#6 The 4-shift career path to loving what you do, being good at it and helping others… in Finance
Greg talks to Tim Bennett, now Head of Education at Killik & Co, a Wealth Management company. Tim is one of the few people we know in Finance who is fulfilled in his work: he loves what he does, he is using and developing a wide range of skills and finally his work is useful to clients, his company and beyond.
It did not start out this way. Listen to this story where Tim shares his iterations to finding his own sweetspot. In this episode you will learn about the importance of knowing yourself, being honest with your current experiences to guide your way forward. Being clear about what you don’t want and using projections to clarify what you want. He talks about seeing the few important opportunities that arise in one’s career and having the courage to seize them. Learn on his career path matrix, a useful way to frame your professional journey. Learn how he convinced himself first to then confront other people’s perceptions when he changed career and took a massive pay cut to pursue what he really wanted to do.
Listen to the full story here or on your usual podcast player or read the story below.
You can find more about Tim Bennett on LinkedIn. Find his current employer videos on Killik Explains and the older YouTube videos on Moneyweekvideos.
After graduating with a History degree from Cambridge University, Tim decided to take the easy path by becoming a Chartered Accountant. Little did he know that he would struggle to pass the exam! After 4 years of training he decided to leave for a career as a training consultant. His father, himself a chartered accountant, was “baffled”.
At first he loved what he was doing and was not very good at it. After ten years, practising in diverse companies, his experience had flipped: he was very good at it, but he did not enjoy it much anymore. That’s when he made the decision to change career - again - by becoming a senior writer for an up and coming finance weekly magazine, the Money Week. He made the jump and took a massive pay cut.
He loved what he was doing, finally using skills he valued. That’s where he became famous by chance on Youtube, creating and posting training videos for the sales people of the magazine. His posts (public without knowing) went viral. Finally the founder of Killik & Co, a wealth manager, called him to ask him to co-design a role as Head of Education there.
Below are some of the key learnings with quotes from Tim.
Seek guidance and help from mentors.
“[My history teacher] said, you've got that ability to turn it into something concise and interesting. It's instinctive with you, even though you don't know it, you can't see it.”
“Fortunately this guy took it upon himself to do a lot of extra coaching outside of hours, my parents didn't pay for any of it. He was very inspiring. He was not just about learning facts. History can be for some people the worst subject in the world, because the way it's taught sometimes is very linear. it's all date, it's all this happened. Whereas he was much more thematic in his approach. and I liked that. So he would come at it the way that, someone older would come at a subject, which is, where am I trying to get to? And therefore, what facts do I need to make my case?”
Know thyself - be honest about your circumstances, what you want and don’t want.
“Getting through those [chartered accountancy exams], unlike my history degree, was a triumph of application over ability. I got there in the end, but it took four years, three years [being] the conventional number. And so what happened after the four years then? I left.”
Tim: “Keep your eyes open because the opportunities are there. But you've got to see them and grab them. There may only be three or four good ones.” Greg: “How do you know it's a good one?” Tim: “It's about knowing yourself. And it's about being honest about where you are at that particular point and what will fit both your skillset and what you want to do next. What's a good opportunity for me at any one point in time, other people would have said is a career graveyard. So knowing yourself is a key ingredient, in knowing which opportunities you take and then you've got to take it, which requires a little bit of courage.”
“I had a conversation in the pub with a partner: ”What are you going to do next?” “I don't really know”. “So well, you're a qualified chartered accountant. So I'm telling you that the two obvious options are you become a partner here or you go and be a finance director.” I thought actually that's a shame because neither of those two things appealed to me very much.”
“Someone said to me, frankly, Tim, you could have a much easier life and a better paid life, just staying here. Why this move to Money Week? But it wasn't enough for me. I couldn't just go in day in, day out, not delivering, not achieving, not visibly using my energy to help other people in one way or another. The biggest satisfaction I still get from what I do now is the response it engenders in other people. I enjoy knowing that people are getting benefit from my videos. if they weren't, I’d turn them off because it's not about me, it's about knowing that people who I may never meet are getting something out of my knowledge.”
Analyse your experience with a joy/skill matrix - don’t expect a straight line career!
“My grid has an X and Y axis like they will do. And on one axis is enjoyment on the other is ability. You don't want to be at the wrong end of both axes. And unfortunately, chartered accountancy pretty much fitted squarely into the don't really enjoy it and not good at it.”
