The use of the written term ‘employee engagement’, according to Google Analytics, has overtaken phrases such as staff incentives and employee motivation for the first time since 1920.’

Enterprise Engagement Alliance bulletin, March, 2011

Brand, enterprise or corporate engagement are relatively new terms that describe the many attempts by organizations to encourage their employees to think favourably about them as employers. The aim is to create improved profits through more loyalty, better efficiency and a ‘can do’ attitude. Most books and studies about engagement tend to make the general assumption that engagement is something you only do with employees.

In the UK the Government raised the issue of employee engagement on a formal basis in 2009 through a paper entitled Engage for Success. Part of the brief was to try and establish a definition of engagement, one of which was:

A positive attitude held by the employee towards the organization and its values. An engaged employee is aware of the business context and works with colleagues to improve business performance within the job for the benefit of the organization. The organization must work to develop and nurture engagement which requires a two-way communication between employee and employer.

But what about your consumers and your distributors or channel partners? Without consumers employees have no work to engage in. What about distribution, whether we mean your own employed sales people or channel partners? Without channel sales, there would be no products for consumers to buy. Distributors are probably in day to day contact more often with your consumers and retail customers than your employees. They play a vital role in bringing your goods to your eventual markets.

But most engagement programmes pay only lip service to consumers, sellers and channel partners under the guise of ‘the brand’. The finer subtleties of brand values are often ignored. It would appear that as long as the positioning of the logo on materials and websites complies with the official brand guidelines then all is well. In the same way, channel partners are often signed up or involved at the last moment with engagement programmes, with little thought given to any kind of alignment with what the organization is trying to achieve long term, except for their financial or contractual terms.

An urgent need to align engagement activities

Why bother to align employee engagement with consumers or channel partners? Because ‘push strategies’ such as advertising, PR and promotion are limited by the amount you can afford to spend in a crowded and ever more fragmented media market. And no brand can keep spending all the time in every media. So the ideal starting point would be to create the engagement programme alongside the consumer brand and the distribution plan. The logic is compelling. But the reality of organisational politics is such that right now engagement programmes are either HR-led or marketing-led. HR deals with employees and in general marketing deals with channel partners and the consumer brand. Both approaches have merit. But neither can do the whole job without some key issues remaining unaddressed.

The problem is that most organizations are hard-wired to deliver service messages to their employees via the human resources function. Sales messages to distributors, internal and external, are usually delivered via the marketing or sales functions. Typically there is very little day to day consultation between these two teams. The result is that well-researched, painstaking work on organizational values can be completely undermined by brash and shallow communication. Or clever, target-marketed brand imagery is ignored by the actual teams that design, service and distribute the goods to consumers. The additional complication of a distribution chain with its own, multiple brand identities within its own value chain simply adds to the engagement confusion.

The mismatch is relatively easy to fix. But it does require some corporate rewiring to ensure that Board level engagement strategy is successfully carried out by staff and distributors and that they, as well as consumers, engage with the brand on a level platform with consistent values and messages. This means that HR should talk in depth and on a regular basis with marketing… and vice versa… so that they both understand that effective engagement is now a team game.

John Fisher’s book Strategic Brand Engagement is due to be published by Kogan Page in February, 2014

As FMI grows as a business so does our dedicated and experienced team. With that in mind, please welcome our newest recruit Ian Mast-Hughes who joins us as a Senior Account Manager. With over 15 years experience in incentives and rewards, Ian’s key focus for the last few years has been on delivering engagement through digital platforms. This experience will prove invaluable as FMI continues to develop its already extensive digital offering.

Ian began his career as a Data Management Co-ordinator at Grass Roots when he first left his native Wirral for the picturesque settings of ‘Down South’. An instant affinity for motivation, incentives and technology led to a six year career there, learning the ropes of agency side project and account management before moving onto other reward agencies such as Love2reward where he was involved in the implementation of flexecash. More recently, he has worked on brand engagement for both corporate and consumer promotions for an agency in London.

