What will Planning for Life look like four years from now?

This is a leading question and we have spent much of the last two weeks trying to answer it by developing a farsighted and radical business plan for Planning for Life.

For most people, 2012 is the London Olympics. For us it is also the year the Financial Services Authority inspired Retail Distribution Review (RDR) will come to fruition. The RDR is likely to change the face of retail financial services beyond recognition even though financial planning firms such as Planning for Life are already almost “there” in terms of the reforms envisaged by the FSA.

During the next four years we will also have to deal with the aftershocks of one of the worst financial disasters for nearly a century and changing attitudes amongst consumers both to their own money and to the way they seek advice on how to deal with their money.

We remain optimistic and excited about the future. Our hard work in building a different sort of financial planning business model over the last few years puts us well ahead of the pack. We are in a strong position to take advantage of the RDR and to provide the right services for consumers with changing needs.

The thrust of our planning centres on both our marketing and our operations. Over the years, whether by luck or by judgment, we have attracted a number of “solo-preneur” (by which we mean a single person running a business that is usually involved in coaching, counselling or similar activities) and entrepreneur families whose main goal is to achieve freedom, integrity and authenticity in their lives, rather than concentrating on the money. In addition, developing an ethical, community-conscious business is often a priority. Over the years we have become more adept at solving their particular personal financial and life planning problems. We therefore plan to move towards providing services exclusively for these types of clients.

We aim to use the internet much more than we have now, both to disseminate our message to the wider world and to bring internet based services to clients.

We have developed comprehensive systems for delivering life and financial planning to our clients and we now intend to extend these to the less well off by providing entry level and mid range financial planning services. In June we will also launch our Mapmaker Service, a two hour special meeting with no frills, no commitment and no product sales but which is designed to enable clients to assess the degree to which their finances are properly directed to achieving their life goals.

We will continue to provide defined services for fixed monthly fees, and once we have completed the work of extending our range of service standards we will invite all our existing clients to finally switch to pure fees.

We will begin to outsource some of the functions that we do here. Investment management is one key area where we feel that by outsourcing the management of our clients’ portfolios we can provide them with greater depth of expertise and access to a wider range of conventional and alternative investments than we are able to provide at the moment.

We plan to work more closely with other professional advisers. Solicitors in particular face the prospect of big changes in their practices as the Legal Services Act takes effect and we want to work more closely with accountants and solicitors, supporting them by giving them access to real and effective financial planning for their clients.

So, in four years time we expect Planning for Life to be a leading edge life and financial planning boutique providing a range of life planning, financial planning and tax planning services to Yorkshire entrepreneurial families seeking that elusive dream of freedom.