“If you're good at something that really helps when it comes to eventually find a way to like and love it. If you love doing something, even if you're not desperately good at it, you'll probably get better at it. So you might get to that sort of holy grail. Just don't start off bottom left, ideally. If you hate it and you're not very good at it, then you've got a bit of fixing to do later.”
“This is the funny thing about doing the same thing for too long, So it would go from being something that I really wanted to do, and wasn't very good at because I'd done much of it. 10 years later, it had morphed to being something which I no longer wanted to do, but I got very good at.”
Explore your career options by mentally projecting yourself into the future.
“I got better at visualizing my future self and I think it's quite important. Being able to imagine what the world might look like for you in 5 or 10 years time is hard, very hard, and the world will almost certainly deliver curveballs. I could visualize what I didn't want it to look like, which is step one. The harder thing is knowing what you do want.”
“Suddenly I could see the future. I couldn't see myself still doing this. So then you think, okay, now I'm a bit old, mid-thirties, time's moved on, but I have a problem, what am I going to do next?”
“It was a gamble. It was a risk. it could have been a dead-end move in some respects. At that point I wanted to retool. I thought I needed another skill. I suddenly feel quite niche in what I'm doing. I was like, that doesn't sound good because I'm mid-late thirties. You're looking at another 30 years of career, right? Yeah. It's early days in some respects.”
View your career as if you were self-employed by continuously developing your skillsets and be ready to scale down expenses.
“As you work your way through a career, you should view it as though you're self-employed. What I mean by that is at a certain point in my career, I've looked at my skillset and thought there's a gap, or what happens if that [work] doesn't exist anymore? Unfortunately companies are much more short term than they used to be, they hire and fire. So it's fair enough that employees have a little bit of that mindset too.”
“I could manage the money. I've always been able to scale down my outgoings and to my income, which I think is an important skill in life, actually. I can spend up and I can spend down. So I knew I could manage the financial transition. That was fine. I didn't have a lot of dependents. I wasn't paying private school fees.”
Beware of others telling you what they think you are or can become.
“I had a conversation with an MD I worked for the week before the interview for Money Week. And he said to me: "one thing's clear, you're a trainer. How old are you?" "Mid-late thirties." He said: "I'm telling you, you're a trainer." And funnily enough, that annoyed me. I said: "Oh, I'll tell you what I am. You're not gonna tell me.""
Seize your opportunities, there may be 3 or 4 only!
“[In] most people's careers, they're are usually three or four good opportunities that come people's way over a course of a career. And I've had people say, I didn't get any of them. They probably did. They just didn't see them for what they were or take them.“
“So when the word went round, the big audit room: “Does anyone want to fill in this space on a training course at HSBC up in Hertfordshire?” My hand metaphorically shot up because I just thought, yeah, that sounds quite fun. And other people were probably sitting there thinking, I can't imagine anything worse. standing in front of a group, HSBC is quite an important client, you don’t want to get that wrong. So there are all kinds of reasons why someone might not say yes to that.”
“I got scrambled onto an HSBC training course for graduates, obviously not senior managers, and I'd only just finished the chartered accountancy and I got the opportunity to present. Okay. You can have one 20 minutes slot. Do you fancy it? And I thought, I thought I'll give this a go and I loved it. I loved the adrenaline. So suddenly I thought, oh, maybe so here's something I could do for a living because it's quite exciting. I'm helping people.”
“I then thought, I'm gonna do this teaching thing. I better immerse myself in that. then I thought actually the honest thing to do is to be on that side of the fence, right? I wonder what that's like. So that's where it came from, but the opportunity to actually do something with that curiosity didn't come until a few years later.“
“If you think you've got what it takes, send me your CV. I thought, clearly that's not for a chance to count and who's done 10 years of training consultancy. good luck to whoever that is. And then I thought, do you know what, I am going to put my CV. I'm going to do this. and I put my CV in, that's met some work, some articles and much to my amazement, a call came through, I think pretty much direct from Marriott actually saying, come in, come and meet the commercial director. And she said, do you want to ask me anything? I said, yeah, amongst other things: How can you afford me? I'm a chartered accountant training consultant. I've done Okay. It wasn't spectacular money, but had some money behind me. and she went, the money here is horrible. I remember those words you, you're not going to like it, but if you want the break, you might get the break. So I took a massive pay cut. I wasn't married at the time.”
