Who We Are

A firm built around you.

Herbert & Webster began in 2010, founded on a simple conviction: that advice works best when someone independent sits at the centre of it, coordinating the banks, accountants and solicitors around a single plan built for the client. What grew from that is a chartered private wealth firm, independent, based at Marlow Place, serving a concentrated group of clients through the moments that genuinely reshape their lives.

Founded
2010
By Adam Herbert and Colin Webster, after years inside the large institutions
At Marlow since
2022
Moved our head office from Oxford to Marlow Place, the Georgian house the firm works from.
Team
4
Deliberately small. Every client knows every member of the firm.
Client retention
98.9%
Our average client relationship is now into its eighth year.
Our story

Good advice, written down.

Herbert & Webster is a firm we lead together. Adam co-founded the practice with Colin Webster in 2010; today, with Colin retired, we run it as husband and wife, alongside a team who care as much as we do about getting things right.

The firm began on a single conviction: that financial advice should serve the client, and no one else. Adam and Colin had both spent years inside large banking institutions. They cared about the people they advised and about the work of helping them shape a future, but they had grown weary of the limits placed on the advice they were allowed to give. Too often the right answer for a client sat just outside what they were permitted to recommend. They wanted the freedom to put forward whatever was genuinely best, drawn from the whole of the market rather than one provider's shelf.

So they built the firm they wished had existed. Herbert & Webster was established as an independent practice, directly authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, free to advise across the whole of the market and answerable to no one but its clients. Chartered Financial Planner status followed, held by fewer than 15% of UK advice firms, pursued not for the title but for what stands behind it: a promise of diligence, transparency and real care.

That same instinct, to do things properly rather than conventionally, still shapes everything we do. It led to our 3Ls methodology, which sorts wealth by its true purpose, liquidity, lifestyle and legacy, so that every pound is put to the job it actually has to do. It led us to build our own technology, the tools and integrations that give our clients a single, clear view of their wealth. And for families whose lives have grown more intricate, it grew into our Family Office service, caring for wealth thoughtfully across generations.

Today we are proud to call Marlow Place, in the heart of Marlow, our home. It is a building with a sense of permanence about it, which feels right for the kind of relationships we set out to build: ones measured in decades, not transactions.

Our clients are entrepreneurs, families and individuals whose wealth carries real complexity, and real responsibility. They come to us not for products but for clarity: a considered plan, honestly explained, that frees them to focus on what matters most to them. Their trust is something we have never taken for granted. It remains, as it was in 2010, the reason we do what we do.

Herbert & Webster
We are not trying to be the biggest private wealth firm in the Thames Valley. We are trying to be the one a narrow set of families can rely on for the next thirty years.
Adam Herbert · Founding Principal
Our team

The people doing the work.

A deliberately small group. Everyone you meet at H&W is someone you will still be meeting five years from now.

Founding Principal · Director

Adam Herbert

Co-founded the firm in 2010. Chartered Financial Planner and Fellow of the Personal Finance Society. Works mostly with founders and family offices.

Director

Marina Herbert

Director of Herbert & Webster, working across the firm's client relationships and its long-term direction.

Independent Financial Planner

Selena Hills

Works alongside Adam on the advice team, guiding clients through the planning that turns the 3Ls framework into a plan they can actually live with.

Digital Strategy & Operations Manager

Anthony Massie

Runs operations and the technology behind the firm, including our in-house Atlas platform and the wealth portal clients use to see everything in one place.

Our values

Five words we are willing to be judged on.

Values are easy to list and hard to live. These five are the ones we try to be held to, by clients and by each other.

i

Positivity

We start from what is possible. Good planning should open choices up rather than narrow them, and most people leave our meetings with more options than they arrived with, not fewer.

ii

Honesty

Independent and directly authorised, we tell you what we actually think, including when it is not what you hoped to hear. There is no in-house product to push and no introducer fee to chase, so the advice can simply be the advice.

iii

Humility

We see ourselves as the conductor, not the star. The best outcome is usually built from other people’s expertise, coordinated well, and we are comfortable saying when something sits outside our own and finding the right specialist for it.

iv

Clarity

Money is complicated; advice does not have to be. We write things down in plain English, so that you, your family and your other advisers can all read the same page and act on it.

v

Altruism

We measure success by your outcome, not our revenue. That shows up in the details: no exit fees, an allowance rebated toward advice you take elsewhere, and accounts always held in your name, with us or without us.

Visit us at Marlow Place

Best met in person.

We work slowly because the work we do rewards slowness. The first conversation is always the same: no fee, no pitch, an hour and a half.