Scott Winslow • Wilmington, NC
Nabell Winslow Investments & Wealth Management • Cetera Advisors LLC
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I grew up in a small farming town in North Carolina. Our family worked the land, sold cash crops each year, and took on odd jobs to make ends meet. While money was tight, I gained respect for a strong work ethic, family values, and perseverance. I attended a nondenominational private high school on an athletic scholarship. I was a three-sport athlete and a pretty good student. That made for long days when combined with my chores at our farm.

I was an unusual farm kid—I loved reading The Wall Street Journal, looking at commodity prices, and asking why some families made it through tough times while others didn’t. I remember a family in our community losing their farm to estate taxes because of their business structure and lack of liquidity. That’s where the seed was planted for my interest in becoming a financial advisor. Looking at the families, business owners, farmers, and senior citizens in our area, I felt I could eventually help people like them. I was already assisting my father on business matters for the farm, especially tracking commodity prices and planning crop yields.

I attended the University of Mount Olive on scholarships and played soccer my entire time there. I earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in business management. I developed a close relationship with the chair of the business department, who acted as a mentor and helped shape my thoughts on portfolio management.

Toward the end of college, I interviewed with many financial companies. I was pleased to join Jefferson Pilot, a terrific company with a strong training program in financial planning, risk management, tax principles, insurance, and investments. After a few years, I left for a firm affiliated with GE Capital and later joined First Citizens Bank’s Private Wealth Management, where I served as a senior vice president specializing in wealth strategy and advanced planning. Our team essentially revamped the private wealth management group in our area, creating a sophisticated resource for both business and retail clients.

In 2013, Mark Nabell—one of my close associates—and I founded Nabell Winslow Investments & Wealth Management. Our goal was to build a firm focused on long-term client relationships, comprehensive planning, and customized portfolio design. We wanted the independence to deliver direct, actionable advice to clients without any consideration of a corporate parent. We were gratified when many of our clients chose to move with us. That confirmed the value of the advice we had been offering: goals-based financial planning backed by expertise in retirement, business planning, tax strategies, legacy planning, and specialized advanced markets.

We are a boutique firm headquartered in Wilmington, North Carolina. Our mission is pretty simple: to provide life-enriching financial advice and services that improve the quality of our clients’ lives.

We’re fully independent, but we affiliate with Cetera Advisors LLC for their open-architecture platform and support. We also have a sister firm, Partners Square, that helps us deliver advanced insurance, investment, and risk-management solutions for clients with more complex needs. Our four core areas of focus are retirement-income planning, portfolio management, business owner planning, and legacy planning, supported by additional areas of expertise.

Let’s focus on retirement-income planning. Between taxes, market fluctuations, and unexpected expenses, there are many pitfalls clients need to avoid when it comes to turning their retirement savings into consistent, reliable income. Our comprehensive process helps clients plan for future income streams to support not just their daily needs but ideally their aspirational lifestyle. By combining different strategies such as the bucket strategy, income flooring strategy, and systematic withdrawals with tax mitigation, we help clients create the income they need while minimizing inefficiencies and managing risk.

We believe there is an art and a science to financial planning. Building client relationships and deeply understanding their motivations, needs, and behavioral biases is very important. But that must be backed by a truly customized financial plan—one rooted in scientific and research-based techniques applied to real financial lives.

Our process starts with a lengthy discovery interview. After doing this for 30 years, I’ve learned to keep it simple. I typically open with, “Please tell me the top three things you’d like for us to help you achieve.” And then I listen. Everything flows from that conversation. We want to understand what makes our clients tick, what keeps them up at night, and what kind of relationship they want from us.

We often collaborate with CPAs, attorneys, and other professionals to take a team-based approach. That’s essential. When everyone involved understands the full picture, the client benefits. We’re not transactional—we’re relationship-based. We don’t charge for upfront planning. We treat it as sweat equity, an investment in what we hope will be a long-term relationship. Planning isn’t a one-time document. It’s a living, breathing process, and we want to walk along the bridge to success with our clients.

What’s your philosophy when it comes to investments?

My first rule? Be disciplined.

We practice goals-based wealth management. Once we know what a client is trying to achieve, we reverse-engineer the investment strategy. I’m not all in on one approach or against another. Some clients may need annuities based on conservative risk attitudes, but most need both fixed income and equity exposure—and all need appropriate short-term liquidity. We use every tool—active, passive, tactical, alternatives. But we use them deliberately.

We divide portfolios into four broad sleeves: passive/beta exposure; active management through SMAs, mutual funds, or our proprietary models; a tactical sleeve to help dampen volatility; and alternative strategies, when appropriate. This approach allows us to customize for each client’s situation—especially in retirement, where sequence-of-returns risk is huge. We want to be intentional and research-based in financing clients’ future obligations and goals.

The bucket approach is key. The short-term bucket includes very low-risk assets—Treasurys, high-grade bonds—to cover the first three to five years. The middle bucket, covering years five through 10, is balanced between stocks and bonds. The long-term growth bucket is designed to fund expenses more than 10 years out and is more heavily weighted toward equities. This structure helps with both the math and client behavior. When the market slides, clients can look at that short-term bucket and say, “I’m OK.” That helps prevent emotional overreactions during periods of volatility.

I’ve learned that markets are dynamic—and portfolios should be too. Active investment management plays an essential role in our process. It’s not a catch-all solution, but it helps reduce risk, control volatility, and respond in real time to changes in the market landscape.

With interest-rate uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and rapid sector rotations, simply buying and holding broad indexes can expose clients to unnecessary downside. That’s why we believe in blending active management with passive exposures—especially in the tactical and alternative sleeves of our portfolios. It allows us to pursue upside while defending against drawdowns.

Risk management isn’t a tagline at our firm—it’s embedded in every layer of our planning and investing process. We look at everything through the lens of risk-adjusted returns and educate clients to understand not just potential returns but the risks they’re taking to pursue them. Clients come to realize that beating the market is not the real objective—achieving their goals in a disciplined, long-term approach is. At the end of the day, investment management is about aligning with the client’s goals and keeping them on plan. That’s what we do. No magic formulas—just disciplined execution and education.

I hope they would say that they trust our firm to put their interests first and provide sound advice in building and executing a customized plan that suits their specific needs. I have heard more than once that a client has selected and remained with our firm because of our integrity, commitment, and depth of knowledge. I love being a financial advisor. I think that passion is something people can feel, and they know I’m always going to give them my best possible effort.