There will be times in your life when you need to take a break from employment, retrain, or change your course says Steve Butler, CEO, Punter Southall Aspire.
Having spent the four years working on developing Punter Southall Aspire’s pre-retirement proposition, Butler has taken time out to focus on his own later life development.
After reading The 100-Year Life by Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton, Steve Butler made the decision to enrol at the University of Winchester at the age of 47 to pursue a doctorate in business administration. The book, he says, made it clear that people would work for 50 to 60 years of their life due to living longer, “I couldn’t see myself working into my seventies doing the same thing,” he says.
His doctorate in business administration, which is now in its writing-up phase, explores the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on different generations in the workplace, particularly relevant to his role as CEO, a position he has held for the past seven years. Prior to that, he served as the MD of the company’s investment consulting division for more than seven years.
“As a business leader, I’m experiencing a different generation coming into the workplace now with different values and different motivations. I felt looking at the full spectrum of ages would be an interesting area of research.”
He tilted his research when the pandemic started and began examining whether the new flexibility that came with Covid was going to have a positive impact on life choices or whether it was going to cause individuals to regress from the advancements that had been achieved in the workplace. His research includes data from organisations including Aviva, Aegon, Canaccord Genuity and RedWheel.
“I did a survey looking at perceived discrimination and asked for people’s feelings around that using an age discrimination scale before Covid and
during Covid. I could see there was a difference in the way that people felt they were being treated in the workplace during Covid. I’ve also done a series of semi-structured interviews to delve into what the issues are.”
Mid-life review
Butler is not new to academia; he has written three books and made contributions to the field from the perspective of a practitioner. The first book, Manage the Gap: Achieving Success with Intergenerational Teams, was published in 2019. In it, he examines the issues that come with working with many generations and the various generations in the workplace.
He learned while conducting research for the book the extent to which many people find themselves, often in their fifties, without the right skill set or career. A midlife review can be a positive intervention for these mid-career professionals to reflect on their lives. The concept is based on the idea that career counselling and training are heavily invested in for those beginning their careers, but not for those who are already established.
His second book, which serves as a handbook for HR directors on how to implement a midlife review, looks at career objectives, training needs and the need for financial planning and financial education to support people.
The third book introduced him to a wider discussion on diversity and inclusion, looking at how businesses may create inclusive cultures for all employees. Butler had been fully focused on age up until that point.
“The books have gone down very well with our clients because they’re like guidebooks that you can pick and choose what you want from, rather than paying for a consultant to come and deliver a full service to you.”
Butler also contributes to research as a visiting fellow at Oxford Brookes from the viewpoint of an expert. He believes that continuing one’s academic education serves as an important example of the idea of “lifelong learning”, which can be advantageous to businesses and reflects good ED&I practice.
“If you’re building a business, you need to create a culture of inclusive, continuous learning because you’re only going to improve as a business if you’ve got everyone engaged in their own professional development and continuous learning. I think being a role model is an important part of my role within the business and the industry.”
Community work
Butler holds a trustee position with the Money Charity, a group that not only educates individuals about money in
the workplace but also reaches out
into neighbourhoods and schools.
“We provide a lot of financial education into the workplace but found that we were restricted to the workplace so we’ve built a partnership with the Money Charity so that we can support them delivering financial education to refugees coming to the UK in schools as part of the national curriculum and people that perhaps can’t access financial education because they’re not in work.
“Our employee benefit consultants and financial advisers volunteer to deliver those workshops with the money charity. We see that as being the complete circle of what we need to do as an organisation.”
Acquisitions and solutions
Butler has led Punter Southall Aspire for the past four years in focusing on the
pre-retirement space and developing services and solutions. The company
began the process of establishing a financial planning division almost immediately
after acquiring three such firms in Bedford, Oxford, and the south coast and combining them into a single financial planning
division. Chartered financial planners are part of the new team and assist corporate clients who are nearing retirement and need financial guidance.
In just five years, the company has grown from having 60 employees to 150 thanks to the three acquisitions and the addition of the employee benefits team from BDO, an accounting business.
The company has not only grown through acquisitions but has also created and built out a number of solutions,
such as its Aspire to Retire proposition, which Butler characterises as a “financial education journey.”
“Corporates will sign up to it and give us names, email addresses and dates of birth of all their staff over age 50. We have an ongoing educational campaign to equip them with all the knowledge that they would need as they approach retirement.”
Punter Southall Aspire also launched a product called Pension Potential, effectively a Moneysupermarket for annuities.
“There’s an advice gap and for many of our employees inside our corporates, they may only be retiring with pension pots of £50,000 or £60,000 and can’t afford a financial planner. Pension Potential starts out as a financial education journey and then allows the individual to receive a bespoke quote for their needs and purchase an annuity.
“It’s free for the employer to give to their employees and it’s free for the employees to use and is suitable for those with small pension pots. People get referred to our chartered financial planners if something more complicated comes out of that online journey.”
Trends and rivals
Punter Southall Aspire’s own changes aside, Butler points to the significant trends active in the consultant sector, particularly in the area of consolidation.
“There’s been huge consolidation in the marketplace with private equity coming in and buying up firm. We’re one of the few organisations that are a hybrid between financial planning and employee benefit consulting. We’ve seen a growing interest in corporate clients wanting to provide retirement services for their retiring employees. I think there’s a growing segment where we currently sit.”
Benefits tailored to workers of various ages is one area in which Butler anticipates being more innovative.
“I think traditionally HR directors have chosen a set of benefits and applied them as a blanket across the whole of their employee base. We’ve been talking to clients about looking at the demographic of their organisation and tailoring the benefits to suit them. People are staying in the workplace longer and therefore employers need to support their older workers in their journey to stay in the workplace for longer.”
He cites products such as the concierge service from Legal & General where employees can get help to find the right retirement home for their parents as one such innovative product.
“We see a cohort of older workers that have older parents which demands their time as carers and it’s a new area that people have to get involved in.”
He has observed not only emerging trends but also strong competition from firms such as Wealth At Work whose educational push hits home for Butler.
“I think they’ve very much focused on this financial education piece and using the workplace to support people on their financial journey. Financial education delivered through the workplace is important with the cost of living crisis and a recession coming down the line.”
Butler, however, asserts that the
sector as a whole needs to attract the
right talent from university to come into the industry and needs to create an environment where people can move from one company to another.
“We need to learn to change our management style technique to accommodate that rather than just reverting to old practices.”