Everybody Can Be A Star

In 2010, after 25 years as an award winning senior executive at American Express, Scott DiGiammarino started his dream business, Reel Potential. At the root of this entrepreneurial venture is an unyielding belief in the human spirit, and in the idea that everyone has inner potential waiting to be engaged. With this proven philosophy, Reel Potential partners with some of the major Hollywood studios, using their iconic movie clips to help inspire and engage people in the workplace. The company also helps teach college students the soft skills they need to land a great job upon graduation, and motivates consumers worldwide to maximize their true potential. “I’ve always believed in people,” Scott says. “Sometimes all it takes is a different way of communicating for a message to really be heard, and for inspiration to really be felt.”

During his last few years at American Express, Scott himself began to lose sight of the motivation that had first inspired him. Ever since he was a child, he had been fascinated by people who had achieved success, both personally and professionally. “Through watching people succeed, I learned quickly that if you help others get what they want, you’ll ultimately get what you want,” he explains. “So I spent the better part of my life working toward a career that engaged others to believe in what could be, which, in turn, provided financial freedom for my family and me.”

But because lifestyles of affluence don’t often come easily, Scott had mastered the art of putting his head down to get the job done. “I call it Hustle 101, which basically means trying to outwork the rest of the field,” he explains. This approach led him to he achieve tremendous success for over two and a half decades, but toward the end, he got the feeling that something just wasn’t right. Internally, he wasn’t as fulfilled as he’d been in the past.

Scott thought he was keeping that emotion to himself, but nothing could be further from the truth. One day, his two daughters, Amanda and Emma, approached him at one of their soccer games. “Dad, are you okay?” they asked. “You seem to be a little distant these days.  You’re quieter than normal.  We want our fun-loving, passionate dad back.”

Despite the numb exterior he had developed, his daughters had found just the right buttons to push to wake him up to what he really wanted his life to be about. “They were so right,” Scott says. “I wasn’t having fun at my job anymore.  I felt stagnated, bored and unchallenged. My goal had always been to make a global difference in the lives of others, and I just didn’t feel like I was doing that anymore.” Thus began the quest to search for the next chapter in his life—one which would help him make that global impact he dreamed of. He wanted to help motivate, inspire and engage the masses, and above all else, he wanted to bring the old dad back for his daughters.

At the outset of that quest, his thought process reverted back to his childhood days in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Scott always felt a pull to help others—an emulation of his parents, who provided best-in-class love and support to Scott and his brothers. His father was an Assistant Principal at a local high school, and despite his success in the school system, there were some years when he had to work multiple jobs to provide for the family of five. He’d supplement his day job by teaching driver’s education, working at a fish pier, painting houses—whatever it took to provide the lifestyle he envisioned for the family.

Scott’s mother had a similar work ethic. She had three sons by the age of 22 and then secured a position working in the health care space as an administrative assistant for various practitioners. Both of Scott’s parents were the shining example of Hustle 101, doing whatever they had to do, without hesitation, for their children. “I learned the value and importance of putting family first,” says Scott. “I saw how important it was to have a strong work ethic and to genuinely love and care for your family.”

Scott was the oldest of three boys, and the brothers loved sports from the time they could walk. While Scott played basketball, track, and tennis, and was the 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 who’s 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 twenty 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 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 ally!” 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 eighty-year-old company based in Minneapolis. Scott was invited to an orientation meeting, and out of sixty 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-per-month 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 incredible opportunity for a 25-year-old who was starving for leadership and direction. Within six months, he was promoted to a District Manager position, and within a year, he was ranked the top manager out of 836 in the country—a spot he held for three consecutive years.

Scott was then promoted to Field Vice President in 1992. He was asked to take over the Washington, D.C. region, which was ranked 173 out of 176 at the time. “I had my choice of ten different regions to run, but the D.C. opportunity seemed special to me,” he explains. When he finally arrived, he learned that he had his work cut out for him. With rampant compliance issues and employees blatantly not showing up to work, morale in the office was incredibly low. Scott took the office by storm, and within one year, he took the region to Number One in the country. “I took the system I learned in Boston and applied it to D.C.,” he says. “We put in a common vision, principles, values, systems, goals, roles, rewards, and accountability. We put the right people in the right jobs, and if we couldn’t change the people, we knew we had no choice but to change the people. And the key to our change was that we were extremely transparent in everything we did. Everybody knew what we were trying to do and the ‘why’ behind it.”

