captain and All Star quarterback of his football team during his senior year, his true love was baseball and the Boston Red Sox. “Sports were everything to me,” he remembers. “Whether it was bouncing a ball against the front stairs, buying baseball cards from the ice cream truck for a dime, or playing street hockey in the parking lot, I simply just can’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t playing something.” Scott’s parents were always extremely supportive of him, never missing a single game. “Maybe it was an Italian thing, but I’ll always remember my dad, sitting in the corner of the field during my practices,” says Scott. “He’d be smoking his pipe, watching every play, every move, and every success and failure. During the car rides home, he would only focus on the positives. And as I think about it now, I am who I am because of my parents.” Scott actually planned on playing both baseball and football in college, but he was only 5’7” and a whopping 165 pounds, so he knew he’d eventually have to pick a different route. When he graduated high school, he attended Babson College, a small business school just west of downtown Boston. “I had a classmate whose father was an alumnus there, and he told me that Babson didn’t have a football team,” Scott explains. “He said I should go there and stretch my skills by starting one myself. He actually wrote a letter of recommendation for me saying that I would be an excellent entrepreneur. What’s funny is that I didn’t know what that word meant at the time. I had to look it up in the dictionary. When I found the definition, I thought it summed me up perfectly. It was everything I wanted to be.” When he finally started at Babson, Scott had already drafted up a business plan to start the team. He met with the administration several times to argue in support of the plan and his strategies to raise money for it, and even though it was ultimately rejected, his lifelong career as an entrepreneur had begun. “Babson has been the top school for entrepreneurial skills in America over 20 years,” he reflects. “I learned so much about how to start and run a business, as well as the critical elements that you need to have in place to win. Conversely, they also taught us the importance of failing successfully and bouncing back when you’re hit the hardest.” Scott graduated from Babson in 1984 with a degree in Marketing and Finance and set off on his career path with his focus on the advertising world. He applied to every advertising firm up and down the east coast, but was rejected across the board. “The only upside of that episode in my life was that you could get a free beer 52
at the Babson Pub for every rejection letter you got,” he laughs. Eventually, he was hired by Design Options, a startup computer consulting firm in downtown Boston. “What I didn’t know was that they were going to teach me how to program in Cobol and Fortran… Right up my alley!” he jokes. After several months, Scott was working with a client at the Bank of Boston who was developing a new financial product that would revolutionize investments, taxes, and people’s retirement. It was called an IRA. Scott was so intrigued by the concept that he started researching financial services firms and was finally introduced to IDS Financial Services, which was then an 80-year-old company based in Minneapolis. Scott was invited to an orientation meeting, and out of 60 candidates, he was one of only two hires. Shortly after Scott started at IDS, the company was purchased by American Express and ultimately became American Express Financial Advisors. There was no office space, so Scott started off working from his basement, and with limited leadership and support, the first few years were a struggle. “I would wake up every morning, brush my teeth, and hit the phones,” he recalls. “I had to build my own client base by cold calling, conducting seminars, buying and dialing direct mail leads, and asking for referrals. I had a $500-permonth draw, and I had to cover my own expenses, including gas, leads, and my state-of-the-art IBM PC XT for $6,000. As you can imagine, my parents weren’t too happy with me. They thought I was nuts! My dad couldn’t believe I was working a commission-based job after they paid so much for me to go to school, and after I had taken out student loans of my own.” After a couple years of working 15- to 18-hour days and achieving considerable success, Scott was ready to quit. He had been offered a salary position with a competitor and he was prepared to take it, but then Amex hired a new VP for the Boston region. “Larry Post came on board with an incredible background,” Scott recalls. “We met, and he told me I wasn’t going anywhere. I’ll never forget the way he said to me, “You need to be smart enough to be dumb enough to do what I tell you to do for the next three years. If you do that, then I guarantee that you will have an incredible amount of success, both personally and professionally.’ I thought to myself, “Wow! So that’s what great leadership is all about—painting this compelling vision, sharing expectations, and letting me know what’s in it for me.’ I decided to stay.” Larry created a formal invitation-only leadership development program and asked Scott to join. It was an
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 8