With a diverse range of clients over the years including BT, Burgerking, Xbox, Adidas, BBC and Microsoft, to name just some of his favourites, Ian has been lucky enough to work on some fantastic projects and develop some great rewards over the years. The biggest challenge has been dealing with Italy’s promotional activity laws for every pan-European programme! He is yet to receive an invite to Rome…

In between obsessing over music and devouring DVD boxsets, Ian is passionate about baking bread with his two and a half year old daughter. He is less passionate about tidying up the mess made by his two and a half year old daughter ‘baking’ bread.

ian.mast-hughes@fmigroup.co.uk

John Fisher examines the third annual SITE survey of motivational services buyers and finds that event managers are an optimistic lot when it comes to predicting the future of the industry

Research is a funny old game. 100 per cent of turkeys never vote to retain Christmas. But 100 per cent of hamper providers would. In other words, it depends who you asked, when looking at the results of any survey. Opinion surveys about the future are exactly what they say they are…opinions about the future. So what do we make of a survey of ‘motivation professionals’ which concludes that incentive travel is ‘on the upswing’? Are we really sailing off into another beautiful, motivational sunset or does that inviting horizon simply mark the terrifying edge of the known world?

According to their own blurb SITE (Society of Incentive Travel Executives) exists to promote marketing-related business travel, has 2,000 corporate members in 90 countries worldwide. The membership profile is a mix of destination/venue providers and corporate event organisers. The majority of members are US-based. In the third annual SITE survey published late last year about 110 members replied which is equivalent to a sample of 5.5 per cent. This is a small number but big enough to assess the results as being a true representation of what SITE members think, So, no problem there.

But what these mainly US opinions have to do with what European event buyers think is not clear. For us incentive travel is sinking fast. So, claims of an ‘improving market’ for this product are somewhat bizarre. Unless what they mean is that demand has been so abysmal in recent years that any improvement from a low base will look very encouraging, whatever way you cut the numbers.

Let’s just look in more detail at what SITE members actually said. The headline statement is that 86 per cent of providers/corporate users say that incentive travel usage is increasing (well, they would say that, wouldn’t they because they have venues to sell and jobs to protect?). But looking at the relevant chart it is clear that the bulk of opinion for the next six months is firmly in the ‘stay the same’ box. And although there is a batch of respondents who say events usage will increase longer term, it is clear from answers given to this question in previous years that respondents always say that the long term market is increasing even though we all know it has been virtually static for past three years.

There is a question about the level of senior management involvement in motivational events decision-making. Presumably this is intended to measure the increasing importance of events as a strategic business weapon. The tables show that there has been no change in the incidence of senior people getting involved with events over the past three years. So events are not ‘moving up’ the corporate agenda in any way.

ROI (Return On Investment) usage is deemed to be ‘static’. But actually when you look at the tables it is clear that of all the indicators ROI is one of the strongest in the ‘increasing’ category. In other words, an event manager who knows nothing about ROI may get a rude awakening in a year or two when most major events will require a business impact assessment of some sort before they will get internal agreement to go ahead.

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) elements in events continue to increase and overall, across all the issues surveyed by SITE, CSR is the standout, wake-up call for event organisers. Event managers need to get up to speed with their own organisation’s CSR policies and start including such objectives within major events or they will be corporately ‘off-message’ and increasingly marginalised by senior management.

But by far the most instructive part of the survey was what members said about B2B marketing techniques…in other words, how do I get corporates to take notice of my destination or venue?

Contained in the detail is a superb table of various marketing activities by SITE members showing whether users found them effective or not over the past three years. This is the real eye-opener from this survey;

• The ‘effectiveness’ of newsletters (non-specific news roundups on email) has more than halved since three years ago…this is right in line with the general drop-off in click through rates of e-shots which is now about 5 per cent at best
• Direct mail (printed) has suffered in a similar way dropping substantially in their effectiveness compared with three years ago
• Most members were generally upbeat about trade exhibitions and most found attendance at these events to be effective or very effective

The other techniques are all rated with the same ‘effectiveness’ as three years ago. On the downside we are still using techniques that are no more effective than they were three years ago, so vendors are not getting sharper about marketing themselves. A more interesting question would have been to measure what proportion of the budget has shifted from offline to online to trade shows to videos etc and what marketing activities were quietly being dropped. The responses concerning office visits by vendors to corporates showed no change over the last three years in terms of effectiveness. But my European experience has been that we have had fewer vendor visits than in previous years and of those visits we have had, many were poorly supported with bog-standard ppts and not much evidence of sellers doing their research into us as the client.

