‘It’s been three years where I’ve literally been responding to people for over six hours a day just outside of office hours’: How ‘Ask Paul’ turned social media clout into real action

Having developed his brand online, Merriman now appears regularly on mainstream broadcast platforms where he injects and amplifies the Instagram personality with his trademark clean, skin-fading haircut, cheeky grin and Dublin pattern.

The Ask Paul persona is all about easy-to-understand financial advice, served up in easy-to-digest portions from a familiar menu of questions.

But Merriman isn’t on social media to chase likes and clout. He is also the Managing Director of Pax Financial, a fast growing financial brokerage company.

As the first financial planner in Ireland to appear on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, he rode the flagpole of the social media revolution where educational content is a massive driver of recurring engagement.

In the case of Pax Financial, Ask Paul has fueled the growth of the business, attracting a major buyer in Fairstone, the acquisition-driven UK financial planning firm that has been gobbling up brokerage businesses from Exeter to Edinburgh for a decade and a half, and amassed £13bn in client money along the way. It bought Pax last summer while Merriman stayed on-site to handle things here — including more deals and big growth.

The goal is to add an average of around €1 billion in assets under management every year over the next five years. That would make Pax a legitimate competitor to stockbrokers Davy and Goodbody in the wealth management space.

For a company that was a two-man band as recently as 2009, that kind of ambition is hard to appreciate. After all, Merriman is based in the same building in Stillorgan, Co. Dublin where he started as a Junior Financial Advisor for Irish Life almost two decades ago. Okay, he owns the building now, but still – it’s not Dawson Street.

Pax is not Merriman’s start-up. He and a partner bought it in 2009 from an asset management firm that wanted to unburden its retail clients and take the business in a different direction.

“We were pretty good, we were pretty clean on price, very open and free of jargon,” says Merriman. In a way, this was Ask Paul in an embryonic stage, before social networking.

But it was also 2009, perhaps the most bombed-out year of the financial crisis. Markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and property prices in Ireland have fallen by 50 per cent. Nobody felt rich anymore and everyone was afraid.

“It was easy until 2006, then it got very difficult,” says Merriman. “But what struck me was that in 2009, people really wanted advice because they were in so much trouble. People were laid off who had to wire up their pensions, people had mortgages they wanted to restructure. So I found it a lot easier to do business with clients because before that everyone was a real estate genius.”

Pax under Merriman was therefore perfectly positioned in this new world to move from product to financial planning, a move that sets the company apart from its more commission-oriented peers and positions it for years to come.

The business went ahead, growing linearly and organically for six or seven years, nothing spectacular. What really kickstarted the business was the launch of Ask Paul in 2016

“It was the Ask Paul brand that changed things,” says Merriman. “Five years ago we were maybe making a couple hundred big profits and maybe 10 employees, but in five years it’s just exploded.”

“When we started Ask Paul, we had no idea what it would become,” says Merriman. “I figured if I could go on video and talk about financial planning, it might give me a little edge in the market. I think the first video is still on YouTube and it’s appalling.”

Merriman worked hard to improve, putting hours into content creation after convincing himself that nothing would happen in the first year. He laid out content, people in the audience fired back questions. Rinse, repeat.

“I used to get up and answer all the questions myself,” he says. “So for three years, I literally just answered people outside of office hours for over six hours a day.”

Then content marketing started to work. Transparency and consistent communication turned into trust and inbound requests came in. Every Tuesday, Merriman hosted Zoom consultations with about five clients during the day and met with six or seven others in Dublin the rest of the week.

Two important things happened with the company: it grew outside of its geographic footprint in Dublin by reaching people online, and it built the digital infrastructure.

“Covid hit and boom – I started doing 15 consultations a day,” says Merriman.

He was able to switch to a productive pandemic immediately from home.

A typical day would start at 6am Monday through Friday and last until 10pm. Then he started making Saturday and Sunday calls to accommodate couples who wanted to zoom together.

By September he was understandably “tired” and had to call in help from other certified financial planners, so Pax/Ask Paul had to expand their staff and bring in new faces on camera.

But Merriman was a little caught up in the brand here and, like many entrepreneurs, was reluctant to relinquish control at a critical moment for the business.

“I was very valuable because it was called Ask Paul and I thought people were going to want me,” he says. “I’m not cocky.”

However, he relented and expanded to a dozen CFPs to handle the massive load of new clients the firm was attracting as people took advantage of the space remote work afforded them to manage their finances. Investments in the site followed to allow people to shop online and sign up for consultations, events and webinars.

“The marketing did a really good job of showcasing the content from different people. I still make the majority of these, about 80 pieces. I do all the Instagram live, I do the TV and radio myself. But now it comes down to the team.”

The Covid crisis has been a huge growth driver for Pax, doubling assets under management to £200m, enough for a boutique wealth manager to properly wait.

No wonder Fairstone knocked. There is a serious business behind the brand, even if the brand did the business.

Pax’s most recently filed annual accounts for 2021 show that the company has more than doubled its turnover to more than 7 million euros and tripled its profit to 1.25 million euros in one year. Based on Fairstone’s valuation formula, this performance should have fetched a price of no less than €11 million, but likely a fair bit more given Ask Paul’s brand equity, market positioning and growth path.

But Fairstone hasn’t been the only tire kicker in the huge supply bonanza that has gripped the Irish financial and insurance brokerage market over the past two years.

Private equity was particularly interested in general insurance companies, where high recurring revenues generate attractive returns relative to the initial investment. Life and pension companies like Pax are getting approaches, but the multiples aren’t quite as rich because the segment is more promotional. In short, the money doesn’t just come in the door every year, you have to fight for it.

Although Ask Paul is one hell of a showcase and apparently that made a huge difference.

“We’ve been approached monthly by various private equity firms and various corporate finance houses trying to structure deals,” says Merriman, adding that directors considered raising €12 million in corporate financing to fund future growth beforehand they made up Fairstone, who had something bigger to offer.

“Our acquisition by Fairstone was the first real step into the Irish market [consolidation and integration] Step. I mean we were acquired to be the platform.”

Starting next month, Pax will be rebranded as Fairstone while Ask Paul will be retained as a channel for organic growth. But while Ask Paul will continue on its linear path, Fairstone aims to go parabolic by replicating its aggressive UK acquisition strategy in the Irish market.

While Pax undertook an individual buyout that left Paul in Ireland as CEO of Fairstone, Fairstone’s normal model is the sell-and-stay downstream buyout, where the company pays 10 percent of valuation up front, with an earn Out accruing over the next few years years ending up packing earnings growth into an improved price.

This is Merriman’s offering to the 50+ financial brokers and planners on his target list, which he believes ranks in the top 5 in the market.

“We have a very strong acquisition pipeline, which we are very excited about,” he says. “We probably don’t have to do anything [to fill it] for the next five years. We expect to reach between 4 and 5 billion euros in assets under management over the next five years. I think we have a first mover advantage in the market.”