Certified Financial Planner

If you’ve been waiting for a role that treats financial planning as a genuine craft — not a product sales target dressed up in advice clothing — keep reading. This is a rare opportunity to join a small, selective practice built on the belief that great financial planning changes lives. Not just portfolios.

WHO WE ARE

Sandford House Financial Planning is a boutique lifestyle financial planning firm in the Southwest of England. We were established in 2019 with a deliberate intention: to do things differently. We work with a carefully chosen group of clients — people who want clarity about their financial lives, not just a quarterly statement. We help them understand what their money makes possible. We plan around how they want to live, not around arbitrary accumulation targets. We are small by design. We grow organically, through trust and reputation. And we are looking for one exceptional person to grow with us.

WHY THIS ROLE MIGHT BE FOR YOU

You are good at what you do. You know it. And yet something feels off about where you are. Perhaps it’s the volume. The compliance conveyor belt. The sense that your clients are files to be processed rather than people to be helped. Perhaps it’s the quiet frustration of being good enough to do proper, holistic financial planning — but working somewhere that doesn’t really want that. Or perhaps it’s simply that you can see a ceiling above you that you didn’t put there. If any of that lands, this might be the right conversation.

THE ROLE

You’ll work directly alongside the principal adviser, handling a meaningful caseload of clients from first meeting through to ongoing relationship management. This is not a paraplanning role or a stepping stone. You will be advising. Day to day, you can expect to:

• Conduct discovery and planning meetings with clients across the full range of financial planning — pensions, investments, protection, estate planning, cashflow modelling.
• Build and present suitability recommendations that are genuinely tailored, not templated.
• Develop long-term client relationships where you are their trusted adviser, not a face they see once a year.
• Collaborate with the principal on complex cases, strategy, and firm development.
• Contribute to how the practice grows — your ideas will be heard and acted on.

WHAT WE BELIEVE

We call it ‘full-fat’ financial planning. It means we do not cut corners, sell products as solutions, or treat advice as a process to be completed. We treat it as a professional discipline — one that deserves proper time, proper thought, and proper relationships. Some things we hold firmly:

• The client’s life comes before their portfolio. We plan around goals, values, and fears — not asset allocation alone.
• Ongoing relationships matter. A client who trusts us with a difficult conversation is worth more than one who never needs us.
• Complexity is earned. We do not over-engineer solutions, and we do not oversimplify that which genuinely requires care.
• Fees should be transparent and honest. We do not hide margin in products.
• We would rather have fewer, better client relationships than grow at the expense of quality.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Qualifications and experience matter, but they are table stakes. What matters more is who you are as an adviser. You should bring:

• A genuine belief in holistic, client-first financial planning — not a rehearsed interview answer.
• Level 4 Diploma in Financial Planning as a minimum; Level 6 or Chartered progress preferred.
• Experience advising real clients — ideally across pensions, investments, and protection.
• A communicator who can make the complex feel accessible, without dumbing it down.
• Enough hunger to build something, not just service what already exists.
• Comfort with technology and modern planning tools — we work efficiently and expect the same.
• The kind of professional standards that would make you uncomfortable cutting corners, even when no-one was watching.

WHAT YOU’LL GET

We have built this role to attract someone serious about a long‑term career in independent financial planning. That means we are not offering a job. We are offering a stake in something. Reflecting your experience and contribution, reviewed as the practice grows. You will not be managed by a spreadsheet. You will be trusted to do excellent work and given the space to do it.

• Share options.
• For the right person, a long‑term equity stake in the business. If you help build it, you should benefit from it.
• Study support for Chartered status. Time and investment in becoming genuinely excellent.
• A practice that reflects your values: small, independent, and proud of it. No corporate agenda. No product quotas. Just proper advice.