So what should we take away from this annual survey of event organisers and promoters? The market for incentive travel remains static and has not moved much over the past three years at all, despite the upbeat forecasts of industry promoters and those whose jobs depend on events management. The glossy printed brochure is well and truly dead and the battle for new business is now being fought online. Exhibitions have retained their appeal, despite there being fewer events to run. But the result is more competition between destinations for a static or smaller overall travel market.

Of course, if the Euro eventually sorts itself out, the clouds of recession fade away and the USA starts re-employing their unemployed, we could be talking this time next year about an expanding market and lots more jobs for event managers globally. Marketing and events bods are an optimistic lot…part of the job is to wave the corporate flag when it looks like all is lost… so there is something to be said for making the good times come back simply by claiming things are getting better. And if SITE members from all over the world think next year will be great, who am I to quibble?

‘It was quite hard work to get my mind back into academic work while still holding down a pretty hectic day job at FMI but it was well worthwhile. I can now see how all the various elements of motivation fit into the campaigns I am helping to run. It all makes sense now!’ said Jessica who has been with FMI for two years and works mainly on telecoms and social networking projects.

John Fisher, md of FMI is a firm believer in education. ‘The way I see it is you can fire-fight as an account handler for ten years and still not really get exactly what performance improvement or corporate engagement is all about. By being  a bit more informed about the principles it stands to reason that you will not only get more job satisfaction as an individual but be more useful to clients when advice rather than just logistics is required.’

John Fisher founded FMI with co-directors Gerry York and Chris Taylor in 2009. But he has 30 years’ business experience, as both client and consultant. He has also written a number of business books, speaks French and German and spends most of his leisure time in Italy.

John was born in Yorkshire and has six brothers, most of whom now live abroad. He studied Modern Languages at Oxford University before joining an advertising agency back in the 1970s. ‘After a few years I realised that perhaps not every business issue could be solved by advertising, so I got a marketing job in the insurance industry to get a wider viewpoint.’  Working on the marketing side of an 800-strong, commission-only sales force he learned all about motivating business people and left to set up P&MM with industry veteran Tony Moy.

After 10 years, managing a team of 125 incentive professionals with a turnover of £25m he sold the business to the management team in 1999. He then spent five years writing business books for Kogan Page as well as speaking at trade conferences, writing articles and running business seminars.

But the lure of agency life was too great and in 2005 founded Oxford Motivation to provide consultancy services and ‘human audit’ research to large plcs. This eventually became Fisher Moy international, FMI.

‘Of all the things I have done, what I enjoy the most is sharing what I have learned over the years with clients and students starting out in the business. My basic primer about incentives, ‘How to Run Successful Incentive Schemes’ is now in its third edition and is a set text for the IPM’s Diploma in Motivation course designed for people new to the industry. If it helps people get enthusiastic about improving their own or their clients’ businesses, then I’m happy.’

Being a small company has its challenges, and FMI Group has had to overcome more than most. When our parent company went bust in 2009, we had to rebuild our business from the ground up – it hasn’t been easy, but it’s taught me much about what resilience really means, and how important people are to the success of any business.

Back in 2002, after 15 years in the incentives business and the sale of my first company, I was just starting up again with Oxford Motivation But getting new clients was tough: we were just too small for most procurement departments. We only had six employees, £1m sales turnover, and most clients just did not want the financial risk of contracting with such a small business.

My solution was to partner with a bigger agency that already had big clients. But around the same time we were approached by the company brokers Avondale and asked to consider being bought outright. The money was too good to ignore. So in 2007, we sold out to a £10m, all-singing, all-dancing communications company with £1m of shareholder funds, 75 staff and a roster of top level clients. What could possibly go wrong?

We had not bargained for 2009, the year when many UK businesses fell off the proverbial cliff. The parent company lost three clients in a week so, with potential debts of over £1m, it called in the administrators. And even though our part of the company was making profits, all 75 employees were made redundant. They left that same afternoon. Except for my team of six. I asked them to carry on as normal and told them we would have a chat the following day. We had been modestly profitable and had enough traction in terms of projects to take our division forward independently.

The following morning, after frantic phone calls to the bank, my accountant and a few wealthy friends for advice, I spoke to the junior administrator executive who told me that their job was ‘to maximise the value of the remaining business’. As they had just let everyone go, I pointed out there was now no value left…but I could offer him £18,000 for the software and some computers. Within half an hour he said yes and we agreed to stay in the building as before and just carry on.

