Last week I onboarded my first client into Sigma Advisory. (If you’ve just done a double take, don’t worry. So would I have a year ago.)

I’ve been keeping this quiet for a little while. Not because I was trying to be mysterious. Simply because some decisions deserve a little silence before they’re shared. They need time to settle, to feel right, before you find the words to explain them.

After that first client signing, I sat for a while with a coffee (although had it been a little later in the day, in this cold weather, it would almost certainly have been a glass of delicious red!) and reflected on how I’d arrived here.

The truth is, I don’t think this journey started with Sigma. I think it started the day I founded Confiance. At the time, I thought I was building a business. Looking back now, I realise I was building something far more important. I was finding my voice. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I wasn’t just building a business. I was becoming the adviser I’d always hoped to be.

When I left corporate life, I knew I wanted something different. I wanted the freedom to think independently, to write again, to ask better questions, to spend less time talking about products and more time talking about people.

Confiance gave me all of that. It gave me permission to rediscover why I fell in love with this profession in the first place.

Over the past year, one or two words kept finding their way into almost every conversation I had in everything I was doing.

Simplicity and Clarity.

In the world we live in, advice is everywhere. We have so such information coming at us and available that even the small decisions can become confusing. We are surrounded by exceptional lawyers, accountants, investment managers and fiduciaries. What we all need is someone who can step back, connect the dots, challenge assumptions and help us navigate complexity with confidence. Someone who can see the whole picture and quietly ask, “Are we solving for what really matters?”

Funny enough, while I was building a business to help clients find greater clarity and simplicity, clarity was quietly finding me too.

Part of that clarity came through a series of conversations with someone I’d known professionally for about 20 years: Jonathan Selby, founder of Sigma Advisory. Every few months we’d catch up over coffee at his office. We’d talk about how things were going, frustrations, about clients and usually end up talking about stewardship, family dynamics and what genuinely independent advice should look and feel like. Then we’d go our separate ways. A few months later my phone would ring again, “How’s it going?” And we’d pick up exactly where we’d left off.

To Jonathan’s credit, he never really gave up on the idea of me. We skirted around timing issues, words like not quite ready, you carry on, congrats on getting your license but deep down I think we both knew there were definitely synergies, personally and commercially. What struck me, was Jonathan’s way. He never tried to convince me. He simply stayed curious about where I was heading. Until he didn’t.

Fast forward to earlier this year, he called and said, “Let’s chat, seriously. What do we have to do to find a world where Confiance and Sigma come together?” We chatted and mulled. He was concerned about how I would you feel about letting go of Confiance, the brand I loved.  It was such a thoughtful question. And one that stayed with me long after the conversation had ended. After a couple of years of being let down and disappointed more times than Cheslin Kolbe breaks away and scores, I was naturally nervous.

There is a certain romance attached to building something of your own. Maybe it’s because I’m an old-fashioned romantic at heart, but I could very easily have become attached to the story of continuing to build Confiance on my own simply because it was mine.

We celebrate founders. We admire independence. We quietly convince ourselves that success only counts if we’ve built it ourselves. I could have kept telling myself that story.

But clarity has a funny way of challenging the stories we tell ourselves. The more I reflected, the more I realised something.

Confiance had already given me exactly what I needed. It had given me permission to think differently. It had given me courage to take a leap of faith and back myself. It had given me the confidence to trust my instincts again. And perhaps most importantly, it had given me the clarity to recognise an opportunity that, 18 months earlier, I simply wasn’t ready to see.

There’s something I’ve never really shared publicly. The name Confiance has always meant more to me than most people realise. It wasn’t until after I’d settled on the name that my sister pointed out something extraordinary. Confiance Wealth contains my late mum’s initials, CW. Completely by accident, or perhaps not entirely by accident.

At the time I smiled at the coincidence. Looking back now, I think it was her quiet way of telling me I was exactly where I needed to be. And I was. Confiance became one of the most important chapters of my professional life. It didn’t lead me away from my purpose. It led me directly towards it. I am beyond proud of what I achieved and created all on my own!

Somewhere along the way, Jonathan and I stopped feeling like two people building different businesses. Instead, we realised we had simply been travelling towards the same philosophy from different directions. What impressed me wasn’t that Jonathan wanted to build a bigger business. It was that every conversation kept coming back to clients. To families. To doing the right thing. To having the courage to ask the questions others sometimes don’t. That told me everything I needed to know.

If there’s one thing Jonathan and I know with absolute certainty, it’s not exactly what Sigma will look like in 10 years’ time. But we do know how we want clients to experience it. Independent advice. Empathy. Intellectual curiosity. Thoughtful challenge. And the comfort of knowing someone is sitting beside them when the decisions really matter.

Our personalities couldn’t be more different. Jonathan is wonderfully thoughtful, particular, articulate, detailed and measured, overlayed with a keen sense of humour and love of cars. I shoot from the hip, I’m enthusiastic, get over-excited and emotional, sprinkled with everything else that comes with the being in menopause. I’ve discovered, after spending the last couple of weeks in the office, that I may have brought just a little more conversation and energy than everyone had become accustomed to! In fairness, I haven’t had colleagues since 2021. When you’ve spent years working on your own, talking mostly to clients (and, if I’m honest, often to the two dachshunds), suddenly having people around you again is rather wonderful. I suspect the office is still adjusting.

And so am I. But that’s exactly the point. Great partnerships aren’t built because two people are the same. They’re built because they’re aligned where it matters most.

The combination of our experience, our strengths, our perspectives and yes… even our different personalities, gives us the opportunity to build something far more meaningful together than either of us could have built alone. Not bigger for the sake of being bigger. Better.

So today, I’m delighted to share that I’ve become Jonathan’s partner in Sigma Advisory.

Not because my vision changed. Because it became clearer. Confiance taught me what I wanted to build. Sigma gives us the opportunity to build it at a level that simply wasn’t possible on my own.

Looking back, I realise I needed to take my own advice. Sometimes growth isn’t about building something different. It’s about finding the right people to build something better.

Because, in the end, clarity isn’t just something we offer our clients. It’s something we should have the courage to seek for ourselves.

And perhaps that’s why Sigma’s below the line philosophy (maybe a future tagline – watch this space) resonated with me from the very beginning.

The Wisdom Beside You.

For me, those words now carry a meaning far beyond a business.

They remind me of my mom, whose quiet wisdom has been beside me long before I realised it. They remind me of Jonathan, whose patience was matched only by his belief that there might be a different way to build something meaningful together. And they remind me that the greatest privilege in our profession is not to have all the answers.

It’s to walk beside people, guiding them steadily and calmly through the complexity, until they can see the answers for themselves.