cathi was joined by Jo Campbell, COO at Verve, who was Verve's (Para-Sols at the time!) first employee and helped build the business from a spare room. She talks about what it felt like to be employee number one. About the clients who were "the new boss" when it was just the two of them. And about the moment she realised she was as invested in Verve as if it were her own.
"A business is not just a commercial entity. It's not a bloody VAT number. It's a living, breathing thing that you really get invested in. You really care about it."
If you too are thinking about going solo, Tony's advice might be for you: "If you can stay in it, do it for three, four years, then you'll come up over that hill and you're in a stage where you feel like you survived." And that's when it gets good.
Hear the full conversation on the NewIn Podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Amazon Music.
The NewIn podcast is brought to you with thanks to Royal London, Lead Sponsor of the Verve Foundation.
