Client Stories
Building businesses, and helping family when it matters
David Archer has spent his career building businesses, advising and looking after clients. But when it comes to his own finances, he readily admits he hasn’t always had the time.
After the sale of a business he had built alongside his legal career, David found himself with new choices to make. How much should he keep? How much could he give to his children and charity? And how could he make the most of what remained for the future?
“I’m too busy,” David says. “I’m good at looking after clients. I’m useless at looking after my own paperwork.”
Meet David
David is a solicitor and one of four partners in boutique law firm Archer Evrard Sigurdsson, which he helped establish in 2021. Today, the firm has 18 lawyers and an office just off the Strand in London.
His legal career began in the City in 1985, followed by time in Australia with Baker McKenzie and at Clifford Chance. But after the birth of his second child, David decided that life in London was becoming unsustainable.
“I simply never really went home. I just worked all the time,” he says. “I’ve got a young family. I’m just not ever seeing them.”
He moved to Berkshire and joined a Reading law firm as a young salaried partner in 1992.
As part of his work as a litigation and insolvency lawyer, David began taking independent trustee appointments to final salary pension schemes. The work grew into a business which, by the early 2000s, had become the largest law firm-owned independent trustee company.
David and several colleagues subsequently bought the business from the law firm in a management buyout in 2017. In 2021, they sold the business to Zedra Governance Limited.
For David, what had started incidentally had become a significant business in its own right, and the sale created “welcome liquidity”.
It also meant David had some important decisions to make about what he wanted his wealth to achieve.
Helping family when it matters
David first met John in 2011, after being introduced by a mutual friend. There was an immediate connection, with both having studied law.
When they met, David already had a pension and some investments, but wanted someone he could trust to help him make sense of his own financial affairs.
“I liked him. I was confident in him,” David says. “I moved my then fairly modest portfolio over to him.”
Over time they developed a good friendship, and so when the business sale was going through, David valued John’s objective advice and guidance.
“When we sold, it was really good to be able to chat to John around how to manage the proceeds and consider what’s next,” David says.
One of the most important decisions was to share some of the proceeds with his family.
David gave each of his three children enough to help them buy properties.
“It was a massive privilege for me to be able to give some of the capital away,” he says.
For David, the decision was partly shaped by his own experience. He inherited money from his parents when he was around 50 and had seen how circumstances could change over time. He wanted his own children to benefit from what he had built while they were still young enough to make use of it.
“What’s the point in your kids waiting until you’re in their 50s or 60s?” he says. “They need it when they’ve got a young family.”
There was also a balance to strike. David wanted to help his children, while making sure he and his wife would have enough not to be a burden in years to come. “I’d like to make sure my wife is taken care of, but also that my kids inherit too.”
John was someone David could talk through those decisions with. “John is good at walking through those thoughts,” he says.
The new chapter
The sale of the business marked the end of one chapter, but certainly not the end of David’s appetite for building something new.
In 2021, he helped establish Archer Evrard Sigurdsson, which is growing from strength to strength. For David, it was another opportunity to build a business alongside continuing his legal career. David is still working full time and has no immediate plans to retire.
When he eventually does, he doesn’t expect retirement to mean stopping altogether.
“When I do retire, it won’t be to stop work. It’ll be to do something different.”
The investments John manages are intended to provide retirement capital for David and his wife in the years ahead. He remains comfortable taking investment risk, but describes his approach as measured.
David really values John taking the initiative - spotting gaps and the efficiency the team provide is exceptional. “The team handle the practical side efficiently, from paperwork to DocuSign – they just make it all easy”.
For David, having the financial freedom to make choices is increasingly important. Whether that means continuing to work, spending more time with family, supporting causes he cares about or doing something completely different, he wants the flexibility to decide what comes next.
A relationship built on trust
More than a decade after they first met, David and John’s relationship has developed well beyond financial advice. They meet regularly for breakfast, share mutual business interests and go skiing together each year with a mutual friend.
David says that trust remains at the heart of the relationship.
“He’s trustworthy. He’s straight. He’ll give a client advice that’s in their interests.”
And perhaps that is what David values most. After a career spent building businesses and looking after clients, he has someone he trusts to help look after him.
Not simply managing the money he has created, but helping him think through what he wants it to achieve, for himself, his wife, his children and the causes that matter to him.
