Fear made her do it. Joyce (Johnson) Scott ’72 decided as a young mother to set a good example for her two sons by conquering a fear a year. Some years, she tackled physical obstacles like swimming and running. In 1978, the target was public speaking.
A computer programmer for the city of Beaumont at the time, Scott had been asked to speak at a local women’s conference about working in the male-dominated field. She turned organizers down the first few times they asked, but her 4-year-old shamed her into it. The speech went over well and led to other speaking invitations. Those put her on the winding path she continues to travel today, a path that moved from using and selling business-friendly technology to running a company that strives to help businesses and their employees work more effectively.
Scott and her husband, Lavanne Scott ’72, ’73, left Beaumont in the late 1970s for Tulsa, Okla. There, Scott took a job as systems analyst at St. Francis Hospital, which had computers that made her drool. She built on knowledge she had gained at Lamar while earning her associate’s degree in data processing and learned more about systems design on the job. She then became the information technology manager for Phillips Colleges, a company buying private business schools around the country, and developed skills in acquiring and setting up computer systems to deliver curriculum. On the side, she continued public speaking activities and gained increasing prominence as a woman making her mark in the growing technology industry.
“A woman who’d seen me at a conference said, ‘You really ought to think about IBM,’” Scott said. “They hired me, and, within six months, I was one of the top 100 performers out of 400,000.”
She credits her success to a career plan she first developed as a Lamar freshman
in 1969. A professor in an economics class triggered her imagination and
prompted her to think seriously about the impact of return-on-investment and
supply-and-demand on her potential in the working world. “Those two factors
triggered a burning desire for me to have a career that would always pay off with
good return for what I invested and would allow me to look at what the demand
was in the marketplace. I wanted to put myself in something that was in short
supply because that’s what I understood supply and demand was. You’re a more
valuable asset where there’s a high demand and there’s a very low supply,” Scott
said. She began researching career possibilities and settled on computer programming
because of the growing need for and short supply of people with those
skills, along with the availability of a good curriculum at Lamar.
At about the same time, Scott did a business analysis of another potential investment and decided it would pay off—she proposed to her husband, Lavanne, an engineering and math major and “a really smart guy.” They’ll celebrate their 38th anniversary this year. The young couple became dorm parents in the “nerd wing” of the men’s dormitory Plummer Hall, which also housed student athletes. “Whenever I’d go wash clothes, I’d have to yell, ‘Woman on the floor!’” she recalled. The university helped them get their start by providing a place to learn, to live, to work and to have fun. Date nights consisted of movies in the brand-new Setzer Student Center. After graduation, they both took jobs at DuPont until their two sons were born and Joyce took a few years off. When she re-entered the workforce, she started refining and following her career plan, continuing to pursue research on supply and demand, coming trends and what types of skills she needed to develop.
Her job at IBM, which took the family to St. Louis, Mo., initially was systems engineer. Scott’s previous experience with curriculum prompted her to set up her own training plan to learn as much as she could as quickly as she could. “I used all their services at IBM because they have tons. Then I’d go back immediately and apply what I’d learned. Within six months, I was on the executive resources list,” Scott said. The elite designation provided Scott with opportunities to study at Harvard BusinessSchool and to interact with top executives at the company. She became a top manager, taking on troubled accounts and turning them around by drawing on her experiences as a customer when she worked as an information technology manager. When she left IBM in 1992, after 10 years she was the No. 1 sales team leader. During the years, her successes at IBM had led to ever more, paid, speaking engagements for other organizations seeking training for their managers in performance improvement. IBM allowed Scott to take time off to speak, often for major companies like AT&T, and “the geek girl in me wanted to explain it to people,” she said. She did not, however, fully appreciate the potential of her speaking and training sideline at first.
“Sometimes we are just kind of naïve. I had no idea this was a business until I started doing some economic analysis of it, looking at the market, and realizing at the time it was a $50 billion industry,” Scott said. Family circumstances made a change of pace attractive to Scott by 1992. Her sons had finished high school, so uprooting was no longer a concern. Plus her father’s health was declining, so she wanted more flexibility to allow more frequent trips to Beaumont. She and her husband moved to Austin. Her husband continued his career with IBM, staying with the company 19 years before leaving to become a licensed financial planner. She ventured out on her own. Within a month, her company, Superb Speakers, was born. The name came from her first customer’s description of her.
“When you leave IBM, and you’re the No. 1 sales person, it’s not that hard to get people to buy you as a speaker. The problem was I’d had two surgeries the year before, and I had to recover from that. The solution for me was starting a bureau a few years later versus me being the person out there speaking,” Scott said. In 1996, her business evolved into a speakers bureau, which had been her goal from the beginning. “I had met so many wonderful experts from all over the world,” she said. “My best thing is not necessarily being the star. I don’t have the personality that needs that. What I need is for the world to understand something.” She sees herself as “a cheerleader of really brilliant people. Honestly, brilliant people don’t very often know how to sell that they’re brilliant. They are the most humble people.” She is happy to champion their expertise for them and group the right people together to work on the right projects. Scott still accepts speaking and training assignments, but her roster of experts now includes about 75 speakers listed on the company Web site. Another 150 consultants are available to her as needed. She also takes custom requests and works to find the perfect expert for whatever the topic and circumstance might be. Many of the contracts she takes are for longer-term training projects rather than keynoters for events. Some of her consultants would not be comfortable speaking in front of a group but provide insight in areas such as product marketing.
What she loves most more than 15 years after starting her own business is that “it’s the beginning. I’m so excited that at 57 years young, I just have nothing but optimism about the future. I’ve been asked to write books. I have all kinds of opportunities all the time.” Her next opportunity will bring her closer to home. She and her husband are planning a move to Houston. Like anyone else in the working world, Scott acknowledges that she has had “bosses from hell,” politics to navigate and fears to conquer. But she said she has never faced a dull day in her career. “I’ve never had a job that was a terrible job because I’ve planned it,” she said. “It started with my career at Lamar. My very first class in computers was logic. It’s all problem solving.”