Over a six-year period, Scott went from 32 employees to 1,600. They grew from one office to over 200, and the three leaders underneath him multiplied to over a hundred. He was trying to build a dynasty—one that would set record-breaking results each and every year. Soon, however, it became clear they were growing too rapidly—something his boss termed “uncontrollable growth”—and Scott started seeing his leading indicators shake. He knew that if he didn’t do something creative, he could lose all of the success and goodwill he had built. But before he made any rash decisions, he and his team decided to take a step back and evaluate what was really happening—not only to their own environment, but also to the world at large. They wanted to understand how the new generation wanted to learn and what made them tick. Then, and only then, would they develop their long-term strategy.

Scott’s research lent him remarkable insights. He learned that attention spans were shrinking, so the days of the three-hour meeting were over. He learned that his employees wanted to learn by being entertained, especially by video. He also learned that, as people grew, so did the gap between the top performers and everyone else. “There’s something called the 80/20 rule, which states that, in a given work environment, 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the workforce,” Scott explains. “I saw that that was absolutely true, and that the other 80 percent of the workforce felt very much like a number. As Pink Floyd would say, these people felt like just another brick in the wall.”

With a strong belief in a collaborative approach to problem solving, Scott brought a cross section of employees into his office to find out what they thought the region should stand for. He wanted to find out what would make them proud to come to work each day, and what would motivate them to give their best efforts on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. “If you had a magic wand, what would you want leadership to do to help you maximize your true potential?” he said, posing his signature question. “What could they do to help each and every employee get what they wanted, both personally and professionally?”

Over the course of the multi-day meetings, the focus group came up with over 200 themes that they wanted their work to be associated with. Among those were courage, teamwork, ethics, principle-based decision-making, fairness, and transparency. “I then asked them to prioritize the themes down to the top five or ten, and they pushed back,” says Scott. “They said that they wanted to be known for all of them. I asked, how can we drive home over 200 themes in over 200 offices? ‘That’s what they pay you the big bucks to figure out,’ they told me.”

That weekend, Scott went to the movies and saw Braveheart and was struck by the sheer volume of scenes that inspired and motivated him. He found himself thinking how great it would be if he could share those emotions with his team. “That’s when it hit me,” he avows. “I decided I would figure out how to use movie clips to help drive the theme-based culture my employees wanted.”

With that, Scott began sending out weekly theme-based emails to all 1,600 employees. For example, one week’s theme might be courage. He would start with a brief explanation of why the theme is important and would then say, “It kind of reminds me of the movie Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise. And for those of you who’ve never seen the movie, it’s about X, Y and Z.” Scott would include a clip, and would then invite employees to share with him the most courageous decision they had ever made in their lives. “I’d receive back between 200 and 300 stories a week, and what was amazing was that most of them had nothing to do with business,” he describes. “They were all about something that happened personally—maybe a story from when they were nine years old. I read each and every one of them, and with the author’s permission, I’d share the most compelling and emotional stories with everyone else on a weekly basis.”

Thanks to this story sharing strategy, the environment began to change dramatically.  People started to feel more connected and team-oriented, which in turn prompted the employees to look out for one another. “I felt as though I went from 100 leaders to 1,600,” Scott says. “If you were having a bad day or a bad moment, there was someone to support you. If you needed help, someone was always there to pick you up because they genuinely cared about you and your success. The team was more energized than ever before, and as a result, we maintained one of the top rankings amongst American Express divisions for over two decades. They had Best in Class metrics and, most importantly, Employee Engagement scores, and ours were through the roof.” Scott won countless awards for his efforts, including the Leader of the Decade Award and the prestigious Diamond Ring—although neither could compare to the Coach of the Year Award he won when he led his daughters’ soccer and basketball teams.

