All At Sea – PIMS 2014

I spent the bulk of last week and part of the weekend all at sea on the P&O cruise ship “Aurora” – all for the sake of our clients naturally. You might be pleased to learn that there wasn’t much R&R involved and a very full schedule meant that barring the time to don a dinner suit for “dinner” (well it is a cruise) I had all of two thirty minute breaks in between meetings. Known as PIMS and most definitely not to be confused with Pimms and rather a tiring schedule, perhaps I overdid things with my zealous selection for 2014 of 21 meetings and 8 seminars.

Anyway, anchored just a mile or so from Guernsey, the captive audience was pummelled with information. Some great ideas and some rather dubious ones… all meant to advantage our clients. The packed schedule meant that for both advisers and product providers, this was a condensed series of meetings, which might normally take several months. I was there to search out ideas for improving our services to clients (a constant theme I presume for every business) as well as getting some sensible but clever investment ideas within the tax saving and tax reducing wrapper of an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) or Venture Capital Trust (VCT) and I’m pleased to say that I’ve found some that I believe to be worth consideration.

Thankfully I had the advantage of Steve Williams being aboard too – he assists with impartial, independent guidance, research and serious mathematics to help us construct portfolios for our clients (see the investment committee section). So it was good to be going through the same process together and we shall be discovering each others insights about our respective experiences in due course. I’m bringing this to your attention because often clients don’t realise how much we can do for them. We are able to access all sorts of solutions, provided by small niche companies to the giants of global private banking, its not really a question of can we do something…. but more “what is the problem that needs solving?” The main point being that our job is to help you on your journey, safely and not leave you all at sea.

Dominic Thomas: Solomons IFA