If you are a regulated adviser facing exit pressure, repayment demands, or contractual constraints — you have found the right place.
What happens in the next few weeks matters enormously. The decisions you make — and the order in which you make them — will determine the range of outcomes available to you.
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Most advisers in this situation are being pushed toward one of two costly mistakes.
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Moving too slowly — hoping the pressure resolves while risk quietly accumulates and deadlines pass.
Or moving too fast — escalating to lawyers before properly understanding their position, their leverage, or their options.
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Both reduce choices. Both increase cost.
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Adviser Exit Support™ exists in the space between those two extremes.
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Before adversarial escalation. Before rights are compromised. Before unnecessary legal spend becomes locked in.
Who this service is for
This service is for regulated financial advisers who are:
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Operating within constrained or structurally untrustworthy frameworks
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Leaving — or considering leaving — their current regulated environment
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Facing exit-related financial exposure, repayment demands, or contractual pressure
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Wanting to avoid being pushed prematurely into legal disputes
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Determined to manage their own situation — with informed, experienced support alongside them
This applies across:
This applies across national firms, networks and AR models, consolidators, and partnership and capital-backed structures.
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Many network and consolidator exit arrangements involve loan structures — including business sale and purchase arrangements — where the contractual repayment obligation and the actual economic loss to the firm are fundamentally different things. Understanding that difference — and how to surface it — can significantly change the commercial outcome.
It is not firm-specific.
Exit-related financial obligations and restrictive covenants often interact in ways that create simultaneous income restriction and debt enforcement. Understanding how that interaction affects your negotiating position matters before any response is made.
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If you are an adviser tied to a network by financial obligations that feel disproportionate to the value of that relationship — this service is specifically designed for your situation.
​Why Steve Conley
Most people who offer support to advisers facing exit pressure come from one of two directions.
They are either lawyers — who understand the contract but have never sat inside the frameworks that produced it.
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Or they are coaches — who understand the emotional pressure but lack the commercial and structural literacy to navigate what is actually happening.
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Steve Conley comes from a third direction entirely.
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He has been on the inside of the system you are trying to leave.
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As a former Business Development Director of one of the UK's largest IFA networks in the 2000s, Steve was responsible for recruiting, retaining, and managing the commercial relationships with advisers operating within exactly the kind of framework you are now navigating.
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He understands how these frameworks are designed — not from the outside looking in, but from the inside looking out.
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He understands:
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How network and consolidator loan structures are constructed — and where the assumptions built into them may not reflect commercial reality on exit
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How exit pressure is applied — the sequencing of correspondence, the language of default notices, the gap between legal posture and actual commercial exposure
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Where institutional power sits — and where it does not
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How advisers inadvertently compromise their own position through well-intentioned but poorly sequenced responses
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When legal involvement helps — and when it escalates cost and closes options prematurely
As a CF30 regulated adviser throughout the 2010s, Steve understands what it feels like to operate within a constrained framework — the regulatory exposure, the compliance load, the tension between what the system rewards and what genuinely serves clients.
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As founder of Get SAFE — providing pre-legal support to those harmed by financial exploitation — Steve has spent years helping individuals navigate situations where institutional power is being applied asymmetrically and urgently. Adviser Exit Support™ applies the same principles to a professional context.
As a Chartered Financial Planner with zero platform, product, or legal conflicts of interest, Steve has no commercial stake in the outcome of your situation beyond your best interest. He is not referred by your firm. He is not connected to any legal practice. He does not benefit from escalation.
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What he brings is rare — and in these situations, genuinely valuable:
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Deep insider knowledge of how the frameworks actually operate
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Commercial intelligence about where leverage and risk actually sit
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Professional experience of supporting people through high-pressure institutional situations
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Complete independence from every party with a financial interest in your outcome
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A track record of helping advisers navigate transition — not just survive it
Steve has also made the transition himself — from a senior corporate career inside the financial services industry to an independent, conflict-free practice built entirely around client agency. He is not describing a theoretical alternative. He is living it.
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That combination — insider knowledge, commercial intelligence, complete independence, and lived experience of the transition — is what makes Adviser Exit Support™ different.
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Not a lawyer. Not a coach. A professional ally who understands both the system you are leaving and the world you are moving toward.
The Space Where Outcomes Are Preserved
The most costly mistakes in these situations are almost never legal mistakes. They are sequencing mistakes.
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Too slow — hoping pressure resolves itself while risk accumulates
​Too fast — escalating to lawyers before understanding the terrain
Both often reduce options and increase cost.
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Admissions made too early. Correspondence that inadvertently closes options. Escalation that occurs before the commercial terrain is properly understood. Numerical positions stated before economic loss has been disclosed or verified.
