6 minute read

Q&A Richard Romer-Lee

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD ROMER-LEE

Richard Romer-Lee is the Chief Executive Officer of Square Mile Investment Consulting and Research. It’s been over two years since SK and Square Mile started working together and this was an opportunity for Richard to tell his side of the story.

It has been over two years since SK and Square Mile started working together and it felt like a good time to catch up with Chief Executive Officer, Richard Romer-Lee to get his take on responsible investments, the role of a CEO and some important life lessons.

To start us off, could you tell us more about what you do? Square Mile exists to help investors achieve a better financial future. We focus on empowering our clients with the knowledge, tools and support to help them deliver the best outcomes for their clients. Whether that's a financial return, an appropriate risk profile or matching responsible investments to their personal priorities. My job is essentially to set the tone for the business, the culture, and to build, nurture and develop a team of talented people. So, in practice, I do what I'm told by everybody else to help them do their jobs!

I'm a great believer in hiring talented people who are far greater, far better at what they do than I would ever be. I see my role as providing the environment within which they can excel on behalf of our clients.

How does Old Broad Street Research compare to Square Mile? Wow, what a lovely question. It's wonderful that you remember Old Broad Street Research, which was bought by Morningstar in 2010. There are some similarities. One is the clarity of purpose. When we build a company, it's about building something that we value, but more importantly, something our clients value and believe in.

We want to enjoy what we do. We spend a great deal of time at work and if you are having fun, I believe you do a better job. And ultimately, everybody has got to be fairly and appropriately rewarded too.

The biggest difference in Square Mile’s model happened post the Retail Distribution Review. Now each adviser business creates their own investment proposition to fit in with how their business works and to meet the needs of their clients, which manifests itself in how we work with SK Financial.

Your team has grown. What have you been doing differently since March 2020 to lead the team? The frequency of interaction with clients increased immediately a er the pandemic.

We also tried to provide some security to our staff by saying it was at the time, and still is, our intention to come out of this pandemic with the people with whom we went into it.

Immediately a er lockdown, I made sure I spoke to the staff as frequently as I could. When you are in an office, you can walk around the floor, you can see everybody and you get a sense of how people are feeling. We are doing our best to listen and communicate as effectively as we can in very unusual circumstances.

What tips would you have for anyone starting a business? Don't be afraid to have a go. Surround yourself with good, driven, passionate, personable people. Build the right culture – it sets the tone for the business, your staff, your clients and you will be surprised what you can achieve. Understand cashflow. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.

Your Chairman and I share a Kleinwort Benson connection. Relationships in business are so important. So too is business development. What have you been doing to build relationships in this new way of working? We’re in the relationship business. I think your clients trust you to help them with their financial future, you trust us to do our part in that to create the appropriate investment portfolios, we must then trust the fund managers who we pick to do their job. They in turn have to trust the people running the businesses or the corporations in which they're investing. So, we're all in the business of trust. Video calls with existing clients tends to work better than with those you are looking to build a relationship with.

I have mentioned trust. I cast my mind back to Black Monday in October 1987, when I was 22. We went into the office that morning. the phones were ringing furiously, the markets were down 30%! My old mentor and great mate Richard Downs, with whom I set up OBSR, worked it out in about 15 minutes. He said, “People are ringing, they're panicking. The financial planning has been done properly, right? They don't need access to the money. They will only lose money if they sell their investments. So actually, what we're going to ask them is do you need your money, and do you need to spend it right now? If you don’t, then remember markets go up and down. Trust the plan and stick with it. The worst thing you can do is to sell now.”

We spent 12 hours on the phone speaking to over 100 clients with the same message. Not a single person sold. We provided reassurance to plans that had already been laid.

As a firm you are active in the responsible investment space and doing things for charity. What are your own thoughts on social mobility? I le school at 18 with some fairly average A-levels. I was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity in a business as an office boy. I was prepared to give anything a go and was lucky someone was prepared to give me a chance.

So when we're interviewing someone, it’s important to remember that everybody is an individual and is entitled to be treated equally and given every opportunity to prove their talents. I'm a great believer in assessing people for who they are, not where they've come from, or what they are. Children don't choose where they are born, they don’t choose their families or where they go to school. I think sometimes people forget about that.

“I'm also a great believer in giving everybody a chance, in real diversity, in real cognitive diversity which makes for a more vibrant, more constructive, more challenging environment, and ultimately, a much better and more rewarding workplace.”

How would you like to be remembered? Yikes. Well, I think just being remembered would be a start. I'll take that and hope it’s for the right reasons.

What puts a smile on your face? Seeing people happy is what really puts a smile on my face. Watching my five-year old son playing with his Lego pieces or having a good old laugh with my wife Holly and friends. I also enjoy playing sport.

What's your favourite quote? The client is always right. If you put your clients first and do right by them, everything else will fall into place.

I love the humour and nonsense of PG Wodehouse books. There's one about a chap who's woken up one morning and remembers that he discovered himself cheating at Solitaire, as he called it, and therefore he wasn't going to speak to himself for a week. I thought that was hilarious.

How do you deal with disappointment? My glass is half full, so if and when things go wrong, don't dwell on it. Learn from the experience and then try not to make the same mistake twice.

What would you now like to have known that you didn’t know before? To me, life is a great adventure and a journey of discovery. And if you know what's going to happen along the way, or how things will turn out, it would take the fun and adventure out of it.

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