Northern Spire Limited, a senior partner practice of St James's Place Wealth Management, provides a wide range of services for clients looking to build, grow, protect or preserve wealth.
The company prides itself on the long-term relationships it develops and believes its success has come from being entirely customer centric. By putting the needs of the client first, everything else falls in to place. Here, managing partner, David Cook, gives insight in to how the pandemic has highlighted the importance of forging strong and meaningful relationships and how Northern Spire is looking to the future and the various ways it can continue to support existing and new clients.
Having been in business for over 30 years, it is clear the main thing that differentiates between those that do well and those that don’t, is the relationships and networks grown and nurtured. Without a strong cohort of clients that feel cared for and valued, a business simply can’t exist.
The reality, is that no matter what service you offer, there are plenty of others providing the exact same thing. It is how you differentiate yourself that matters and the key words here are trust, respect and team culture. Live up to those high standards and you will stand out from the crowd.
When the pandemic hit, like most, it was a worrying time for my business. We are client facing, our relationships are built on face-to-face interaction and when this abruptly stopped, it took time to adjust to the new normal way of working. In order to keep everyone’s spirits up the team looked at ways we could create Zoom nights with clients, for example, we hosted an online cooking night with Kam Chera and his wife, Nedhi, owners of Sunderland-based, The Funky IndianWali, which offers at-home master classes in Indian cooking. We also hosted an online gin tasting night, where we sent out samples from award-winning, Northumberland-based client, Hotspur Gin, to the homes of clients and associates we work with, so we could all have a night in together. The Zoom evenings have been a great success and our upcoming virtual rum tasting night in July is sure to be another hit!
Our clients have held their own during this tempestuous time and we wanted to pay homage to the hard-working, diverse range of outstanding North East talent we work with. We brought in client, Ynot, a creative content agency, to devise a series of videos about ‘The Us You Don’t See’, highlighting the outstanding people behind some of these companies, all from varying sectors and industries.
Through these short videos we want to thank them for being the great clients they are, the resilience and bravery they have shown during the pandemic and for all that they do for our local communities.
First to star in the series is optometrist, Simon Berry who has been a client for a long time. Simon is a man we can all learn something from, he is hugely community focused and his business, Simon Berry Optometrist, has recently become involved in a pilot service that aims to make eyecare more accessible to patients with a learning disability. Also featured is, Lee Francis, chief executive of REGEN Group, which was established last year and is already disrupting social housing across the North East with its best-in-class solutions. It is a company that is set to lead the market and bring about change for good. A client that joined us during the pandemic, CyberWhite, provider of cyber security and risk mitigator solutions that prides itself on challenging the norms, will also be included, with co-founder, Matthew Hewison speaking to camera. CEO of charity, Red Sky Foundation, Sergio Petrucci will be a highlight of the videos. Sergio and his wife Emma, set up the charity after the pioneering life-saving treatment their daughter, Luna, received at the Freeman Hospital, in 2015, when she was born with a serious heart problem. They have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds that has been donated to The Children’s Heart Unit at the Freeman Hospital and also to purchase AED defibrillators to improve the lives of people across varying age ranges.
The campaign is our way of saying thank you to our clients, all of whom are doing outstanding things for the region, in their own individual way. The last year and a half has been devastating in many ways but it has also united people and companies and made us all realise the power of human connection, whether this be in business or personally.
