The chief executive and co-founder of wealth management specialist Mattioli Woods said the number of new clients signing up to the business had slowed due to the perilous state of the economy – but had no doubts that would improve in the medium-term.
said the business had seen exponential growth since the start of the pandemic, more than doubling in staff numbers to 877 and almost doubling turnover.
He said there was still potential to add to the 33 acquisitions the Leicester-based professional services firm has made over the years. But organic growth, he said, had always been central to the firm’s success.
He said: “We always look for new business opportunities. There are times when clients will rightly say “yes” quite quickly, and times when you can offer them exactly the same and they will say “I’ll think about it”.
“We’re in a “thinking about it” mode. People are really very, very concerned – as we all are. We’ve all switched more lights off this year and all turned the heating down a bit.
“These are very real things happening in people’s lives and therefore they are just delaying, rightly so, what they want to do for the next 30 years for another period. I think that’s where we are, and we’ve seen it before.
“We’re in touch with every single one of our clients and at the same time giving new clients the option to understand their financial position better and there will come a time when they say yes.
“You can’t oversell because you come up with a bad outcome – and that’s the last thing you want – which is quite tough because we’re listed.
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“If other people think we could have been slightly more successful they can try and sit in my seat.”
Mr Mattioli spoke to BusinessLive on the back of interim results which showed revenues up 10 per cent to almost £55 million in the six months to the end of November. By comparison the business had revenues of £54.4 million in the whole of its 2020 trading year.
Pre-tax profits were up 45.5 per cent for the six months at £4.8 million, although there was a 2 per cent drop in the total value of client assets managed by the group to £14.6 billion.
Speaking from the New Walk offices in the heart of Leicester’s business district, Mr Mattioli – who co-founded the business with Bob Woods – said the group remained in a strong position for the year ahead.
That, he said, was thanks to organic revenue growth of 2 per cent and the contributions of eight acquisitions since the start of 2021 – including the two largest to date, Maven and Ludlow, which had added £20.2 million towards turnover.
He said: “I was 60 in November and it does make you look back and reflect on life and whilst the business has grown, actually the principals of the business in creating great client outcomes were in our original business plan which we prepared when we started the business in a garage.
“Just looking after you clients is a real honour. It’s a massive privilege when someone asks you to look after what they’ve built up. That is something that you take seriously.
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“For us it’s been a 30 year project, with good governance, because that’s how you look after people’s money.”
Mr Mattioli said he had been in the industry for 40 years and he had no short-term plans to step back from the CEO position, but said the firm was training and mentoring his successors for some point in the future.
And he said despite the economic slowdown there were millions of potential customers out there.
He said: “The way I look at it the total number of people in the 海角视频 that could now use the range of services that Mattioli Woods has developed, and I would include families, I would say is up to 12 million people.
“[Even with] the competition – people like Hargreaves Lansdown, St James’s Place, Brewin Dolphin – there are still half the people out there who should be taking advice who are not taking advice. There’s enough for all of us.”