INSIGHT: Success by numbers
David Scrivener talks to Suffolk Director
“It’s so exciting that we are now fully part of Azets, and our ambition is to become the largest provider of accountancy services in the eastern region.”
Interview: Sue Wilcock | Martine Silkstone
Pictures: Warren Page
Sometimes people choose a career at a young age knowing that it suits their talents, but sometimes it’s the career that finds the person. Such is the case for David Scrivener.
At school, he enjoyed maths and always found numbers easy, but his true passion was for sport and he certainly never saw accountancy in his future. It was only an old-fashioned copy of the Yellow Pages that led to his now successful life as an accountant and business leader.
Looking back, he says: “Having established early on that professional sport was beyond me, I genuinely had no idea what I wanted to do. So, I just sort of fell into accountancy.
“Fortunately, I quickly realised it was a career that I enjoyed and actually, I was quite good at it.”
He is being modest.
Having started at the age of 18 as an accountancy trainee, he became chartered in 2002 and now holds the unique dual qualification of the ICAEW Corporate Finance and Joint Insolvency Examination Boards. He later co-founded the Corporate Finance Team at Ensors, before becoming Partner at 29, then the youngest Managing Partner ever elected just a few years later. In that role, he led the firm through Covid and laid the foundations for further growth – investing in people, teams, services and property. And we haven’t even mentioned that he also won ‘Dealmaker of the Year’ at the Emerging Leaders M&A Awards in 2017.
Most recently, he has used his wealth of knowledge and experience to co-ordinate the firm’s own acquisition by Azets, seeing Ensors become part of something much bigger while ensuring the maintenance of high standards and shared values.
“Quite good” indeed.
So, any leadership insights to share?
“It’s important to know the detail. If you know the nuts and bolts of how a business runs, then it’s far easier to manage. Starting as a trainee all those years ago, I gained a lot of that knowledge along the way.
“You also need to be connected to your business community, because the people you meet early on at networking events often become local business leaders.
“Most importantly, make sure you do the right thing by your colleagues and the business, always.”
Where it all began
David was born in 1979 (the year after Ipswich Town won the FA Cup, he is keen to add) and grew up in Ipswich with his parents and older brother, Matthew. Both boys, he says, were “super competitive” and “typically sport mad”.
“We drove our parents crazy playing football and cricket in the back garden and would often be banished to the park to save the lawn,” he remembers smiling.
At school David’s passion for sport continued, and he also enjoyed art and design. Maths was, unsurprisingly, his favourite academic subject, though he reluctantly admits that at A level, it was his worst grade.
“I am definitely good with numbers, but I genuinely found maths A level very difficult,” he recalls. “Fortunately, very little of what I learnt for that exam is relevant to what I do now; working out the area under a curve just isn’t that applicable to be honest! And, actually, education isn’t just about qualifications; learning how to get along with people from different backgrounds and gaining emotional intelligence are, in my view, much more important.”
And speaking of connecting with others…
It was at Northgate Sixth Form that David also met Karina, the woman who would eventually become his wife. They sat opposite each other in class and, in fact, she claims to have saved him from failing his maths exam completely.
“And she’s probably right, to be honest,” he says wryly.
Starting out
In 1997, having completed his A levels in maths, computer science and business studies, David still had no idea what he wanted to do, and a careers adviser suggested he write to lots of different companies to see if they had any vacancies.
He grabbed a copy of the Yellow Pages and got started.
“I didn’t get beyond the letter E,” he smiles. “I wrote to Ensors and, though they weren’t taking on trainees at the time, they invited me in for an informal conversation with the HR Manager. A few weeks later I was offered a job.”
Having secured the role, the first stage of his training was a Level 4 apprenticeship, which took two years and was a combination of exams and work experience. Learning from the ground up, David started by helping clients prepare their annual accounts. This usually meant sorting through boxes of paper invoices, receipts and bank statements, then putting together the figures required to show the profit or loss for the year.
“It could take weeks to go through everything,” he explains. “But that kind of basic exposure was a great way to learn and the best grounding that you could ever get. And you need that ability to understand what’s going on or you’ll struggle with more complex areas later on.”
After his initial training, David moved into auditing to gain some corporate experience while he completed his Chartered qualification. At just 22 years old, he was talking to the financial leaders of companies across a range of industries, eventually leading audits and being out on site; gradually developing an intuition for problems and errors that is still useful today.
He qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 2002.
Next steps
After two years in auditing, David decided it was time for a change.
He says: “I had been doing well in that department, and I had some quite significant responsibility for my age, but I really wanted to be an adviser; I wanted to add value. So, when an opportunity came up to co-launch the new corporate finance team, I decided to take a risk and jump ship.
“It turned out to be a great career move.”
Leading the way, David and his colleague Adrian Mole (great name!) quickly established a strong base within mergers and acquisitions. Then, when Adrian left shortly after, David took over his role and went on to build a great team of talented people, leading them for the next 20 years and increasing the department’s revenue by 15 times over that period. That team has since been ranked as one of the most active M&A advisers in the East of England, winning numerous awards along the way.
He says that the key to that success was a focus on listening to the client, understanding their goals and taking the time to discover how each business works.
“And you definitely have to understand the emotion involved,” he adds. “Often the clients we’re working with have been running their business for decades, and they have this one opportunity to sell it – that can be quite emotional. I know because I have just been through it.
“Transactions bring uncertainty for people, and one of my biggest jobs is to try and help smooth the process and give people reassurance.”