The Amex team’s success soon drew the eyes of the corporate office, who sent in a number of internal and external consulting firms. “They wanted to see if what I was doing was legal, and to find out if it could be replicated across the entire global organization,” he laughs. The observing firms published their findings in a study, a large section of which focused on the environment, the culture, and the galvanization of principles and values that came from the storytelling and movie clips, which strengthened the overall motivation, inspiration, drive of everyone involved.

The next thing he knew, Scott was giving keynote speeches at national conferences and mentoring countless leaders throughout the country. He was even asked to host an internal television show. Through all of this, he used the magic of film to help his messages come alive—something that especially hit home at a speech he gave in Las Vegas entitled, “Leaving a Legacy.” Afterward, a woman came up to him. She had laughed and cried through the presentation, and she was so moved by the experience that asked if Scott had considered doing it full time. “My goal in life was to be a great dad and husband, so I didn’t want to be a motivational speaker,” Scott explains. “But she gave me the courage to start calling the Hollywood studios to see if there was potential. I knew we were onto something special, and I asked the studios to partner with me to try and change the world.”

It took over nine years of negotiations, but Universal Studios finally stepped up and agreed to partner with Scott. That’s when he left American Express after 25 years to start launch Reel Potential, the first and only company in the history of Hollywood to gain legal access to movie clips for B2B and Higher Educational purposes.

Today, Reel Potential uses these movie clips to help business leaders inspire, motivate, engage, communicate, and teach soft skills to employees and students. The experience is short, compelling, entertaining, and memorable, and therein lies its power and efficacy. The company has also expanded its impact by allowing people to share their experiences and stories on its new social community portal. “The ROI has exceeded all of the expectations we had for engagement scores, activity, and email open rates,” Scott reports. “Everyone wants to see what the movie is.”

Today, Reel Potential has over 3,000 expertly curated and meta-tagged movie clips.  They work with medium- to large-sized companies, especially those that are decentralized. They also work with colleges and universities to teach students the soft skills that have become a necessity in today’s inundated job market. They also use their movie clip library to help supplement e-learning and corporate strategy. A highly sought keynote speaker, Scott also delivered a talk at TEDxRockCreekPark, entitled “Why Movies Move Us,” in which he discussed the impact movies have on humans and the neuroscience behind it. After a brief hiatus, he’s back to living his dream of trying to inspire and engage the world, and at full velocity.

Throughout his extensive career, Scott has learned firsthand how to be an empowering leader. Some of the lessons came from his parents, while others came from his daughters, Amanda and Emma. But the most influential person in his life has been his wife, Shelley.  The two met at Babson, and she went on to become a CPA in the audit division of Arthur Anderson. “She’s brilliant,” he beams. “She’s my wife, my best friend, my business partner, and my confidant. Every decision I make, I ask myself if I’d make the same decision if Shelley, Amanda, and Emma were sitting on the couch watching me. Would they understand and support why I made the decision? Having them by my side through the years has been immense!”

Just like that pivotal day on the soccer field, Scott’s daughters keep him centered and are a constant reminder of why he’s doing what he’s doing. In return, he tries to teach them life lessons, often showing them movie clips that he hopes will shape and change their lives. The exchange of film and inspiration has become so pervasive that now, the girls have started picking out footage of their own to augment their father’s library of clips.

Now that the 80/20 Rule has been explored more thoroughly, we no longer have to wonder if underachieving employees lack some crucial element unique to top performers. Rather, they have just as much drive, determination, discipline, desire, and decision-making capacity as anyone. They’re just as good, if not better, than the best of the best—they just don’t know it yet. “I believe that there’s so much opportunity out there for everyone,” Scott affirms. “I have this deep belief that greatness is inside all of us—it’s just a matter of finding it somehow, someway. Just imagine a world where we can truly tap into that greatness. Our success would be so incredible that we’d all be able to write our own Oscar winning, Hollywood story. I believe everyone has that potential, and Reel Potential is all about finding it.”

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