Two of our clients had lost £50,000 each as a result of the parent company collapse so I offered to take that loss on with the new company, if they would continue to work with us. They agreed. I approached a small group of the former employees if they would join us on the same salaries as before. They said yes and brought their client projects with them. We met new clients by partnering with supplier venues and destinations and inviting prospective clients to ‘see the facilities’ or have lunch with us. It was a much cheaper way to market ourselves than promoting ourselves through more traditional media.  At the same time we could chat with them in a relaxed environment about their marketing issues. The advantage of being a small company was that clients had direct access to the people who actually did the work and we could turn round projects in days rather than the weeks or the months clients would be quoted from larger agencies.

Good people are vital to consultancy businesses. But we realised that the market was moving to online communications, especially those related to mobile phones and social networking sites, rather than incentive events. So we decided to grow our own talent by partnering with Bournemouth University’s business faculty and other institutions to look for the right profile of recruits. Over the past two years we have taken on two Bournemouth business graduates, one with a Masters in Philosophy from Oxford University and one from The University for the Creative Arts, Farnham as a deliberate policy to gear up for the future market.

It has been important to grow our own talent because the provision of marketing services has shifted very swiftly towards online, mobile, tablet and social networking platforms. And the people who live and work in this environment are largely in their twenties as are the clients who commission this type of work. If you can recruit from university they have no baggage from other working environments and so you can encourage more creative thinking than would otherwise be possible.

Our aim is to get to £10m turnover and employ about 50 staff…then we will see what happens. The two main things I learned from this episode were that it’s never over ‘til it’s over and people not money are what make successful businesses tick. So choose people wisely.

Jan 2013 MIT column

Enterprise or employee engagement has taken over where performance improvement and motivation programmes used to be. But what actually is engagement and what does it have to do with meetings and incentives?

The ‘incentives and events industry’ has struggled for many years to come up with an acceptable phrase that describes succinctly what it does. If you are a corporate client you may well know that you are looking for an effective marketing activity to improve sales or staff performance. But agencies like to complicate things, possibly to make their offering sound more sophisticated and so nothing is ever straightforward. So it is likely you will need to look for performance improvement programmers, incentive planners, brand strategists, reward consultants or even motivational interventionists.

The trouble is it all depends what exactly you want to do and who you want to do it to. If you are looking for a commodity…the best price for a given service… you might search for UK events, overseas events, conference production, delegate management, voucher suppliers or creative web comms. These are all product searches.

But it may make a big difference regarding the price and approach if the activity is more aimed at sales/distributors rather than for employees. For example salespeople are often the target of discretional schemes designed to get their attention. So they tend to be more creatively designed with rewards of high value. On the other hand staff are already employed and in situ so they are, to some extent, a captive audience. So the argument goes that staff need less persuading and will accept lower level ‘rewards’. Of course any good marketing agency could do any of these things. And therein lies the issue for the corporate buyer in deciding who to use.

Fortunately, Google has now come to the rescue. In March 2011 a US-based trade organisation, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, announced that following a Google Analytics trawl of business terms used, as published on the Internet, the term ‘employee engagement’ has overtaken phrases such as staff incentives and employee motivation for the first time… and they added a nice little graph to prove it, going all the way back to 1901.

So the good news is all you need to do is look for an agency or consultant that does ‘engagement’. HR gurus will argue that engagement is all about getting employees to show more commitment to their organisations, to work harder, to be more creative. The benefits will flow back to the business in terms of more sales and profits. There is significant ‘proof’ that employee engagement works from the Harvard Business Reviews of 2000 to the Towers Perrin study of 2005 and the Gallup surveys of 2009. They all show that there is a significant correlation between higher than average levels of employee engagement and revenue growth. People argue about the best approach to improve staff engagement. But in summary it appears that any combination of vision sessions, local team leadership, better communication, trust exercises and ideas generation will work. The approach, of course, has to be ongoing, not just HR flavour of the month.

But how many times have you been involved with a programme that is ‘imposed’ on employees rather than truly ‘aligned’ with what the organisation is all about? Marketing-led engagement programmes emphasise the need to explore the organisation’s external brand first before trying to get staff to line up behind it. But then they fail to follow through with employees.