“The Money Week opportunity turned out to be a huge one because, I got in as a senior writer, I was doing 13, 14 hour days. I was working on my style, working on articles. I got to rapidly write almost every page in the magazine from one way or another. And it was successful. It was growing at the time. in the five years I was there, it doubled its subscription numbers to 50,000 a week, which made it at that point, the most successful financial magazine in the UK.”
“In my trajectory up to Deputy Editor, which only took two or three years, I got to edit every page. I got to design the cover. I got to work with a guy called Jolyon Connell who founded the Week magazine, half a day a week. That kind of access, very successful Sunday times, colonist in his own right. [...] So I got to learn a heck of a lot about writing, editing, commissioning, copywriting, appetizing in a way that you couldn't really get anywhere else.”
“After about five or six of these catch-up sessions, someone went, crikey, these are popular. I said, what do you mean? And suddenly we will have thousands of hits. I was like, my mum can't be that bored. Somebody is watching this a lot. And then the likes are coming in and comments. It was all quite exciting. So out go these weekly videos. So we started doing it as something people could watch in turn. On YouTube. And just as a brand awareness tool. I think I did one a week and it just went bananas.”
“And he said, we could make a role for you here. And neither of us knew exactly what that role was going to be, but we essentially, for the first time in my career, which was awesome, we almost took out a blank sheet of paper and looked at what projects I could take on as part of an education role, let's say, and it turned out to be a lot. it was better paid but that's never been the driving factor in my decisions.”
“People said to me, oh, you are lucky to get a phone call from Paul Killik. Yeah. but again, it comes down to, do you take the call? Do you go for the interview? ? Do you go for the blank sheet of paper? Do you go for a new industry?”
The hardest part in a career shift may be the perception of others rather than the money or fear of failure.
“[It was not the money] but the perception. I had to sell it to people. They were like: “why would you want to do that? Why would you want to start at the bottom?” That was the hardest move to make in terms of people getting it.”
“My father was baffled, I worked hard to be a chartered accountant for five years. He hadn't gone to university. I think he would have perceived it then as slightly throwing it up in the air to go and do this Money Week opportunity. Internally, it was tough. Changing jobs is always tough. Making a lateral career move is challenging.”
“Convincing other people that money was the right move was hard, but ultimately the only person I have to convince is me.”
Lucky are those who work hard and build on their strengths.
“And here I had a bit of luck, but I say luck… “For the harder I work, the luckier I get”, as they put it. I've been working hard at training. But I thought, God, that thing that the history teacher told me, it's bugging me. You were the best writer in the class. You're instinctive. And I thought I'm using a fraction. I'm not really properly using that skillset. At that time I was a subscriber to a magazine called Money Week, the Editor, Ben, dropped a tiny couple of sentences at the end of the column saying, “I'm looking for a new writer”.
“Almost within two weeks of arriving, I knew I'd done the right thing. because I suddenly started deploying my creative writing skills, my nascent editing skills,And I suddenly thought, yeah, this is the skill set I want to be using right now. To focus on using language, getting messages across and really targeting those messages.”
Teaching is a whole-hearted task. Don’t become a bored teacher!
“Training is a voyage of self discovery in some ways, because when you stand up in front of a group you're putting your personality, you're putting your knowledge in a way that is unusual. Presenting is a big part of a lot of jobs, but if you turn it into your day job, it's a huge learning curve. Fortunately, I couldn't see how big that learning curve was going to be at the beginning.”
“I'm not going to be an Audit Partner. I don't want to be an [Financial Director]. So what am I going to do? So is that the teaching spark? Which I think anyone who goes into teaching or training must have. Sometimes you can lose it, but you must have it. I had that curiosity about what it was like to be on the other side of that fence.”
“It would go full circle. At the end of 10 years, I just got to a point where what I didn't ever want to become was a bored teacher. The consultancy I was working in hired school teachers. I was part of the interview process. We got talking about teaching in general. And he said something to me, which set off what was to be my next career move. He said, the thing about teaching Tim is after 10 years, either this is what you want to do for the rest of your life or it's not. And if it's not, he said gout because bored teachers are the worst thing in the world. It’s bad for them. It's bad for the kids. And I thought, do you know what? I'm not yet bored, but I can't see myself doing this in five years.”