I set up Wealth Wednesday for my team at Let Tech Solutions and Kingsford Estates – the objective is to all learn more about finance and investing and to help all of our team become more financially aware, literate and successful.

The Format: We have adopted the approach of LEARN – DO – TEACH and we get together on the first Wednesday of the month for a couple of hours usually 4-6pm.

We do about an hour of LEARNing and then workshop the next hour in DOing and TEACHing any new recruits.

On the DOing side:

So we split our team up into 3 Wealth Wednesday investment teams: each team manages a company trading account with Hargreaves Landsdown that they can invest in funds /equities/ETF’s. We started each team off with £3,000 and it is a competition we look at each team performance quarterly and there is a £250 prize for the team that has got the best return.

Why do this?

I guess everyone knows friends that are savers and friends that are spenders. Some people spend everything they earn and more and are also easy tempted with easy credit card debt- other people on similar incomes who spend less than they earn and manage to save and invest. Some people have very little Net asset value and some people have accumulated a good net asset value. Its almost exactly the same with companies. Some companies scrape by to make a profit or make losses and have little value on their balance sheet. Others with similar turnovers and sectors manage their finances to ensure a profit and build their balance sheet wealth.

Much is a mind set (spender/saver): So we have this slightly radical theory which goes a bit like this.
We want all of our team to progress within our companies and at some stage that means being in charge of budget. So our theory is that if people learn how to manage their own finances better they are more likely to:

1) Not to get themselves into a bad financial situation that may effect their work

2) Help them to get a better return on investment for the company when they are trusted with company budgets within their roles.

So in adopting our LEARN- DO – TEACH philosophy the team work and competition is that hey its a bit of fun but on a serious side the idea is it  enables familiarity with the online  tools and information – so that that in DOing and applying what has been learned using company funds and risk that familiarity and lessons can be applied when making their own personal investment decisions.

Why the website:

The objective is to again get team engagement and contribution and to try and capture what we are learning together for the benefit of future recruits and others!

Alex Watts