It seems to make sense that the public brand as promoted through advertising and sponsorship needs to be thoroughly disseminated through the staff and distributors and even its key business partners before you can get the employees to ‘engage’ with it. There’s no point in having an expensive staff engagement programme if it does not match what consumers expect to hear. If this is done with care it is much more likely that the organisation will produce even more revenue if customers perceive that staff embody what the advertising says. It’s no good having a we-try-harder approach to the public if the staff plainly don’t, when you ring up to complain.

But the point is, whose job is it to bring together the employee brand and the consumer brand and make sure they match? No-one’s at the moment. That’s an issue similar to the use of incentives. You can fix a temporary business issue with an incentive but once the incentive ends, the problem returns. Someone needs to start at the top of the decision tree and take a view about whether the ‘sales problem’ is in fact the result of misalignment between public (consumer) perception of the sales offer and the internal perception of how staff should treat customers.

The obvious answer is to have an Engagement Director who manages the HR  and Marketing functions with the aim of having both of these hugely powerful internal teams working off the same hymn sheet. It follows from this that there will be a need for Brand Engagement Managers, some of whom deal with staff/distributors/key suppliers and some who deal with the consumer/sales.

This is not just an academic idea. In fact, if agencies are already attempting to fill this gap by being somewhat loose about what they do, it is likely that the need has already been recognised. Engagement Directors will henceforth send out RFPs to Brand Engagement agencies who will naturally have two types of specialist, some with an HR background and some with a marketing background. But neither is more important than the other. It’s a team game from now on to support additional client revenue and brand share.

The downside will be a re-alignment of a new breed of industry associations…the CIBE (Chartered Institute of Brand Engagement) with sister associations in HR, the CIEE (Chartered Institute of Employee Engagement) and the CICE (Chartered Institute of Customer Engagement). But life’s never perfect, is it?

John Fisher is a director of FMI Group

john.fisher@fmigroup.co.uk

@TheFMIgroup

How to recognise and reward success

At FMI achieving that ‘feel good’ factor is key to all our incentive programmes. Proud teams are more productive and contented customers will keep coming back for more. We create programmes that are compelling and fun, that reward engagement and produce measurable results.

Building Loyalty

We help our clients drive revenue and profit by building brand loyalty and encouraging desired behaviours with rewards. Our solutions cover direct and indirect channels. These include:

• sales force motivation
• employee reward and recognition
• channel sales promotions
• distributor, dealer and reseller incentives

Flexible Approach

Our platforms are flexible. They can be points-based or training/competition-oriented and are fully-supported with end-to-end services. These include programme design, participant communications, programme management, reward fulfilment and performance measurement.

Rewards range from:

• name-brand merchandise
• travel rewards
• live experiences
• sports, concert and cinema tickets
• gift cards and cash-equivalents

Seamless Communications

Accessibility is the key to engagement. Smart technology has extended the available channels for communication across mobile web and tablet devices. Now participants in our programmes can check in via mobile, update their status, engage in quick training, enter a quiz, or check and select their rewards, anytime, anywhere. This may be on the move, in the office, on the shop floor, or at home in the evening while grazing on TV.

Staying a Step Ahead

Our clients now also engage in personal, two-way comms with their users via our bespoke smartphone apps. Real-time messaging enables teams to share ideas, opinions and grass roots industry knowledge direct with the executive team. As a result, clients can respond more swiftly to changing market conditions and customer demands, keeping ahead of the competition.  Rewarding participants for their input breeds a greater feeling of brand loyalty and a shared commitment to future success of the business.

Social Connections

Connecting social media, Yammer, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks adds a further beneficial dimension to some of our programmes. If they choose, our clients can incentivise their teams to share best practice, hints and tips for overcoming objections, latest product information and industry news and competitor information swiftly and transparently. Great ideas and active engagement can be rewarded with spot prizes and recognition rewards.

Employees, partners and customers are valuable assets for every business. Their performance, motivation and loyalty are often the most significant factors in influencing a company’s revenue and profitability.  That’s why, at FMI, we put the feel good factor at the top of the agenda – and make sure that engagement is always rewarded.

To find out how your business can use incentives to become more profitable, please get in touch.

