Ian White, managing director at Beckett Investment Management Group, explains why an engaged workforce was the key to achieving Platinum accreditation and winning Best Overall Medium Company at Best Employers Eastern Region 2021.

Becketts is recognised as one of the largest regional providers of financial advice to individuals and corporate clients. We have offices across the East of England in Ipswich, Norwich, Bury St Edmunds and Kibworth, and we manage around £1bn of client funds.

We believe that achieving high levels of customer satisfaction is a direct result of having an engaged workforce, and our most recent client survey revealed an average score of 9.6 out of 10.

We are passionate about measuring employee engagement and use software to measure our engagement levels which enables us to benchmark against other companies. We can see that our scores are very high.

Our objective is to enable everyone to thrive and we believe that everybody comes to work to do the best possible job they can – so Becketts seeks to provide the right level of training, support and environment.

This extends to gender diversity where we are signatories to HM Treasury's Women In Finance Charter, with more than half of our team being female - which is exceptional for our industry and the size of our firm.

We also like to innovate. Our industry is renowned for its ‘stuffy’ image, and so we try to overcome that wherever possible. An example of this is our mission statement, called the "Beckett Bus" which communicates our quest to be best-in-class within the IFA sector.

This innovation also extends to a YouTube channel dedicated to unique and original cartoon videos that are designed to explain common financial topics in an entertaining way.

This innovation and engagement has resulted in Becketts being voted the ‘Best Financial Firm in the East of England’ by Citywire’s prestigious publication New Model Adviser, and we have been recognised as being one of Top 100 Firms in the UK by the Financial Times’ publication FT Adviser.

We are proud to belong to the community of Best Employers in East Anglia.


The Best Employers programme was founded by recruitment specialists Pure and psychometrics experts eras, and is supported by Archant and full-service law firm Birketts.