Family life
But life wasn’t all about work during those years.
David and Karina (also an accountant) had been together since those difficult maths classes in Sixth Form, then, shortly before they moved into their first house in Kesgrave, David proposed, writing the all-important question in the sand at Sheringham.
“I often think I should have picked a warmer beach,” he laughs.
Nevertheless, Karina said yes, and the couple were married at Westerfield Church in 2005, before a horse and carriage took them to Fynn Valley Golf Club for the reception.
(Interesting fact: David had broken his wrist playing football a few months earlier but delayed an operation to repair it so he didn’t have to wear a plaster cast on his wedding day. In fact, the break was only treated after they returned from honeymoon in Mauritius. Now, that’s true dedication to your nuptials!)
After six years of marriage, the couple welcomed their first daughter, Isabelle, but it had been a tough six years for David and Karina. While they had been eager to start their family, the journey to parenthood was not an easy one for them.
“It didn’t work out for us from a family perspective for quite some time,” David explains with understandable emotion. “We had quite a lot of miscarriages between the early days of marriage and Isabelle arriving, and we had all sorts of medical intervention during that time – so it was hard. Eventually, we got to the point where we thought: it’s just not going to work for us. So, we decided to go travelling instead and took an extended break to New Zealand. And while there we reset and decided to stop all treatment.
“Then Isabelle came along.
“We don’t know why it happened at that point, and I’m really careful not to oversimplify things because, though not many people talk about it, those kinds of difficulties happen a lot and everybody’s situation is different.
“And our experience has given me a very personal insight into that journey and an empathy; an understanding that you don’t always know what people are going through.
“For example, one of the first things you tend to ask when networking and trying to learn about someone, is: have you got family? I know that can be painful if it hasn’t worked out for you.”
Happily, their second daughter, Clara, was born in March 2015, making their family complete.
Today, they still live locally, and David describes Karina as “the glue that holds the family together”.
“I couldn’t do all that I do, and the kids couldn’t do all they do, without her constant support,” David says fondly. “She is an amazing mum and an amazing person as well.”
Moving up
At the age of 29, David was made an equity partner, becoming a part-owner of Ensors and member of the board. He had gained a wealth of knowledge about how to run a business over the years, but he was still relatively young for the role, and it was a big move to invest capital and lose the security of a guaranteed salary.
And the first few years were challenging.
It was 2008 and the financial crisis had left corporate finance struggling as the banks stopped lending, loans were called in and the markets went into steep decline. So, they diversified into forensic accounting, and David took on fraud cases and shareholder disputes, and later appeared in the High Court as an expert witness.
Over the next few years, things improved.
And in 2016, at just 36 years old, David was elected as Managing Partner.
“I was still relatively green to be honest,” he smiles. “It probably happens in all industries, but it’s very acute in professional practice. You tend to get promoted because you’re good at your job, then the higher up an organisation you get, the more you end up managing people. I’m not sure I was ready for that.
“It was also quite a strange dynamic at Ensors, because the Managing Partner was an equal shareholder, so you’re the boss, but there are 14 other shareholders that are also the boss. Managing that collection of equals takes a careful blend of democracy and empathy, together with the drive to make things happen.”
In that leadership role, David saw the firm through the pandemic in 2020, navigating the restrictions while Ensors remained as busy as ever.
Coming out of that unprecedented period, he decided it was also a good time to reassess his career. He needed to decide if he wanted to carry on as a leader or step back and do what he was trained to do; what he felt he was really good at.
In 2021, he went back to full-time corporate finance, where he could help people with life-changing decisions. And that’s where he stayed for three years, until the opportunity to become part of something larger presented itself.
New opportunities
The partnership model at Ensors had worked well, but it eventually came to the point where its lack of scalability was restricting the growth of the business. If they wanted to move forward, they would have to make a change. The firm had been approached by potential buyers many times over the years, but now it was time to seriously consider their options.
“We identified that we wanted to be part of something bigger, to open up more opportunities for our people and enhance our client offering,” David explains.
In 2025, they decided Azets was the perfect fit. Why?
“Ultimately, we chose the one we thought was right for the business and right for our people.
“When you look at the values of Ensors and you look at the values of Azets, they are the same. For example, Ensors has always prioritised training and Azets has a very similar ethos. Now we have more than 1k apprentices nationally and we are almost like a mini university.
“We also just really liked them,” he adds. “And the leadership team at Azets was running a firm just like Ensors not that many years ago, so there was a shared experience there.”
They agreed heads of terms in March 2025, and over the next five months David took charge of the transaction and delivered the sale. It was a challenging time with confidentiality an important factor during the due diligence stage and some uncertainty for staff, but part of the deal was ensuring that there was a solid plan in place for both clients and employees.
They completed in August that year.
Today, David is Regional Managing Director, running the six East of England offices and leading the continuing integration of the two companies, including the recent retirement of the name Ensors and rebranding as Azets.
So, what’s next?
“It’s so exciting that we are now fully part of Azets, and our ambition is to become the largest provider of accountancy services in the eastern region.
“It isn’t just about scale though. Because we are now part of a top 10 firm, it is possible for us to provide a wider range of services, delivered locally by people who know this community – I want to lead that vision.
“But actually, while I have got loads of ambition and I want to continue to do well in my career, my biggest goal is to be present for my girls – maybe because they were so hard to come by. Seeing my kids grow up to be two completely different but amazing young women is my greatest achievement. I never stop being proud of them and never hide from the fact that they are my ultimate priority in life.”
