From analyst to CEO: How the Warwick MBA helped to shape a career

Never a day goes by when Dan Boardman-Weston, the CEO of a leading wealth management firm, doesn’t draw on his MBA at Warwick Business School (WBS).

“Each day there is probably an element of an MBA module that is coming up, whether it’s leadership or strategy, organisational behaviour or accounting,” says the 33-year-old chief executive of BRI Wealth Management. “There’s something every day to draw upon.”

This might not have been a position that he had envisaged for himself when he left his school in north Warwickshire in 2011. “All my friends were going on to university,” Dan recalls. “But I thought long and hard about it and thought, ‘no, I would like to go straight for a career’.”

So, instead, the young man from a small village in south Derbyshire joined the wealth management firm in which his father was a shareholder, initially as a stopgap to fund a gap year, but then for much longer.

The timing – amid the market turbulence of 2011 – was to prove formulative. “I thoroughly enjoyed it from Day One. I’m quite an analytical person and I enjoyed the analytical side of things, looking into what’s going on in a company or a sector.

“And because investment is really about politics, economics, and everything that is going on in the world, it sparked something intellectually with me.”

By his early twenties, Dan was heading up the investment side of the business, leading a team of portfolio managers and investment analysts.

And he loved it. Investment was his passion.

Yet, with success came a certain unease. By this time, he wanted to do more than pick the best companies to invest in. He wanted to run a company. He knew, however, he didn’t have the skills to do that.

“I had a very narrow but deep set of skills and I needed them to be slightly broader and shallower,” Dan recalls.

The skills an MBA brings you

The solution came from an unexpected source. A contractor with his firm suggested an MBA. Dan was intrigued, and then took the plunge, enrolling for a Full-time MBA at WBS in September 2017. “I wanted to go to the best, and it just so happened the best was located nearby.”

For someone who had never set foot in a university lecture hall, the experience was transformative. “It was a great cohort of people. Predominantly international, and I’d never really been exposed to that many people from different walks of life, different cultures, different perspectives.”

He threw himself into modules ranging from leadership to operations management – subjects a step removed from his investment background. “Operations management was something very alien to me, you know, how production lines work and getting the flow right in an organisation.”

The learning was practical and real-world oriented, and his dissertation was no abstract exercise. He drafted a five-year growth strategy for his firm, a practical plan that could later inform its expansion. “I really liked the professors of practice like John Colley. The academic theories are important but you actually have to go through something and live and breathe it.”

All in all, the MBA gave Dan confidence beyond investment. “As opposed to just being confident and competent on the investment side of things, I could get stuck into other areas within the business.”

That grounding proved invaluable when he returned to BRI and became Chief Investment Officer, and even more so when he was appointed Chief Executive Officer in 2022.

Now, as CEO, Dan sees the firm entering a new phase. “We are a business going through a really exciting period of growth and development,” he says. “Big structural drivers mean more people need financial advice.

“That coupled with the fact that we’ve got a superb group of financial planners and investment managers means we’ve got a really strong proposition.”

Growth is both organic and inorganic. “We’ve got the ambition to drive growth and we have supportive shareholders. It’s a good combination of the macro and the micro.”

But the central mission is always clear: helping clients navigate their financial lives. “It’s always that Friday afternoon job that never quite gets done. I think we can be helping a lot more people in the coming years than we currently do. Ultimately, that’s what drives me – I see the difference that good financial advice can make to people’s lives.”

Beyond the office, Dan has channelled his energies into philanthropy. He recently joined the board of trustees at the Heart of England Community Foundation. “It’s a fantastic local organisation that gives out millions of pounds to local causes. I jumped at the chance to contribute in this small way.”

Unsurprisingly, personal time is scarce. “I play a bit of tennis when I get the chance, and I walk in the countryside with family and friends. But a lot of my time is eaten up with work.”

That work continues to be informed by his MBA. For Dan, Warwick Business School was not simply a credential but a bridge from analytical curiosity to corporate leadership.

As his company expands, he continues to draw on lessons learned in the classroom.

“The MBA is very useful in giving you that grounding and framework,” he says. “But then living and breathing it in running a business is the final piece of the puzzle.”

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