MURPHY Wealth was originally set up 42 years ago as an insurance broker. Adrian Murphy took over the company in 2014 from his father and has worked on making the business accessible for clients.

Name: Adrian Murphy

Position: CEO

WHY DID YOU SET UP THE BUSINESS?

MY father actually set up the business in 1977 down in Ayr originally as an insurance brokerage pre the financial services act 1986. Dad got quite good at that. The business went well for quite a number of years.

My route in was through university. I studied BA Financial Services at Glasgow Caledonian University. It’s now called finance, investment and risk. I would have liked to have had a job in the industry prior to joining this. That was kind of the plan but at the time when I came out of university there wasn’t a huge number of jobs. I was working in a call centre not using my degree and then dad asked me if I would like to come and work for him in an administrator role. I thought it would be a good grounding to build my career from there so that’s what I did. I have six siblings and I had always been around the business. I would go in after school and help with the mail and clients.

[My dad] had nine mouths to feed, if you include him and my mum, so he didn’t have a thought about building a business in a traditional sense. He just worked and then people around him worked and he saw clients whereas I came in thinking let’s build a business here. Something sustainable, something with a value and a legacy. Those thoughts started crystallizing once I’d been in the business for a few years. That was 16 years ago.

The National: Neil Law, far-right, and his teamNeil Law, far-right, and his team

Neil [Law] is the managing director and I brought Neil in as an adviser five years ago. Over the years we’ve been through a few different teams and advisers and things like that. I think the biggest change was when we moved from Ayr to Glasgow. I was commuting to Ayr every day and I always planned to bring the business back here and we did so six years ago. We still have a lot of clients we’ve had since day one. I finally bought the business from my dad last year. It took a while because we moved and there was no real urgency on our part to do it.

WHAT IS THE TARGET MARKET?

IT’S fairly niche. Our clients will be management of large organisations like banks, oil companies, financial companies. They’re a key group of clients for us, they’re fantastic and we do a good job for them. We also have entrepreneurs – SME owners running successful businesses with all the complexity and challenges that come along with that. We look after that whole journey for them. Neil largely deals with those clients and I deal with the business owners. We’re not sectoral or anything because in my view it’s very difficult for us to be sectoral in Glasgow as we have such a fantastic range of businesses. We are the SME capital.

HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM COMPETING BUSINESSES?

IT’S very challenging. I don’t think there is such a thing as a unique selling point. Nobody has a USP but we have selling points that are different. There isn’t anything unique in the finance world anymore really. We spend a lot of time breaking down complex concepts to clients and we get rid of all the jargon. The vast majority of people don’t want to know how the thing works. If you get brain surgery you don’t ask the brain surgeon how he’s going to do it. You trust that he knows what he’s doing.

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Most of our clients just want peace of mind and freedom. They’re the holy grail. Stuff that sits underneath that is our job to know. I think our industry is guilty of overburdening clients to prove we know what we’re talking about or prove we’re smart. We focus on what the client wants to do and show them how we can do it.

I’m studying some behavioural finance courses at the moment because that’s the future of the industry as we move away from products and investments. When you go to the doctor you don’t get a prescription first, you get a diagnosis so sometimes what the client needs is something different from what they think they need.

WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT RUNNING THE BUSINESS?

ONE of the things we really enjoy is the variety. It’s amazing the things you learn about different businesses. We’re lucky in that we’ve been reasonably successful so we can pick and choose clients we want to work with. Client satisfaction in our industry tends to be very high because people don’t usually shop around for this service so we measure it by how likely they are to recommend us to friends, family and colleagues as that’s a bigger risk to them.

There is a challenge when you take the wealth down south and think it would be easier down there but Scotland is a fantastic place to do business. Glasgow is the SME capital and will always be our HQ.

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Our industry is very male dominated. Fiona, our operations director, is the first member of the manager team to be female. If we were able to hire a female adviser that would be amazing because again the adviser market is very male dominated. We do stuff with Business Women in Scotland and all of our client managers are all female, bar one, so we’re trying to do something about that. It’s not necessarily deliberate – we’re not picking female clients over better male clients, we’re picking the best people while trying to maintain a gender balance.

WHERE DO YOU HOPE THE BUSINESS WILL BE IN 10 YEARS’ TIME?

WE’D still like to be here in Glasgow but have grown. We have set quite ambitious targets for ourselves in terms of the goals of the business.

We have an ambition to be the number one financial planner in the city. Every time we say we have enough staff we take on more. It would be nice to think we could attract people to come and work for us.