From adviser to owner at Miller James Financial Planning: "Making the move with Marloo has given me more capacity and confidence"

When Alec Baker took ownership of Miller James Financial Planning recently, he took the reins of a quietly exceptional firm. A five-person Berkshire practice, it looks after around 150 client families, built almost entirely on referrals.

With founder Jonathan Miller stepping back towards retirement, Alec needed to absorb more of the client work, take on the responsibilities of running a business, and keep growing, all at the same time. Marloo, which the firm had started using just months earlier, turned out to be extremely well timed.

"Marloo's given me a ton more confidence about the takeover process. When you've sat with a client for two hours, the best time to write up notes is straight away, when the details are fresh, but then there's another meeting, or the team has questions. So quite often it would take a few days."

Before Marloo, that process could take Alec a further two hours per client meeting. Then there was the follow-up email to the client (another hour depending on the case) and a separate briefing email to the team. In total, a single client meeting could generate three to four hours of additional desk work before any paraplanning had even begun.

"Now I check that Marloo has captured all the key points, but that's a 15-minute check rather than a two-hour write-up. That has directly increased my capacity to see more clients. I can hop from meeting to meeting and the notes are just there for the team."

A year ago, if his colleague Jonathan suddenly wasn't there, Alec would have been swamped.

"With Marloo I can focus on the meetings, on the clients, on making them feel looked after. It's actually been a pretty perfect time to take over."

For Josh Witting, Miller James's paraplanner, Marloo has closed the gap between a client meeting and him being able to get to work on reports and compliance. Before, it could stretch to five or six days, however long it took Alec or Jonathan to find time to write up their notes.

"If they had back-to-back meetings all week, finding the time for notes meant everything got delayed. Any actions we needed to take, any write-ups, all of it was waiting on those notes."

Now, Josh typically has a structured summary available within minutes of the meeting finishing, regardless of where Alec is. If Alec has been out visiting a client at their home, he uses Marloo's voice note feature to dictate his reflections during the drive back. By the time he arrives at the office, Josh already has the meeting notes and can begin acting on them.

"You've naturally been having a conversation in the car about next steps and what you need to tell us to do, so you might as well just record it and we get the notes straight away."

The speed of the handover matters all the more because of what Josh does with those notes. Marloo's document generation has changed that side of his work completely.

Miller James produces a range of suitability reports across its client base: pension transfers, pension income, ISA top-ups, GIA top-ups, cash investments and bond-to-ISA transfers, plus variations for clients drawing pension income, which carries considerably more regulatory weight than a straightforward ISA review. Previously, every one of these required pulling the relevant wording from their compliance template, removing the sections that didn't apply, and constructing each letter mostly by hand.

"I've finally got my Control-C and Control-V keys back. I don't need five screens any more. Just two will do."

Josh has built a library of templates within Marloo that covers nearly every type of case the firm handles. A new template takes him about 15 minutes for a simple variation to under an hour for a complex one, after which it can be tweaked rather than rebuilt from scratch when regulations change.

For straightforward ISA or GIA top-ups, Marloo produces a letter that is, in Josh's words, "99% good to go." The more complex pension transfer reports require more oversight, but Marloo still saves around 45 minutes to an hour per pension on a simple single-policy transfer, and up to an hour and a half on cases involving multiple pensions. That is the more common scenario at Miller James, where clients typically arrive with three to four pension pots, and couples often consolidating five to seven between them.

"It does a lot of the finding and researching as you go through the report. It can pull key features out of policy documents: guaranteed annuity rates, protected tax-free cash, fund details, even from older schemes where the information arrives as a scanned paper document."

For pension income letters, where the compliance is more extensive, the time saving is invaluable. On a recent Friday before Josh was going on holiday, adviser Jonathan had an 11am meeting with a client who wanted to start drawing income from their pension. Josh's paraplanning colleague was already off. Josh was leaving that afternoon.

"Before Marloo, I'd have been thinking: really unfortunate timing, there's no way we're getting this done before I go. Writing a pension income SR takes a while. You've got a lot of sections and regulated content, and if you start it on a Friday lunchtime you're potentially carrying it into the following week."

Instead, Jonathan finished the meeting at noon, emailed Josh to confirm the client's wishes, and Josh had the suitability report prepared, checked and sent to the client via e-signature the same afternoon.

"By next business day, we already had a signed SR. That wouldn't have been possible before. It was a nice feeling to be able to close that off before going away rather than leaving it half done."

Most clients don't see how much work goes on in the background; they just see the service. But the speed of the response, and knowing a matter has been handled, is something clients feel even if they can't quantify it. It also makes for a better holiday knowing your client's been looked after before you sign off.