Hey, I’m Scott and joined Reef on the 20th April 2015 as Head of Digital where I will be helping to develop and deliver digital strategies for clients (and for Reef) that meet and exceed business KPI targets and result in a positive return on investment.
After deciding university wasn’t for me, I started my working life straight from college as a fitness instructor and personal trainer for a fairly large health club chain in the North of England.
At age 19 I was a year into this role and full of ambition so opened up a sports supplement shop with a friend and fellow fitness instructor. I carried on in a similar capacity for another 18 months to 2 years and during this time became friends with a regular client who owned a mortgage brokerage.
Now at the time, mortgage brokers were doing VERY well for themselves! The property market in the UK was booming and lenders were falling over themselves to give you a mortgage.
Me being young and ambitious but also a little impulsive at the time in my scramble for success, thought it would be a great idea to do a complete u-turn and become a mortgage broker… so that’s what I did!
I made my way through the qualifications, self studying in my own time before eventually becoming fully qualified and breaking into a role as a mortgage broker.
When I first got going it was good… then the recession hit! Que the next few years of struggling and redundancies! Believe it or not this was the hardest yet most important period in my working life to date!
It was these hard times that forced me to seek alternative income streams and in doing so, led me to digital marketing! I was instantly hooked!
I was working a full 8-10 hour day in my current mortgage role then coming home and spending another 3 hours or so every day teaching myself digital marketing. Learning, trying, testing every day for the next 2 years or so but I loved it! I loved everything about digital marketing and couldn’t get enough of learning and doing.
Anyway all the hard work finally paid off! After creating some successful websites I decided it was time to follow my passion and do what I love, that being digital marketing. I landed a job at an agency in Manchester and never looked back.
I started as a digital marketer about 5 years ago, developing my skills in SEO, PPC/SEM, social media, content marketing and conversion optimisation and working with a variety of clients from manufacturing to retail to finance, local, regional and national brands and even a global product launch for one of the most well known brands in the world.
My career developed in line with the growth of the agency and when I left for Australia, I had progressed to Head of Digital and been employed in this capacity for the last couple of years, reporting only to the owners of the business.
I’ve always wanted to emigrate with Australia being the number one destination of choice, so when the opportunity presented itself, I had to grab it with both hands and so far loving every second of it along with some exciting future plans for Reef! Watch this space!
In my spare time I’m often deep into learning and developing my digital marketing skills and researching new strategies, one because it’s important that I stay ahead of the curve and on top of my game by keeping knowledge and skills up to date but two because I just really like it!
… but I do have a life as well! The old work hard, play hard saying rings true for me I guess. I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, I’m willing to try most extreme type stuff and am always chasing new experiences. Recently I’ve learned how to snowboard so would really like to get out to some great resorts and hit the slopes in the near future. (that’s not me in the main image, just thought it looked pretty cool!)
Always up for a round of golf as I love being outdoors so looking forward to playing more in the great Australian sunshine compared to the grey skies of the UK! Also love walking, mountain biking and generally just being out and about “doing stuff”.
Really into health, fitness and weight training. Hit the gym usually six times per week in the morning with a mixture of weight training and cardio and try to be really strict with my diet through the week but at weekend there’s nothing I like more than to go out for a meal and kick back with an ice cold beer!
Hopefully this gives you a bit more insight into who I am and what I do but please feel free to send me a message or post a comment and I’ll be happy to talk and answer any questions you may have or if you just want to bounce some ideas off me feel free, always enjoy marketing related discussions!
Find me on Twitter and Linkedin too.