Surge Meeting Season

I am currently deep in my ‘surge’ meeting season, properly deep.

Back-to-back meetings, financial plumbing, admin, cashflow forecasts, beneficiary nominations, ISA top-ups, pension consolidations, insurance gaps, estate plans, school fee projections, the full works. The unglamorous bit of the job that no one posts about on LinkedIn. And yet, this is the bit that quietly reminds me what a superb position we sit in as Financial Advisers.

In any given week, we move from one family to another, working with a founder, a founder to a widow, a widow to a young couple, a business owner exiting soon and then a retired Army Major worried about too much money coming in. We see the full spectrum.

We see the real version of wealth, not as it's portrayed in the media.

We see the tension between saving and spending. The trade offs between time and money. The friction between partners who want different futures. The parents quietly subsidising adult children (this one is huge and most of the time very hidden). The children who have no idea how much their parents are worth. The entrepreneurs who cannot switch off. The corporate lifers who want out but cannot quite do the maths to make it happen, or who are really scared of losing their identity and purpose.

Every meeting in this season adds to your knowledge base. You start to see patterns. Behavioural patterns, spending patterns, regret patterns, and success patterns. What works, what doesn't, what people wish they had done five years earlier, what they are relieved they did ten years ago.

One client teaches you the emotional cost of retiring too late. Another teaches you the financial risk of retiring too early. One shows you the joy of gifting early, another the unintended consequences of giving too much too soon. One demonstrates the power of simplicity, another the curse of complexity.

We benefit from the collection of wisdom, which then compounds. Thousands of lived financial experiences, and the real magic of this job is that the lessons do not stay siloed. The information compounds, the outcomes improve, and our advice sharpens.

So yes, surge is admin-heavy and exhausting, but I think there are huge benefits to it. And it reminds me that it is a genuine privilege to sit at the intersection of so many families’ financial lives, and quietly turn the shared experiences into better decisions for all.