Jan 2 • New Models 🛠️
How an advice firm was born out of frustration
This story isn’t really about two advisers setting up on their own – it’s about why new advice models are starting to emerge.
Here’s what struck me when I read this in Professional Adviser: https://www.professionaladviser.com/interview/4523675/advice-firm-born-frustration?
This isn’t just another “two advisers set up on their own” story. It’s a very clear signal of why new advice models are starting to appear – and why they’ll keep appearing.
The firm wasn’t born out of ambition to scale fast or sell one day. It was born out of frustration. Frustration that advice in larger firms had become narrow, investment-led and commercially constrained. Frustration that advisers could help families more holistically but were actively discouraged from doing so.
That’s important.
What Freshney and Silk describe is something I hear repeatedly from advisers at different stages of their careers. Clients don’t arrive neatly packaged as “investable assets”. They arrive as families, businesses, generations, competing priorities and life decisions. Yet the traditional percentage-of-assets model struggles to serve that reality – especially when younger family members need guidance but don’t yet have wealth in their own name.
Their move to a fixed-fee, family-based model feels less like a pricing tweak and more like a structural shift. It removes some of the conflicts that sit quietly inside the traditional model and opens the door to serving people who have always been pushed to the edges of advice. In other words, it directly touches the advice gap without dressing it up as a social mission.
What I also find interesting is that this isn’t being positioned as “anti-regulation” or “anti-networks”. They’ve deliberately chosen a supported independent route, kept the firm small, and focused on expanding services rather than client numbers. That’s a very different growth mindset to the one many advisers were taught.
And perhaps most telling of all is this: the hardest part wasn’t regulation. It was branding, positioning and building something that felt like a real business. That alone says a lot about where the next wave of advice firms will either succeed or struggle.
To me, this article isn’t really about Sherpa Family Wealth. It’s about a generation of advisers quietly questioning whether the old structures still serve advisers or clients properly – and then doing something about it. Not by burning everything down, but by redesigning the model around how people actually live, earn, inherit and make decisions.
We’re going to see more of this, lots more. Not because it’s fashionable, but because for a growing number of advisers, the traditional model no longer matches the advice they want to give.
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How an advice firm was born out of frustration
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