Scott Taylor: A UK-born financial adviser slash DJ slash soccer coach
- Sara Ang
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
There are some conversations you have that feel like a time vortex. You sit down thinking you’ll talk for an hour, perhaps get a few good stories, and then look at your watch to discover a significant portion of the day has disappeared.
My conversation with Scott Taylor was one of those.
From the moment I met Scott, I sensed that he was “our people”. The MAY Brandworks kind of people.
Responsive, upbeat, positive, interested in other people, and a wearer of multiple hats.
A UK-born financial adviser slash DJ slash soccer coach. It turned out that was barely the beginning. I first met Scott in his DJ form. I was singing at the same event and he was behind the decks.
Every time I looked over, there he was, hands in the air, celebrating my songs as though I were performing at Glastonbury rather than a business event in Western Sydney. Honestly, he could start a side business as a professional hype man. I was very grateful for the hype.
Talking to Scott reminded me of one of those eighties birthday parties where everyone played pass the parcel. The music stops, another layer comes off, and there is another surprise underneath. With Scott, the financial adviser revealed the DJ, the football coach, the former tennis coach, the business owner, the actor, the migrant, the father, and the man who once died in an explosion on Home and Away and later reappeared as a lawyer.
But Scott Taylor is not a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none.
The more layers I uncovered, the more I realised almost the opposite was true. He has done many things, but he does not seem to do them casually. When Scott starts something, he tends to stick with it. He studies it, practises it, turns up and gets good at it.
Scott grew up in Broadstairs, a seaside town in Kent. At about 13, hanging around the Mad Chef Bistro waiting for an older friend to finish work turned into his first job. The Mad Chef was a heavily bearded character with colourful language and, in Scott’s memory, the general appearance of a drunken sailor.
Sport was already a big part of his life. Scott moved from competitive karate into tennis, then began helping a coach running programs across East Kent. When that coach moved on, Scott stayed and eventually ran programs himself. It becomes a recurring pattern in his story. A gap appears, and Scott steps into it.
He was planning to study German at university. Then tennis led him to finance. A connection through tennis landed him a junior role in a financial advice business in Whitstable. He started at the bottom, making tea and coffee, filing, photocopying and manually entering share prices from the Financial Times into client systems. Instead of finding it mind-numbing, Scott became fascinated by why the numbers moved.“I just found it so interesting,” he told me.
"He is not endlessly searching for the next thing. He is endlessly willing to participate in the thing already in front of him, and he tends to participate properly".
University was deferred and then abandoned. Scott kept studying while working, eventually gaining advanced qualifications in UK pensions. By about 21 he was sitting opposite clients with portfolios worth a million pounds or more, which presented an obvious credibility problem.“I had to know my stuff probably three times better,” he said. What interests me more is that Scott also became comfortable saying when he did not know something. “Nobody knows everything. I know my limits.” In business, where there is such a temptation to say yes first and work out the details later, that matters.
Scott learnt young that trust is harder to win than business and much easier to lose. Eventually he went out on his own and started Scott Taylor Wealth Management. Then Australia began appearing more seriously in family conversations. Scott sold his client book, applied for a job with Financial Accord in Sydney and got it. That was in 2010. Sixteen years later, he is still there. “Loyalty means everything to me,” he said.
What happened around the edges of that financial career is where the story becomes improbable. A client suggested extras work, so Scott gave it a go. He appeared in Janet King and Home and Away, where his caterer character was killed in a spectacular caravan explosion. (This is possibly my favourite sentence to write in an article about a financial advisor ever.)
(Later, Home and Away allowed him back as a surfer and then, magnificently, as a lawyer.)
So let’s talk about DJ Scott.
Scott had loved music since his teens in England, buying decks and spending his tennis coaching money on records. Then life got fuller and the decks gathered dust.
When COVID hit, Scott bought new decks and started playing at home again simply because he loved it. He asked the owner of his local gym if he could DJ while people worked out. The owner said yes, then asked him to play at an event. One opportunity led to another, then to an agent, a Sunday residency, and gigs around Sydney.
I love this part of his story because it would have been easy to leave the decks gathering dust and occasionally say, “I used to DJ when I was younger.” Instead, he started again. Not because he had worked out how to monetise it, but because he loved it. “I don’t want it to start feeling like a job,” he told me.
And perhaps this is where all those apparently separate Scott Taylors finally become one person.
Scott talks about financial advice with the same energy he brings to sport and music. But the part of the job that seems to matter most to him is not the markets or the products. It is the moment somebody realises that the numbers might allow them to live differently.
“When I have a client cry because now they can retire, that’s unbelievable,” he told me. “More than any fee you can ever charge somebody.”
That line reframed financial advice for me. From the outside, it can look like spreadsheets, superannuation, tax and investments, but for the person sitting on the other side of the desk the real question is often much more human. Can I stop working? Have I done enough? Am I going to be okay?
By this stage in our conversation we had travelled from a mad chef on the Kent coast to tennis coaching, financial markets, football, acting, exploding caravans and DJ decks, and I asked Scott what he thought the through line was.
“Getting hands-on,” he said. “If you’re passionate about it, you’ve got to go for it and follow your passions and interests.”
Then he added something that felt even closer to the truth. “I love helping people and seeing people improve.”
That was the line I kept coming back to afterwards because, when you look at Scott’s life through that lens, all the different versions of him stop competing with each other and start making sense. The tennis coach, the football captain, the financial adviser, the DJ, the father, the teammate. They are all expressions of the same instinct. He likes being useful to people. He likes seeing them get better. He likes helping the room lift.
It was the thing I had noticed the first time I met him, before I knew any of this. I was singing, he was behind the decks, and there he was throwing his hands in the air like I was headlining Glastonbury. At the time I just thought he was enthusiastic. Now I think that was the story in miniature.
The same thing appears in the way he communicates. Scott replies to messages with almost alarming speed, and when I asked him why, he seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.
“People are important, right? You’ve taken the time to message me. The least I can do is say thanks.”
The more I thought about Scott after our conversation, the more I realised the lesson was permission to be many things without being half-hearted about any of them. We are constantly told to pick a lane and become known for one thing. Scott’s life makes a different case. You can have multiple interests and still be deeply committed.
His life has not been a series of replacements. It has been an accumulation. The tennis coach did not disappear when the financial adviser arrived, and the teenager buying records was still there when he bought decks again years later. Perhaps that is the version of consistency I find most interesting. Not doing one thing forever, but becoming more yourself as you do many things over time. Maybe that is Scott Taylor’s Human Gold. Not that he has done so many things, but that wherever he goes, he turns up properly.
Want more stories like this? Join my list.
Comments