Tom Birkinshaw

“What gets me out of bed is knowing that what I do can genuinely benefit the people I work with.”

I’ve always been someone who finds satisfaction in putting in the work and seeing it pay off – an apprenticeship at a FTSE 100 company straight from sixth form, five years of accounting exams studied alongside a full-time role. Building the foundations for work that would eventually feel much more personal.

But something was missing. Working in a large corporate, I felt distant from the end result. The impact of what I did was real, but abstract and I wanted to work somewhere my actions directly affected the people in front of me. That’s what brought me to wealth management, and to Mattioli Woods.

What I enjoy most about this role is the variety and the responsibility that comes with it. No two weeks look the same; one day I’ll be at a client’s home working through their full financial picture, the next I’ll be meeting professional contacts, from solicitors to accountants, whose work often goes hand in hand with ours. Holistic financial planning means looking at everything together, not just one corner of it, and finding the right strategy for where someone actually is in life.

I’m also deliberate about how I show up with clients. There can be a tendency in professional services to keep things formal and a little distant – the adviser on one side, the client on the other – but I don’t work that way. My aim is to break down that barrier and have a genuinely personal relationship, one where clients feel they’re talking to someone who gets it, not someone performing expertise at them. I want to be seen as someone they’d trust in a non-work setting too.

That responsibility is never lost on me. The decisions I make have a real impact on people’s lives – on whether they can retire when they’d hoped, or whether they feel confident making financial choices they might not have believed were within reach. That’s the part I find most rewarding.

Outside of work, you’ll find me hiking, in the gym, or out on the water – the same values, just applied a little differently.