HGTV President Jim Samples: Lunch at Michael's (But at A Voce)

As a boy growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta HGTV President Jim Samples often accompanied his electrician father on jobs and learned how to master home repairs and upgradesquotI hated it as a kid but then really appreciated it later as an adultquot Samples told Jack Myers and me over a recent Lunch at A Voce quotI can wire a house plumb a house things like thatquot he proudly addedSamples39 interest in home improvement didn39t stop there As a young man fresh out of graduate school and newly married he purchased a home that was the very definition of a fixerupper quotThe only house we could really afford that we liked was in a neighborhood in Atlanta called Grant Parkquot he recalled quotYou could literally see through the walls from the inside to the outside without looking through a window We renovated the house during the first three years of our marriagequotquotI think it39s the best test of a marriagequot he continued with a laugh quotEverybody should do that when they are going to get married because if you make it through that you39re going to make itquotFor Jim and his wife Margaret several more homes and home renovation projects five in total in the Atlanta area would follow in the years to come That39s why he is fond of saying that since arriving at HGTV in September 2007 quotI39m now doing during the week what we spent all our time on the weekends doingquot Currently commuting between Knoxville where Scripps Networks is based and Atlanta where Margaret and their two daughters still reside Samples said once his family joins him full time they will eventually seek out another home and give it their personal touchSamples39 career path to HGTV would seem not to have been in alignment with his obvious fondness for homebased projects Rather he spent many years traveling to and working in other countries indulging in a passion for travel that like his flair for home repair has its roots in his childhood He learned Spanish as a kid and was quotfascinatedquot by it quotI loved the language the music everything about the culturequot he explained His mother39s father an engineer who worked in other countries also influenced Samples39 interest in foreign lands quotMy grandfather was an engineerquot he said quotHe lived in many places around the world I always admired the man As I was growing up he was never in Georgia but he39d come home for a few weeks in the summer Before I was born he lived in Iran and Lebanon He was always working on big projectsquotIn 1982 when Samples was an undergraduate biology major in the premed program at Presbyterian College in Clinton South Carolina he volunteered for a summer work program in Honduras quotMy grandfather lived in Colombia at the timequot he said quotI think that was maybe part of the interest All the Central America war conflict was going on and I wanted to volunteer in the refugee camps I was probably a little nuts but I was very committed I was opposed to our involvement there and wanted to go down to help But just before I left the volunteer program I was going to go with stopped accepting college students because it had become too dangerous They had another opportunity in Brazil I didn39t speak Portuguese but the languages are pretty close I ended up going to a small town in central Brazil for three months where nobody spoke English so I got a total immersion Then I came back and studied Portuguesequot He met Margaret during the first day of classesAfter deciding that medicine quotwasn39t his passionquot Samples went to graduate school at the University of South Carolina at Columbia and studied international business Upon graduating he worked in international banking for a few years traveling to South America the Middle East and Southeast Asia When the bank he was with announced that it was going to be involved in funding the Olympics Samples was assigned to work with the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games structuring broadcast contracts for the Atlanta GamesquotThat was my introduction to the entertainment businessquot he recalled quotI loved itquotJack Myers Jim Samples and Ed MartinHe moved on to Turner working in international business development and ended up running its Argentina operation for five years quotI did affiliate sales and marketingquot he noted quotYou39re kind of the regional representative so you end up doing all sorts of things My favorite part of the job always was the marketing And since it was all affiliate marketing going in and working with cable operators I did a lot of event marketing around Cartoon Network and CNNquotSamples paused quotYou39re wondering how did this guy ever end up at HGTVquot he said with a laughWhen Samples returned to Atlanta he became General Manager of TNT and Cartoon Network Latin America That led to oversight of cartoonnetworkcom during its early years which appealed to Samples39 inner technophile From there he became General Manager of Cartoon Network amp8211 a position that came to a high profile end in February 2007 when a marketing stunt in Boston on behalf of the series Aqua Teen Hunger Force led to a terrorism scare Samples stepped down in the aftermathLooking back Samples said quotIt was an out of body experience I can39t describe it When people ask me about it my takeaway from it is that it was a huge reminder that when you are in a situation where you are managing a large group of people in a large organization the things that you do you39re often touching in a very superficial way But you39re responsible for everything anyway that just kind of goes with the territoryquotWhat happened there was extreme in my case in terms of the consequences but it39s something that all of us in media are faced with the potential that such things can happenquot he continued quotI wish it had never happened It was traumatic It was the most intense couple of weeks of my life But I39m very happy with where I am career wise after that Maybe I was the unluckiest guy in the world that day Now I feel like the luckiest guy in the world I think about that year as being the best and worst year of my lifequotFollowing that crisis Samples decided to take a year off and indulge his longtime dream of hiking through Europe quotI went around and talked to a lot of friends in the industry and told them I was going to take some time off that I was not falling off the face of the earth I hiked in Europe for about three months over the summer Alone I hiked from a place near Arles in France to the western coast of Spain I followed the Camino de Santiago It39s an ancient European pilgrimage route that39s a little over 1000 miles Originally people walked it for religious reasons It takes you over some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe All along the route there are places set up for people to stay They39re like guest houses A lot of them are in historic buildings I stayed in an old English prison tower in an abbey in farmhouses There were days when I would walk six or eight hours alone through the woods or fields That is one of the most relaxing centering experiences that a person can havequotOf the bad things that happened to me this was the unexpected flip side gift of itquot Samples said quotFortunately I had the support of my wife It was rough for my family It was rough for me too because I missed them a lot But I blogged about it the whole time I was gone posted pictures every time I got to a village that was big enough to have an Internet cafe or something I had a cell phone with me and we spoke every day Europe has outstanding cell coveragequot His family met him at the end and they spent three weeks togetherDuring his journey Samples also spoke with Scripps Networks President John Lansing and Executive Vice President Burton Jablin and outgoing HGTV President Judy Girard every three or four weeks quotI met them before I leftquot he recalled quotFrankly it was the only job interview that I went on They continued their search but we had a great meeting in New York just before my trip and we stayed in touch over the summer Burton had done a long hike too We had that in commonquot Samples started at HGTV shortly after his return from EuropequotThere is probably not a more perfect job for me in the industryquot Samples smiled quotI said at the upfront when I was at Cartoon Network I was a rock star among my kids39 friends Now that I39m at HGTV I39m a rock star among my wife39s friendsquot

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HGTV President Jim Samples: Lunch at Michael's (But at A Voce)

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