James' Story

What do you do now, and what does your current work involve?

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I’m a financial planner, though not in the way most people imagine. When people hear that, they tend to picture spreadsheets, investment products, ISAs and pensions. While those things exist in my toolkit, they’re really just the means to an end. The truth is, my job is fundamentally about people. The “personal” matters far more than the “finance” when it comes to personal finance.

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What I actually do is help clients define the life they want, and then build the financial plan to get them there. That might mean helping someone work out whether they can retire when they want to, while they still have the health to properly enjoy it. It might mean figuring out whether they can drop to three or four days a week without it derailing their future. It could be helping parents support their children with a house deposit in the most meaningful way, or simply giving someone the peace of mind that if something happened to them their family would be looked after.

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Money, ultimately, is just a tool. My job is to help people sleep soundly at night.

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What do you regard as your first career or the path you originally started out in?

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I spent the best part of a decade as a Conference Producer in the B2B events industry, largely focussed on the technology sector. Like a lot of graduates, I fell into it rather than chose it deliberately. I moved to London after university looking for my first proper job, and a relevant degree and some experience organising political events at university made it a natural first step.

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The role involved researching and validating event concepts, shaping agendas, bringing together senior industry figures, and acting as project lead across marketing, sales and logistics. I was good at it, and over time I progressed to Conference Production Director, leading the production team at the company. At one point, we were recognised as one of the fastest-growing private businesses in the UK.

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What prompted you to consider a career change?

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Two things converged, and looking back, both were transformative.

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The first was COVID-19. Like a lot of people, the pandemic forced me to stop and genuinely ask whether my life was set up the way I actually wanted it to be. It also reshaped my industry in ways that opened up new possibilities. The expansion of remote work meant I was suddenly able to work for various event companies in London whilst I was based in Scotland, which previously had limited my options.

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That gave me the chance to test a few different roles on a contract and freelance basis, and in doing so I realised something important. I hadn’t just grown bored of one company after nearly seven years, I had outgrown the role entirely.

The second impetus was becoming a parent. My first son arrived in early 2021, and fatherhood has a way of sharpening your priorities very quickly. The frequent international travel I’d once enjoyed started to feel like a burden rather than a perk.

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I found myself thinking seriously about how I wanted to earn a living, not just what paid well, but what felt meaningful, what I’d be proud of, and what would allow me to actually be present for my family. I’d also hit an earnings ceiling in conferences, and I was honest with myself about wanting to do better financially, not for its own sake, but to give my family the quality of life and security I wanted for them.

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What were the biggest challenges you faced?

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Courage, mostly. I took what was, objectively, quite a high-risk route… I quit my job in December 2022 with two children under two, while my wife and I were navigating all the chaos that comes with that stage of life.

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I tried to de-risk it where I could, doing freelance work in my old field three days a week to keep some income coming in, while treating my career change like a full-time job for the other two days. But there’s no getting around the fact that our income dropped significantly and there was a lot of uncertainty introduced into our lives.

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I also had to sit and pass six professional exams to become qualified. I hadn’t sat a single exam since leaving university a decade earlier, so returning to studying, with all the pressure that comes with it, felt genuinely daunting. I got there, but it required real dedication.

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What helped you most along the way?

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My support network was everything. My wife’s backing was absolutely crucial. Her view was that I’d been talking about changing careers for years, and if I didn’t just get on with it, I’d look back in another decade having wasted years of my life.

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That’s the kind of honest, loving nudge that I needed. Having that permission and belief from the person closest to you makes an enormous difference when you’re taking a leap into the unknown.

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Good friends also helped, people who gave me a proper sounding board, kept me (relatively) sane, and were honest enough to tell me whether they thought I was making a sensible decision.

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What has surprised you most about where your career has taken you?

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How fast it happened. I’d mentally prepared myself for the possibility that rebuilding to the level I’d reached in my previous career could take a decade.

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In reality, it took around three years. What felt like an insurmountable mountain at the outset turned out to be entirely manageable once I broke it down into smaller, concrete steps and just started moving.

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What practical advice would you give to someone considering a career change?

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Immerse yourself in the world you want to move into, before you make the leap. Read the industry press, listen to the podcasts, go to the networking events, and reach out to people who are already doing the job you want.

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The more fluent you become in the language of your new field, the more confident and credible you’ll appear to future employers. And the more informed you’ll be about whether it’s actually the right move in the first place.

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We live in an era where you can research and connect your way into almost any industry. Use that.

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I found that people who had recently made a similar career change were particularly generous with their time, there’s often a genuine desire to pay forward the support they received when they were in your position. A short, tailored LinkedIn message asking for a 20-minute call can open doors you didn’t even know existed.

 

Looking back, what would you tell someone at the start of this process?

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Think carefully about what you actually want before you commit to a direction. A career change is a significant investment of time, energy and often money, so ideally, it’s something you only want to do once.

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A question that really helped me was this that if I won Set for Life on the National Lottery and had £10,000 coming in every month regardless, what would I actually want to spend my time doing? A few answers were immediately ruled out for being entirely impractical, but you get the idea.

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Stripping away the financial pressure helped me get much clearer on the type of work I was looking for. Something person-centred, something where I could make a tangible difference to real people’s lives and actually see the results, rather than just helping large software providers sell their products at conferences.

 

From there, it becomes a process of ruling things out until you find what’s worth diving deeper into.

 

James Bowater is a Glasgow-based Financial Planner working with clients across the UK, and you can connect with him on LinkedIn