Some years ago I played a round of golf with an accountancy undergraduate. We needn’t concern ourselves here with who won. What I remember most vividly – and you may think this says something about my performance on the day – is a discussion about business management.

At one point I asked the undergraduate if his degree course touched in any way on how to run a company. I wasn’t especially surprised by his answer, which can be roughly summed up as follows: “Not really.”

Many people intuitively think of an accountant as a natural businessperson. The same assumption is often made about solicitors. Crucially, financial advisers are also routinely perceived as innately capable of building and overseeing a firm.

But this is a fallacy. The skills needed to develop and manage a company are entirely distinct from the skills necessary to excel in number-crunching, the law or ensuring the financial security of others.

I certainly know very few advisers who have business qualifications. I also know very few who are inherently blessed with an outstanding ability to lead, motivate, monitor, organise and train.

So why do so many advisers believe the optimum route to success lies in having their own firm? Why are they apparently hell-bent on shouldering all the responsibilities, difficulties and anxieties this entails?

As I’ve long since grown weary of saying, I encounter plenty of unhappy advisers. Most are super-stressed and severely overworked – sometimes to breaking point. Many simply don’t like what they do.

In a lot of cases, to their dismay, their misguided belief that they can head up their own company is what gets them into this mess. I consider this delusion the single greatest barrier to advisers’ all-round wellbeing.

The journey usually starts with an adviser establishing a directly authorised business, probably in partnership with another adviser. This in itself can turn out to be a mistake if the pair’s skills aren’t well matched.

Everyone knows too many cooks spoil the broth, which is why it’s rare to hear of two chefs setting up a restaurant together. Similarly, it would be manifestly unwise for a couple of car salesmen to open a garage, since neither of them would pass muster as a mechanic.

Yet numerous advisers think this sort of one-dimensional partnership is the way to go, even though most would even keep their own clients to themselves in such a situation. In many cases, sadly, the only thing that’s really shared is failure.

The longer-term strategy – however fanciful it might be – very likely includes expansion and further recruitment. In effect, this means the aim is to one day have a multi-adviser firm. While no-one should be criticised for harbouring such an aspiration, it’s vital to acknowledge that “bigger” is inevitably synonymous with “more complex”.

Our industry has already reached a stage where a directly authorised business must devote the bulk of its time to administrative tasks, including ever-mounting regulatory box-ticking. The more advisers a company has, the more onerous this commitment becomes.

Most advisers are familiar with the amount of background work nowadays needed just to satisfy compliance. Yet this is dwarfed by the enormous effort involved in enabling a multi-adviser firm merely to exist.

It’s temping to infer bringing in more admin staff is the solution. Guess again. This approach can just as easily extend and exacerbate the problem, placing additional strain on efficiencies.

Against this daunting backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that the principal of a multi-adviser business is seldom able to advise clients and be an effective boss. It therefore seems unhappy advisers face a stark choice.

The first option is to continue concentrating on delivering advice. Unfortunately, many advisers appear to find this insufficiently fulfilling and somehow inconsistent with what they regard as success.

The second option is to switch focus and embrace the day-to-day travails of managing a company. Equally unfortunately, most advisers don’t have the skills to meet this challenge.

This sounds very much like a dilemma in the truest sense of the word. There is, though, another option, which is to partner with a firm that’s already strong on the non-client-facing side.

In my experience, this can bring advisers happiness and success alike. They can spend as many hours as they choose doing what they do best – providing the kind of service clients rightly expect – while benefiting from a range of resources specifically designed to lighten their load.

My own notion of a happy, successful adviser is one who is directly authorised without the burden, independent without the research demands and supported without the costs. Importantly, it’s also one who blends ambition with pragmatism – that is, one who discerns opportunity but also recognises risk.

There can undoubtedly be opportunity in growth, but there can also be serious risk in overstretching – particularly for someone whose working life is already highly pressured and debilitatingly time-consuming. So let’s explode a potentially damaging myth once and for all.

The supposedly bad news is that financial advisers aren’t born businesspeople. But the unquestionably good news is that they really don’t have to be, as there are other routes to accomplishing their most cherished goals – not to mention those of their clients.

Andrew Goodwin is co-founder and CEO of Truly Independent and the author of ‘The Happy Financial Adviser’.