Lowes Magazine Issue 121

SPOTLIGHT

FINANCIAL PLANNING EXECUTIVE Nina Hughes started her business life as the owner of a café in Keswick, in the Lake District. She ran it with her husband for three and a half years, in which time she took an accountancy course, intending to do her own book-keeping. Her move out of retail came purely by chance, when the owner of the cafe next door to hers failed to turn up to meet a potential buyer, who then offered to purchase the cafe from Nina and her husband. “Although I loved meeting the customers of the café, it was one of those moments when it felt like the right thing to do, like it was a pathway opening up for me,” Nina says. Looking for that next step, as she loved working with figures and numbers, she took a job as a Finance Manager with a local company and pursued her higher- level accountancy qualifications. However, while she enjoyed accountancy, there was something missing. “I realised how much I missed dealing with people and I knew I had to get back to doing that somehow.” It was then that she discovered financial advice as a career. So, she left to become a financial adviser. That was in 2015. “It seemed to me the perfect job, working with figures but also working with people, helping them with their finances and their financial futures.” But all did not go according to plan. She joined first one large financial services company and then another, leaving both because, she says, “they weren’t what I had been led to believe. While they said they were client centric and putting people first, that wasn’t my experience. I was very disheartened.” In fact, she was so disappointed that she was on the verge of leaving the profession but at the last moment a recruitment company approached her with details of a role at Lowes. “I met with Ian Lowes about joining Lowes as a Financial Planning Executive. I felt I interviewed him as much as he interviewed me because I needed to know categorically that what Lowes said about the way it treated its clients was actually the way it did treat its clients. “I believe that if you are going to be a great financial adviser then you have to have empathy with your clients, no matter what their wealth. You need to be willing to listen to them to find out what they really want Spotlight on Lowes people

from their lives, so you can help them build their finances to get there. “I can honestly say that while I’ve only been here a few months, everything about Lowes shows that it wants to do right by people. In my experience, that is not a given in this profession.” Now Nina feels she has the career to which everything has been leading. “When the Lowes role came up just as I was prepared to leave financial advice, it felt like another pathway opened up for me. Now I get to travel around Cumbria meeting and listening to all kinds of people. I’m working with numbers and figures but also formulating plans for people, putting things in place for their financial futures. That is important to me and to Lowes.” As well as travelling around Cumbria seeing clients, outside of work Nina spends time with her husband, walking their two dogs in the fabulous local countryside, as well as with her two daughters and her granddaughter.”

17 Lowes.co.uk