At Engage, we’re currently approaching 70 client families, around 35% of these are professional footballers, 60% are business owners and young professionals, with the remaining 5% coming from outside of our niches.

So today we're going to talk about the value of having a financial planner and what we do at Engage. I'm going to talk about Engage as well as more general financial planning explaining along the way in more detail what we do and how we do it.

This is your host, Sam Sloma. Welcome to the Engaging People podcast. This is a

pod where I interview young entrepreneurs, high-flying professionals, and

sports starts to find out more about them, their journey, and how they're

shaping the future.

Recently I’ve been listening to a podcast called ‘The Happiness Lab’ by Doctor Laurie Santos. She is a professor of psychology & cognitive neuroscience at Yale University. She runs a course so popular that they had to do the lectures at a concert hall and the main focus is around what makes people happy…

I’ve just finished reading ‘Rebel Ideas’ by Matthew Syed, which is about the power of diverse thinking. It was a brilliant read. It would be easy for me to end the blog here by saying go and read the book, which I do think you should do.

This blog is going to be a little bit different to our typical blogs. This month we wanted to focus on something that, though not directly related to financial planning, is instead about a topic we all feel strongly connected to. Because, even with the very best financial plan in place, there are always going to be unexpected events in life that we can’t plan for…

When people hear that I advise professionals sports people, their first thought is that I stop them from doing stupid things. I can understand this way of thinking but, having worked within this niche for the past 10 years and having been a professional footballer myself, I really try to impart that everyone is different and will see the world through their own lens.

In my last blog, I outlined Engage’s investment philosophy. I received some really positive and unexpected feedback. I had some financial planners say that it was an excellent communication, and I had some people read the blog and ask me for the investment portfolio data.

I’ve wanted to write a piece about our investment philosophy for a while now. I often write about the human side of financial planning and how we work with and help our clients on a day to day basis – but this time I thought it might be useful to give some insight around the investment side of financial planning.

I have been thinking about financial freedom recently. It’s a term that’s used a lot in the profession I’m in.

In February I was included in the ‘VouchedFor’ Top Adviser guide that featured in The Times. This is a list of financial advisers who have received a significant number of 5* reviews on VouchedFor.

Our new and improved website launched last week – www.engagefs.co.uk (for those who haven’t seen it yet). The brief was pretty simple, to make what was already a good website better.

Over the Christmas period I spent a fair bit of time reflecting on the past year, as I’m sure lots of people did.

The Christmas period is often a good time for a reflection of the year gone by, as well as a time to look forward to the coming year. At Engage we asked ourselves what have we done well? Where can we improve and what are our targets for the year ahead?

For the third and final extract from my Humans Under Management Talk, I look at the important subject of how money can’t buy happiness and - barring a lifetime supply of KitKats - the best things in life are free!

For humans, happiness is found in connections. We, as practising advisers are in the people business and the connections you make with the people all around you are going to influence how they feel. This means that we must be wholly aware of our own happiness, how we are feeling and the projection of energy we give out.

Last week I had the privilege of speaking in front of 250 advisers at the Humans Under Management conference. This is a conference where the focus is on managing clients’ behaviour and what we do help people.

Over the past five years, not only has the actively managed fund underperformed its own benchmark, it has also underperformed the UK and global stock markets.

Last week I returned to the office after 2 and half weeks out. It was the longest holiday I’ve had in years and coming back in to the office felt strange. I mean, I was really happy to be back at work (genuinely) but I felt a little off kilter.

Economics is generally about research and making assumptions based on what would likely be optimum decisions. Humans make decisions based on emotion and psychology. Behavioural economics is a cross between the two!