Who’ve you spent your summer with?

Who’ve you been spending most of your time with this summer? Have you had dinner with good friends? Holidayed with close family? Met with work colleagues or old acquaintances?

We’re asking because this week, we discovered something called Dunbar’s number – a number which, based on academic research, is the number of “stable social relationships” each one of us can maintain – and we’ve been asking around the office to see who our team spend their time with.

Despite Jonathan saying he had over 600 friends, and Stephen saying he only had four or five (sorry, Stephen!), the actual amount of possible relationships defined by Robin Dunbar is roughly 150.

All this comparing then started to make us think about a financial adviser’s Dunbar number. What would the average be amongst other advisers and how do Cooper Parry Wealth compare?

According to CEG Worldwide, while the typical financial adviser looks after 269.3 clients, wealth managers (we call them ‘wealth planners’) look after just 101.1 clients on average. But at Cooper Parry Wealth, our number is just 42. We purposefully keep our numbers low so we can really get to know and understand each one of our clients. In fact, we’ve made a promise that this number will never exceed 75.

Read some more interesting headline numbers about Cooper Parry Wealth here.

And find out more about Dunbar’s number in this TED Talk or in this article in The New Yorker.