All of that advice was well meant. None of it was much use – because it wasn’t professional
The starting gun has fired on our charity partnership with Greenwich-based charity MumsAid, with the first Ginkgo-vested runners braving the Hampton Court Half earlier this month. I said in last month’s blog that I’d tell you more about why this one matters to me. So here goes.
When I was three, my father died suddenly. My little sister was born three weeks later. Understandably, my mother struggled to cope. Friends and family rallied round of course. But the only ‘professional’ help she had was a health visitor who came round to the house and told her that if she didn’t get out of bed and get dressed, she would cut up her dressing gown and burn it.
I don’t know whether that particular kind of pull-you-socks-up, stiff-upper-lip approach that was the norm in the 1970s actually worked. I doubt it! But luckily for us, my mum did find it in herself to carry on – with love, humour and determination. She was amazing.
But it could have turned out very differently. There was no shortage of kindness around her but nobody ever diagnosed what was clinically wrong. Was it grief, postnatal depression or both? What was the best way to support her? There was no counselling on offer - even if there had been money for it, which there wasn’t.
All of that advice was well meant. None of it was much use – because it wasn’t professional.
What professional actually means
On the face of it, a maternal mental health charity and a financial advice firm in Blackheath don’t have a great deal in common. What we share is a view about professionalism: that meaning well isn’t the job, and that whoever is sitting opposite you should be properly qualified, properly supervised and working to a standard somebody else can check.
MumsAid is an organisational member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and works within its ethical framework. It was set up by a perinatal psychotherapist who has been working with new mothers since the late 1990s. Every therapist there specialises in this one thing: the mental health of women through pregnancy and the first couple of years after a baby arrives. Clinical supervision sits behind the work, and the charity publishes its outcomes rather than asking anyone to take its word for it.
The same is true of our business
And that’s where the synergy with Ginkgo sits. I’m aware I may be preaching to the converted here. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a client, and you already know how we work, but it’s worth restating anyway.
Daren has been doing this for more than thirty years. He’s a Chartered Financial Planner and a Fellow of the Personal Finance Society, which is the highest grade of membership the professional body awards, with specialist qualifications on top of that. What matters more day to day is our culture of sharing knowledge and passing it on. Our financial advisers, our mortgage and protection adviser and our paraplanners collaborate, support, advise and sense-check each other. They’re studying for more qualifications, learning continually and making sure every client gets access to high-quality, expert advice. And behind all of us sits Quilter, with the research and the oversight that come with it.
It’s slow and it’s unglamorous, and it is the whole difference between advice and an opinion. Plenty of people will give you an opinion about your money – a mate in the pub, a brother-in-law who did well out of something once, a confident thirty-second video. Some of it will even be right. What none of it comes with is somebody who has to understand your circumstances first, write down their reasoning, stand behind it, and still be accountable for it in ten years’ time.
None of that existed for my mother, in any part of her life. It does exist now, for a mum in Greenwich who needs it, and that is worth a running vest and a good deal more besides.
You can see what MumsAid does here. I wish my mother had been able to.
Debra Blundell, Co-founder and Head of Marketing
