Bernabé Gramajo arrived in the UK from Argentina, worked in the motor trade, and then decided, with a newborn daughter, a full-time job, and no industry experience, to retrain as a financial adviser and build his own practice from scratch.
Last week, he got his FCA authorisation for his own wealth management firm.
The path between those two sentences took almost two years, two months of near-defeat, and one Saturday morning at the library every week for years. He shares his story in Episode 4 of the NewIn Podcast, and it's one of the most honest conversations we've had so far about what becoming a financial adviser in the UK actually involves.
You can study for your diploma, pass your exams, and still find it almost impossible to get a job. The barrier that stops most people isn't the qualification, it's Competent Adviser Status (CAS). You need supervised experience to achieve it, but firms are often reluctant to invest in developing advisers they worry will leave. It's a catch-22 that Lewis Byford, co-founder of the Financial Planning Club, calls the biggest unsolved problem in the industry.
"Getting competent is our biggest problem," Lewis says in the episode. "That's the bit we as an industry really need to improve."
He'd joined a firm on a self-employed basis. They were taking 50% of his fees. They didn't provide leads. After two months, he did the maths and decided he could do it himself. He went independent under the Julian Harris network and gave himself a firm deadline: six months. One year at the absolute most.
"I didn't have the time, I didn't have the energy anymore," he says in the episode. "So I thought, I'm going to give it just six months, one year. And that's it."
That six-month mark is when he found the Verve Foundation.
Being connected to other people going through the same thing, other newly independent advisers, business owners who understood exactly where he was changed everything. "It just literally clicked," Bernabé says.
It's a pattern we see over and over again. The technical knowledge you can teach. The compliance process you can learn. But being surrounded by people who understand the specific challenge of building a financial advice business from nothing? That's the thing that makes the difference between people who stay and people who don't.
"Once you make that click, there is no way back," Bernabé says, hours after receiving his FCA authorisation. "It's an amazing, rewarding profession. And once you make that click, you will be incredibly proud of what you can achieve."
Hear the full conversation, including Lewis Byford on why AI isn't the silver bullet for smaller firms (yet), and what the industry could genuinely learn from Australia, 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.
