Ep.139 - No Clients, No Book, No Blueprint: Matt Abouzeid & Mohneet Dhir on Building &together

What does it take to walk away from a secure, senior role at one of the world's biggest asset managers and start again with nothing?Matt Abouzeid (Co-Founder and Managing Director) and Mohneet Dhir (Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer) came from Vanguard, where they helped shape how the UK invests. Matt spent fifteen years there, building the largest book of business in Vanguard's European operation. Mohneet was a senior leader in the multi-asset team behind the LifeStrategy range, used by hundreds of thousands of UK investors. Then they left it all to build &together, an independent financial planning firm for founders and entrepreneurs, from a blank sheet of paper. No clients. No book. No blueprint.In this episode, hosts Abraham Okusanya and Kate Phillips draw out the full, unvarnished story of the leap: the twelve-month countdown to handing in their notice, the decision to go while Mohneet was on maternity leave, and the single question that tipped the balance, whose dream are you living? They get into the practical machinery too, why they chose a network over going directly authorised, how they modelled two years without income, and the discipline of sense-checking every line of a start-up budget.From there the conversation turns to the hardest part of all: winning clients from zero. Matt and Mohneet share how they grew out from concentric circles of people who already trusted them towards a genuine inbound engine, the difference between a polite introduction and true advocacy, and what it felt like to land in a competitive tender against a long-established chartered firm. They are candid about the war wounds, the marketing money they would spend differently, the constant pull between a young family and a young business, and how they think about fees, investment philosophy, and building a firm optimised for client outcomes rather than margin.It is a rare, honest look inside the first ten months of a brand-new advice firm, and essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered whether they could do the same.