Steve Pemberton

“People often don’t lack money; they lack a clear picture of what they have and what’s possible.”

Before I was a financial consultant, I was a coach – a personal trainer, a qualified martial arts coach and a sports psychology practitioner. However, the more I work in financial services, the more I realise all those jobs are largely the same.

Coaching is about asking the right questions, shifting the way someone sees themselves and their situation, and helping them act from a place of clarity rather than anxiety, and that’s exactly what good financial planning does. People don’t usually come to me because they lack money, they come because they lack a clear picture of what they have, what it means, and what’s possible for them.

One client came to me who was struggling financially, or believed they were, because they hadn’t understood their own assets or what their existing plans could do for them. We sat down, went through everything properly, and their situation did a complete one-eighty. Not a financial one-eighty, a lifestyle one. Within a few months, they had left a job they didn’t want to be in and taken a part-time role with a local charity. The financial worry had gone.  That’s not something you achieve by selling a product; that’s coaching.

I’ve spent over 23 years in financial services, starting at Royal London where I worked for 14 years across individual and auto enrolment workplace pensions. Upon leaving Royal London, I moved into financial advice and employee benefits. I joined Mattioli Woods in 2025 as a senior employee benefits consultant, bringing that experience to bear on something I find fascinating: helping employers build benefits programmes that work for their people.

Employee benefits can feel overwhelming. It’s a tangle of group life policies, health cash plans, pension schemes, and everything in between. My job is to cut through that complexity and build something coherent: a benefits suite where each element works in its own right and all of them work together. I hold the Level Four Diploma in Regulated Financial Planning from the Chartered Insurance Institute, and I’m passionate about making the whole area accessible, not just to HR teams and finance directors, but to the employees who actually need to use it.

I believe that doing the right thing for a client doesn’t always mean doing something profitable for myself. I had a client in serious difficulty with the regulator; not something I could solve directly, so I introduced them to someone who could. Their business was realigned, a significant problem with the regulator was resolved, and I made nothing from it, and that’s fine. Trust is built in those moments.

Outside of work, I’m rarely still. I have a home gym and use it daily, hike and climb with my wife, and enjoy travelling around the world, eating in new places. The coaching instinct doesn’t really switch off, I just apply it to different terrain.