Dealing with Financial Planners and their idiosyncrasies was the topic of the last morning session at the IFP Paraplanner Conference.
The panel session was made up of Cathi Harrison CFP^CM from Para-Sols, Kim Bendall CFP^CM from The Paraplanners and Claire Goodwin from Taylor Oliver.
The trio were sharing their experiences of working as outsourced and in-house Paraplanners. Ms Harrison and Ms Bendall work for outsourced companies while Ms Goodwin works in-house for Taylor Oliver in Sheffield.
On the in-house side, Ms Goodwin said that surveys by Taylor Oliver revealed 96 per cent of its clients felt a close working relationship between Financial Planners and Paraplanners was "crucial".
She said that having the freedom to speak her mind, shared values between the two parties and learning to collaborate made her job easier.
She felt that Paraplanners needed to both take instructions and give them regarding letting the Financial Planner know if they were being given too much or were unclear on the timescale or expectation of the task.
"Being delegated work is a real confidence boost but let them know if it becomes too much work, you have to learn to say no. It's so simple but also one of the hardest things to do."
On the outsourced side, Ms Bendall said the first problem was that you were writing a report for an adviser you never met and a client you never met.
Her top tips were to do a factfind with the adviser to find out how they liked their reports to be written, make a good first impression with your initial reports, establish how they best communicate and ask for previous examples of their work.
Cathi Harrison said working with many different advisers meant some would want long technical reports while others would want brief client-friendly reports. She recommended attending client meetings to see how the Financial Planner presented the reports to clients.
She said problems remained as advisers outsourcing work were not necessarily in favour of Paraplanning.
"People don't realize how much value they get from a Paraplanner. We get advisers using us because their compliance department has told them to do so or it's an Emperor New Clothes scenario for them where everyone else is using a Paraplanner and they're testing it out.
"They're not coming to us already embracing Paraplanning and the relationship and that can be difficult to manage. But when we save their bacon then they realize how important it is to have a second pair of eyes looking other things."
Financial Planner will be covering the conference and will be live-tweeting via @FPM_Online and covering key speakers on financialplanneronline.co.uk.