Citywealth Leaders List, 60 seconds interview – Anthony Villis, First Wealth
This week’s 60 seconds Citywealth Leaders List interview is dedicated to Anthony Villis is Managing Director and Co-Founder of First Wealth, a UK financial planning firm he co-founded in 2009.
Tell Citywealth readers a bit about your role.
I wear a few hats. Formally, I’m Managing Director at First Wealth, which means setting the direction of the business and working with our leadership team to get us there – growth, culture, and making sure the quality of our advice holds up as we scale.
I also still look after a panel of clients. It’s smaller than it was, deliberately, but I’ve no plans to give it up entirely. Sitting across the table from clients is where the useful thinking still comes from.
What does a typical day look like for you?
It splits in two. Mondays and Fridays I’m at home, which is where any real thinking gets done. Tuesday to Thursday I’m in London, and those days are full.
A London day might start with a breakfast with someone from the team, then an ops meeting, followed by a client meeting, and check-ins with our heads of operations, compliance and marketing. There’s usually one external in the diary too, with a software provider or a professional introducer.
I try to be done by half six.
Tell us about some recent, interesting client instructions/requests you have received.
One of the more enjoyable pieces of work over the last six months has been with a client who sold his business and is now building a home from scratch, buying the existing property, taking it through planning, and pulling together the financing for the rebuild.
It’s a long way from a portfolio review. There are lots of moving parts, several other advisers involved, and a clear brief: keep the whole thing coherent while he gets on with the build.
What challenges do your clients face and how are you helping your clients to overcome them?
Once someone has built real wealth, the question shifts from accumulation to stewardship. Protecting what they’ve built, supporting parents and children at the same time, and the one that comes up most, raising children who understand money rather than simply having it.
The other recurring theme is opportunity. Wealthy people get shown a lot of deals. Some are good, some aren’t. Being the person they call before they say yes is often the most valuable thing we do.
What is your proudest professional achievement?
Two, and they’re linked. Becoming a certified B Corp in 2020 took an enormous amount of work, but what mattered more than the badge was the roadmap it gave us. A lot of how First Wealth operates today traces back to that process.
Then, in 2021, we were named Chartered Financial Planning Firm of the Year by the Personal Finance Society. We’d been working towards that one for years, so the recognition meant a great deal to the whole team, not just to me.
What do you consider to be the most important attributes for a leader?
Vision, energy and communication. You need a clear picture of where you’re going, the drive to keep moving towards it, and the ability to bring people with you, because none of it happens on your own.
The energy piece is underrated. People take their cue from whether you actually believe in what the business is doing. And then there’s the obvious one: surround yourself with people who are better than you at their part of it. That’s most of the job.
Who do you most admire and why?
I’m a sports person, so two: Seve Ballesteros and Roger Federer.
Both had extraordinary natural talent, but what I admire is how they carried it. Seve played with imagination and nerve; he’d find a shot nobody else could see. Federer made something very difficult look effortless and stayed gracious throughout. Different characters entirely, but both were unmistakably themselves at the top of their game. I still watch the reruns.
Where was the last place you travelled to for work or pleasure?
I had a good run of it this summer. Four days riding in the French Alps with my cycling club – Alpe d’Huez and the Col du Galibier both went in the legs. Straight from there to Ayrshire for golf at Glasgow Gailes and Dundonald Links. Then a week in Ibiza with the family to recover from the first two.
Two and a half weeks, three completely different things. I’d do it again tomorrow.
If you weren’t in this industry, what else might you be doing?
Something design-led. Branding, advertising, graphics – anything where the brief is creative and there’s no ceiling on how far you can push an idea. The wilder, the better.
It’s not entirely hypothetical. Some of the work I’ve enjoyed most at First Wealth hasn’t been the planning at all, it’s been building the brand. How the firm looks, how it reads, how people experience it. That side of it genuinely absorbs me.
How do you relax after a long day?
Time with the family is the main one, often a film, though at the moment that means whatever teen rom-com my daughter has picked, so I’m not always in charge of the remote.
Beyond that, sport: the bike or the golf course. And a beer with mates talking complete nonsense, or just an early night. All of it works.
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