My name is Derek Thomas and I have been a client of Ardent for the last 12 months. My adviser is Mark Fisher, and he’s been great.
My sister had worked with Mark at Ardent, so he also helped us with our late father’s estate. We were in the process of acquiring a commercial freehold and as the Ukraine war progressed and interest rates went up, the normal stores of funding that were available began to be removed from the market and we looked to Mark to find us a source of funding to complete the deal.
I’ve worked with both Mark and Declan at Ardent. I’ve been very pleased to do that. We are meeting up in a few weeks’ time to discuss some other opportunities that we can work on together.
I wouldn’t have been able to pull the deal together without Mark. I think that’s the best way of describing it. We had an outline plan at the beginning, and he helped set the course to get us through all the complexities of a strategic investment pension (SIP) – without him, it just wouldn’t have happened.
What do I enjoy about working with Mark? Most of all, his professionalism. He’s very ethical, approachable, and therefore very easy to work with.
The best thing about working with Mark is his ability to simply explain the pathway you need to follow to get everything over the line, because there is a lot of complexity in moving to a SIP.
Mark and the team helped me no end by introducing me to key people within the SIP process, from the people who could set up the SIP pension fund to some of the borrowing that we needed to put in place to support it, alongside working with my legal team in completing the acquisition. So overall, it was a real team game and Mark was very good at pulling all that together with me.
Ardent was very clear on their fees. It was a fixed fee to complete the work and, in my view, Mark put in more time than he was paid for. I really appreciate all the work that the Ardent team did to make it all happen.
I would very much recommend Ardent and Mark. Mark has been a pleasure to work with. He’s hugely knowledgeable and where there have been some small knowledge gaps along the way, he’s very quickly filled those and come back to me. We have progressed as fast as the process would allow, with him supporting it all the way through.
