A conversation about neurodiversity, hiring, and why control over your own business is worth the wait.
I sat down with Wayne Griffith, of One Financial Solutions, for his second appearance on the podcast, and this time the conversation went somewhere I hadn’t expected. Wayne spent 13 years building his business inside network 2Plan before deciding to go directly authorised with the FCA, a process that took the better part of 18 months, and the more interesting story, to me, turned out to be what he built once he actually had that control: a hiring philosophy shaped almost entirely by his own neurodiversity, and a business structure designed to keep advisers properly supported rather than losing them within their first two years.
Why Does an Email Longer Than Four Lines Cause Problems for Some Financial Advisers?
Wayne told me something early in our conversation that he clearly wasn’t saying for sympathy, that if an email runs longer than four lines, he genuinely struggles to get past the first paragraph, and that numbers seem to move around the page rather than sit still for him. It’s the kind of admission most people in senior positions wouldn’t volunteer, and rather than treating it as a weakness he’d learned to manage quietly in the background, Wayne talked about it as something that actively shapes how he runs his business day to day, right down to how he hands off his own inbox to the people around him.
“If I get an email comes in and it’s more than four lines, the first paragraph really struggled to get past that.”
That admission is the starting point for a great deal of what Wayne has built since, including a neurodiverse questionnaire he’s designing with a specialist, aimed at understanding how his advisers and clients actually process information, so that people’s natural traits can be matched to the roles and communication styles that genuinely suit them, rather than training everyone through the same pipeline and hoping it lands.
What Does It Actually Take to Go Directly Authorised With the FCA?
That same instinct for control is a large part of why Wayne eventually left the network that had supported him for over a decade, a network he remains warm about, crediting 2Plan with teaching him everything he knows about growing a business and taking on advisers of his own.
What he told me plainly, though, was that he wanted complete accountability over the type of adviser he brought into his firm, and that decision simply wasn’t fully his to make from inside someone else’s structure. Becoming directly authorised meant taking that decision back, and it meant an FCA process that took nine months of preparation with a compliance support firm, followed by nine more months of review, interviews, and detailed questions about growth plans and capital adequacy that stretched Wayne well beyond anything he’d had to handle before.
“They want to know your growth plans. They want to know everything. And looking back, it’s fantastic because that actually prepares you the best business plan you’re ever going to have.”
By his own account, the process left him too exhausted to properly celebrate when approval finally came through, though he’s since come to see it as the thing that let him finally build the business on his own terms.
Why Are New Financial Advisers Leaving the Industry Within Their First Two Years?
Wayne is blunt about one of the more uncomfortable patterns he’s observed across the industry, where new advisers come out of training academies with a qualification, get handed 20 or 30 clients, and are largely left to work it out on their own.
That same instinct extends to the wider business, where Wayne has built a capped, numbered membership structure for his advisers, one where a number only becomes available again if someone leaves, not for exclusivity’s own sake, but as the final piece of a hiring philosophy that starts with understanding how someone’s brain actually works and ends with making sure they’re supported enough to want to stay.
Wayne’s story is a reminder that going directly authorised isn’t really about the FCA paperwork, tiring as that process clearly was for him, but about deciding you want enough control over your business to build it the way you actually believe it should work, whether that’s how you hire, how you train, or how long you manage to keep the people you’ve invested in. If you’re weighing up that same decision, or thinking about how to build a business that genuinely holds onto good people, this is a conversation worth your time.
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Wayne Griffith 🌐 Learn more about One Financial Solutions at www.onefinancialsolutions.co.uk
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