"I didn't want to be an adviser that was shoehorning my clients into someone else's proposition. I wanted to have absolutely my own clients, my own business, where we could run everything," he says.
"Being directly authorised seemed to be the best way forward for our business and my plans."
Manning Gee was set up in January 2020, three months before the first countrywide Covid-19 lockdown. Gee's wife, a former teacher, then retrained as a mortgage broker and joined in 2021.
The firm still operates out of the Gees' home in Bristol, although they are in the process of buying their first office.
"It was a time of being broadly worried about how we were going to really get going," says Gee about starting out during the pandemic. "We didn't really look for new clients at that point because we were transitioning the clients we already had, but we got on to Zoom and Teams and business just went fine during that period. We had no real issues with that."
Many of his clients had stuck with him over the years, while new clients were mainly referred to him by estate agents and accountants, though on the mortgage side clients also came through Linkedin.
The firm's client base is fairly mixed, although it centres around medium net-worth investors "who have issues that they want to solve from a financial point of view", with some more wealthy clients in the mix.
An eye on cost
Gee's original vision involved being able to serve long-term investors with "ultra low-cost" investments, which would allow them to focus on achieving their goals and aspirations over the longer term.
He says: "In the old days it would have been, you know, who's got cash and can we get them to invest, whereas now it's much more about people coming with, 'Actually these are the goals that we have from a financial point of view, but we don't quite know how to get there'.
"And so one of my biggest enjoyments is around helping people reach [these] goals."
Gee says he is a "real fan" of passive investing and is passively invested himself, though he acknowledges it does not work for every investor.
"For the long-term investment I'm totally confident [in] that as a way forward," he says. The main driver is cost, but the crucial thing, he adds, "is that where it's appropriate we will always have an active overlay where that's right for the client".
"I can see how the higher costs have a huge erosion on capital over the long term, and you know, purely from that point of view you can see massive cost savings for a long-term investor," he explains.
