"We're just normal people who want to help other normal people."
Fiona wrote that line in 2024 when she and Craig redrafted the About page. It's still the tagline that does the most work in the room. It's also a fair summary of how this firm sees itself.
How it started
Wealth Health began in 2014, on a Sunday evening in the Coupland kitchen in Papamoa. Craig had been a BNZ Private Banker for seven years and had reached the point where he could no longer keep telling clients the bank line and sleep well at the same time. Fiona had a marketing background and a low tolerance for jargon. The conversation that night was, roughly: "if we did this properly, what would it look like."
What it looked like, in the first year, was the two of them at the kitchen table. Craig met clients in their homes or in the cafe at the bottom of the street. Fiona wrote the website, designed the logo, set up the email, registered the company. The early clients were ex-BNZ colleagues, ex-BNZ customers and friends-of-friends. Everyone was paid by the lender or the insurer, never by the client. The work, from day one, was meant to be advice you'd recommend to your own mother.
Twelve years later that's still how the firm runs. The kitchen is now a proper office, the team is four people plus a labrador, and the book is large enough that Craig and Jared are both full-time on advice. But the principle hasn't moved.
What Fiona actually does
The honest answer is "the parts of the firm that aren't the advice itself." The longer answer is everything that makes the advice land with real people.
Brand voice. Fiona is the reason this website sounds like a person and not a financial product disclosure document. Every page is drafted by Craig or Jared in their professional voice, then read by Fiona to remove the jargon, the bank-speak and the half-sentences that don't quite land. If a paragraph on this site sounds like something a normal Kiwi might say at a barbecue, that's Fiona.
Client communications. The quarterly newsletter, the annual review reminder, the "your fix is rolling off in 90 days" email. Fiona writes the human side of the firm's outbound communications. Craig writes the technical content; Fiona makes sure it gets read.
The human side of meetings. Fiona is in the office most days. She's not the adviser, but she's often the first person clients meet when they walk in, and the person they remember the name of three months later. A surprising amount of what makes a small advice firm feel like a relationship rather than a transaction is the welcome.
The brand. The lowercase "wealthhealth" wordmark, the W/H circle mark, the warm peach against navy, the decision not to put stock photos of suits and skyscrapers on the website. All of that is Fiona, working with the design team to make the firm look like the firm actually is, not like a finance company.
"Craig's job is to know the numbers. My job is to make sure clients still feel like real people when the numbers get serious." Fiona Coupland · paraphrased, to be finalised in Fiona's own words before publish
Why this matters in finance
Financial services in New Zealand is not famous for being warm. The default tone of the industry is corporate, hedged, technical. That tone is correct in some places, like compliance documents and product disclosure statements, where precision matters more than warmth. It is wrong in most of the conversations advisers actually have with clients, where what matters most is that the client trusts you and tells you the truth.
Fiona's role at the firm is, in a sense, to make sure the second kind of conversation is the one that happens most often. The advice still needs to be precise. The licensing still needs to be impeccable. The disclosure still needs to be watertight. But the conversation that produces all of that has to start with a real person on the other side of the table feeling like they can ask the obvious question without being patronised.
It is the unglamorous part of running an advice firm and it is, frankly, half of why this one works.
Outside of work
[Personal bio to be drafted with Fiona's input. Family details, community involvement, hobbies, the dog, anything she wants on the page in her own words. Current placeholder text is illustrative only and will be replaced before publish.]