Dave MacKenzie planned to be a rock star. He started a band, Akiva, while he was at school and spent his time at university building contacts and playing every gig he could. Once he’d secured an economics degree, he moved back to his home town and put everything into his dream.

He and his bandmates found jobs – part-time maths teaching then a role as a junior trader at Spreadex, a spread betting company, in his case – that would let them earn enough money to get by without cramping their musical opportunities. In 2002 Akiva secured a management deal but, despite a rush of hope, it didn’t lead to much. “We were very excited but [the manager] was trying to manage us from America which, we realised afterwards, was a bit of a silly idea,” MacKenzie says.

Akiva recorded a few EPs but failed to get picked up by a label; instead, in 2004 they decided on a big push and invested their own money in recording an album, then spent a year doing everything that they could to promote it. This was expensive and, despite MacKenzie being pleased with the album itself, ultimately unsuccessful. “We didn’t sell an awful lot because not enough people knew who we were.”

At the end of that year, MacKenzie faced a dilemma: find the money and energy to do it all again, or accept that his professional future wasn’t in music. “It all got a bit much. We’d had this really mad year where we put everything in and we needed something to come out of it for us, but it didn’t ... it was hard to motivate ourselves to do it again.”

MacKenzie says that he’s always had a practical streak, but it took him a while to come to terms with the realisation that his life was going to take a different path from the one he’d always hoped for. “It was pretty depressing. There was a lot of the real ‘what am I doing with my life’ moments that you see in films, but I got over it. You have to.”

Fortunately, he was good at – and enjoyed – his day job. In fact, he’s so good at it that he’s recently been appointed to Spreadex’s board of directors, aged 28. While his mathematical skills and interest in sport were important to his success, his experience with Akiva also played a part. For a start, he refuses to take anything at face value and is happy to challenge received wisdom. “I question everything and don’t take anything for granted. In music there are a lot of false promises so you have to ask questions to get to the bottom of things.” He also picked up a lot of people skills, he says. “The band was a democracy of four of us and that could be really difficult sometimes, trying to make a decision with everyone thinking different things, but we always worked out a way to do it. In my first management position that helped a lot.”

The band didn’t disintegrate – the four are still close friends – but now they play for pleasure rather than to fulfil a dream.

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