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This service sits deliberately before all of those mistakes — helping you understand what is actually happening, what your realistic position is, and what should happen next and in what order.
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Where legal analysis of contract terms is required, we help you identify and brief the right legal support at the right moment — rather than defaulting to lawyers before the commercial terrain is understood.
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This is not about avoiding legal support. It is about using it strategically rather than reactively.
The Regulatory Clarity That Changes Everything
Many advisers trapped in constrained frameworks do not realise that a genuinely independent alternative exists — one that sits entirely outside the product-led regulatory perimeter.
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Financial planning built around plans rather than products — where no regulated investment advice is given and no client money is touched — operates under generic advice rules. In the UK, PERG 8.26 is explicit on this.
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This means the exit is not just from a firm. It is into a model that is regulatory light, conflict-free, and — in the experience of over 60 practitioners who have made the transition — more commercially resilient and more trusted by clients than the model being left behind.
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Adviser Exit Support™ helps you leave the old model intelligently. The Academy of Life Planning helps you build the new one.
What this service provides
This is pre-legal clarity, orientation, and commercial decision support. It is not legal advice.
Support includes:
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Making sense of exit frameworks and repayment mechanics as they operate in practice — not just as they appear on paper
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Understanding where contractual entitlement and actual economic loss may differ — and how to surface that difference
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Sense-checking the commercial position being put to you
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Identifying where risk, responsibility, and leverage may realistically sit
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Supporting calm and proportionate handling of correspondence
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Helping you plan an exit path that protects both position and wellbeing
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Sequencing the involvement of legal support strategically — so lawyers are used at the right moment, not as the default first response
You remain fully in control throughout.
What this service does not do
For clarity and integrity — this service provides:
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No legal advice
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No contract interpretation
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No negotiation or representation
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No litigation support
This is about clarity, agency, and good sequencing — not conflict.
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If legal support becomes necessary, you will enter that process having already preserved your options rather than accidentally closed them.
Step 1. Free 15-Minute Clarity Call
A confidential, no-obligation call to understand your situation at a high level and confirm whether this support is right for you.
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Cost: Free. No sales. No obligation.
Step 2 — Clarity Analysis & Orientation Session — £750
A structured review of your position followed by:
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A minimum one-hour Zoom session
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A written orientation summary — setting out your commercial position clearly
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Clear, commercially grounded next-step options
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Identification of the sequencing decisions that matter most right now
Designed to stabilise the situation, restore perspective, and help you understand what happens next — and in what order.
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This single session has the potential to change the entire trajectory of how a matter unfolds.
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One-off payment. No obligation to continue.
Step 3 — Ongoing Professional Support — £500/month
For advisers who want steady, one-to-one support while matters unfold.
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Includes:
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One scheduled Zoom session per month
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Ongoing commercial orientation and decision support
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Sense-checking of correspondence and proposed responses
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A consistent professional ally throughout the period of change
£500 per month. Cancel at any time. No minimum term. No penalty.
Support is always optional and always under your control.
Periods of professional transition place significant cognitive and emotional load on even the most capable advisers.
The pressures are real — institutional correspondence designed to create urgency, financial obligations that feel immediately threatening, income restrictions that limit your ability to respond commercially.
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Clear thinking benefits from calm professional companionship.
Agency is strengthened — not weakened — by the right kind of support at the right moment.
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This is not dependency. It is professional containment at a critical point — so you make the right decisions in the right sequence, rather than reactive decisions under pressure.
A Note on Adviser Exit Support™ and the Academy
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Adviser Exit Support™ and the Academy of Life Planning are two parts of the same answer.
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Adviser Exit Support™ helps you leave the framework that no longer serves you — with intelligence, dignity, and preserved commercial options.
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The Academy of Life Planning helps you build what comes next — a conflict-free, client-agency Total Wealth Planning practice that is regulatory light, commercially resilient, and trusted by clients in a way the old model cannot replicate.
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You do not have to decide about what comes next before you deal with what is happening now. But when you are ready, the pathway is there.
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Over 60 practitioners have already made this transition through the Academy. Four structured pathways are available — from £545 to £3,995 — each designed for a different stage of readiness.
Book a confidential clarity call
If you are navigating exit pressure within a regulated framework and want a calm, informed place to start — this is where to begin.
No sales. No obligation. No pressure.
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Just clarity, agency, and a professional ally — on your side.
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Delivered personally by Steve Conley BSc FCII — Chartered Financial Planner, Chartered Insurer, and founder of the Academy of Life Planning.
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Confidential. Structured. Intentional.