FMI Group

Great Ideas, Better Results

Sony Champions’ Club

Ferring: Employee Reward Scheme

Axa Online Reward Scheme

The introduction of ‘auto-enrolment’, the new UK pensions regime, highlights an ongoing issue in the events industry…it’s a great career but not very well-paid

There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but no old, bold pilots, so goes the saying. In other words they tend to crash and burn before reaching retirement age. It could equally apply to event organisers, whether they work for corporates or agencies. There comes a time after 20-30 years of travelling the World, getting delegates out of gaol, arguing with convention centres and filling in expense claims when the professional event manager, usually female, starts to think about taking it easy, slowing down a bit, being at home at the weekend for a change and wanting to enjoy life a bit. But private leisure time costs money and the chances are that a professional career on the road leaves little time to amass a private fortune or achieve a hugely impressive salary. And by the time you realise that, it’s too late.

This is not a situation which is exclusive to event managers, of course. Many corporate middle managers are facing a challenging ‘third age’. Due to rapidly changing demographics and medical advances they are lining up for decades of illness-free retirement on a State pension plus whatever savings they have managed to hold on to. But very few mid-career workers realise that the State pension is currently only worth about £8,000 a year, even if you make the top level of contributions. So if you have not saved a substantial sum while working or have negative equity in your house or flat,you could be in for a bit of a financial shock when that final plane taxis down the runway at Heathrow for the very last time.

But all is not yet lost. The UK Government has recently introduced ‘auto-enrolment’. In essence all employees in all industries will now be forced to save a percentage of their salaries towards their anticipated retirement costs… and employers will have to contribute, by law, as well. No doubt some owners will bleat about the additional cost and their reduction in margins. But even the Treasury realises that SMEs do not have the margins and resources to introduce such a change instantly, so there will be a transition period. Most UK event agencies will not have to put anything in place until 2014. But this is a society-wide initiative that needs to happen, otherwise retired people will actually be living on the streets. Australia has had a similar scheme since 2002 and so have many countries in Europe. As usual the UK Government gets to the party late and then complains the beer’s run out. But at least they have recognised something needs to be done this time.

So let’s have a closer look. An average, female corporate event manager based in Europe earns about £43k annually in the middle of her career, according to the latest MPI statistics. Let’s say she is now 30. To retire on half her salary at 65 she would have to save 16% per annum of her salary for the next 35 years. Moving that start date to say aged 40, she would have to save 27% per annum of her salary to retire on half pay which, of course, is virtually impossible. Looking at this another way, to achieve £10,000 of retirement savings she would have to save £113 per month. So by extension if she wanted to retire on a full salary of £43,000 that would mean saving around £486 a month for the next 35 years.  This doesn’t allow for the impact of inflation over 35 years. Numbers can be a bit confusing and often scary. So much so that in the end relatively few people make any significant provision for their retirement.

The MPI average earnings statistics for European female agency event organisers are just £39k, so some 10 per cent less than their corporate counterparts. So if you work for a consultancy or agency for all the figures mentioned above just reduce them all by 10 per cent.

You may find this sort of information odd as part of this monthly column about meetings etc as it’s not about a new hotel, a new venue, a new conference facility or a new event management technique.

Well, it’s here because it’s more important than any of those issues, so I make no apologies. Most event organisers often operate out on a limb from the main business. They are away from their desks by nature of the work they do. They can often become somewhat detached from the organisation and all the politics that goes with organisational life. For that reason they often get overlooked when it comes to promotion, involvement in process issues or new internal projects. The danger comes when their remuneration also starts to drift. Because HR, along with other ‘influential officers of the organisation’, consider that they are having such a good time and enjoy a large degree of freedom that there is no need to pay them lots of money to keep them loyal. Add to that the fact that there are thousands of freelance event organisers willing to step in under short term contracts to take an event manager’s place and you have a recipe for lower salaries and a glass ceiling on future earnings, mid-career, for most event organisers.

In the longer term 2012 will not be remembered for the Diamond Jubilee, The London Olympics or the Paralympics. Social historians will point to the introduction of auto-enrolment when for the first time ordinary people stopped relying on the State for rather paltry pension handouts in retirement  and began to take responsibility for their own financial futures. Hopefully some of those people will be hardworking event managers. But start contributing young, because the way things are going you will live much longer than your grandparents did, have less work to do and have much less money coming in, relatively speaking, when you kick off those flimsy hotel-room slippers for the last time.

Thanks to Jim Spicer of pensions experts MPL Wealth Management Ltd for his input into some of the figures used in this article, jim@mplltd.co.uk

John Fisher is a director of FMI Group

john.fisher@fmigroup.co.uk

@TheFMIgroup