A GLASGOW wealth management business that has completely overhauled its focus since relocating from Ayr four years ago is on target to deliver revenues of £1 million in the current financial year.
Murphy Wealth, which was set up current chairman Brian Murphy in 1977 and is now run by his son Adrian, is expecting to deliver the seven-figure sum after experiencing a few lean years following the move to the city.
“We decided to move to Glasgow in 2013 - we’d sold our insurance broking business and I was looking at the next 40 years,” Mr Murphy junior said.
“It was significantly more difficult than I expected.
“We wanted to access a bigger pool of talent in Glasgow but finding people to work for us was proving difficult.
“The relationships we had built were also fairly early stage so we had to re-establish ourselves in a much more crowded market.”
This resulted in revenues dropping by around £200,000 to £450,000 in the first full year after the firm made the move, but Mr Murphy said that the figure has since risen by 67 per cent to £750,000.
He added that the £1m the firm is expecting to turn over in the current financial year should be accompanied by £400,000 in profits.
The reason for this, Mr Murphy said, is that the lean years “forced us to look carefully at what the business is, where we wanted it to go and how we were going to get there”.
On the one hand this has seen Murphy Wealth invest in areas such as technology and branding – changing its name from Murphy Financial to Murphy Wealth at the time of the Glasgow move - and on the other it has seen it refocus its attentions on a very specific segment of the market.
“We are wealth advisers for business owners and our target market is entrepreneurs in the 30-plus age bracket,” Mr Murphy explained.
“Our new client focus is very much on bringing in younger entrepreneurial clients that we can go on a journey with.
“Even when income was tight we were still turning away clients and sticking to our guns - otherwise the message gets lost.”
Mr Murphy believes this refocusing means the firm can offer its services in a different way to other financial advisory firms, whose customer demographic often means the advice revolves around retirement planning.
“We offer a service that doesn’t have to end with a transaction, which is ultimately what the problem with the industry has been,” Mr Murphy said.
“The industry is ripe for change and we believe technology will be a big part of what we do. Because the average age of a principal of an adviser firm is 58 take up of technology is relatively low.”
Mr Murphy sees technology as “an opportunity to engage down the generations with clients” and the firm spent £20,000 upgrading its technology in the last year.
So far it has invested in a customer relationship management system and will be launching an app over the summer.
“We want to give that to clients and say ‘have that then come to us and have a discussion’,” Mr Murphy said. “That’s a big thing for us in the next few months.”
While the refocusing means the firm is now unrecognisable from the one Mr Murphy senior set up, Mr Murphy said his father has supported him in all the changes.
“The only point at which I clashed with my dad was prior to moving to Glasgow - I had to sell the case to him,” he said. “He said ‘I’m at a certain age and Ayr has been good to us’.
“Once we got over that he supported me in everything we’ve done, even when things got a bit tight.”
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