Scott Stevens

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

My parents were entrepreneurs in the truest sense. Both left school at 12, and my dad began his working life cleaning windows. Together, he and my mother borrowed money, backed themselves and built a successful guest house, before going on to create a hotel and one of Jersey’s most popular restaurants.

That success transformed the opportunities available to me. It enabled them to send me to Sherborne School, something neither of them could have imagined for themselves at the same age. I knew what had gone into giving me that opportunity, so I was never going to waste it. It also gave me a perspective I have carried throughout my life: being educated alongside people from significantly wealthier backgrounds made me conscious, very early on, of the difference financial security can make.

Watching my parents build their own financial security from very little had a big influence on me. It gave me both an ambition to succeed and a fascination with what financial security can enable. That ultimately took me to London and a career in financial services.

Over the next 20 years, I built experience across investment management, sales, marketing and distribution, working with organisations including JP Morgan, AXA, Deutsche Bank and BNY Mellon. I then moved into financial advice with Quilter Financial Planning and St. James’s Place, where I helped shape adviser recruitment and the Financial Adviser Academy.

What all that experience has taught me is that our industry still has an enormous opportunity to help more people. Around 13 million people in the UK have between £50,000 and £5 million in assets, yet fewer than four million ever sit down with a financial adviser. Closing that gap is something I care deeply about. I’ve seen first-hand that good financial advice can change people’s lives. It isn’t simply about investment returns or putting the right products in place. It gives people clarity about what they have, where they are going and what is possible. Perhaps most importantly, it can replace uncertainty with confidence.

That belief has influenced a lot of what I’ve done outside my day-to-day roles too. I’ve run mini-MBAs in Money Management for young people, helped shape Future Financial Advisers, a website designed to encourage more people into the profession, and launched Life Beyond the Numbers, a podcast exploring the often-overlooked human side of money and financial decision-making. They all come back to the same idea: money is rarely just about money. It is about choices, confidence and the life you want to lead.

I’ve always been competitive. I played rugby to a high level, including with London Scottish, and came close to making the final England under-18 cricket squad. These days, some of that energy goes into cycling 50 kilometres into London most mornings. But sport also taught me something that has stayed with me throughout my career: individual drive matters, but you rarely achieve anything worthwhile on your own.

That is one of the things that attracted me to Mattioli Woods. It has the scale and capability to make a real difference, while retaining the entrepreneurial spirit to try new things and challenge how things have traditionally been done. For me, the opportunity is to use both to help more people experience the benefits of genuinely good financial advice.

And in many ways, that brings me back to where I started. My dad always told me: “You don’t need to be the best, but you do need to try your best”. I watched my parents live by that principle as they built their business from nothing and created opportunities for our family that they had never had themselves. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me ever since, and one I try to bring to what we’re building at Mattioli Woods today.