Roy’s Foreword to Good Company

I asked my friend, mentor, and best-selling author, Roy H. Williams, to write the foreword to Good Company.

I was nervous to ask. Roy doesn’t typically do things like this.

But once, in 2004, he asked me to bite my lip about something and if I did, he’d owe me a favor.

It’s been eight years now that my lip’s been bitten. I didn’t remind him about the favor. It would have been bad form to remind him, and it wasn’t necessary, of course.

He agreed. I was humbled and touched by what he wrote:

There’s a cheap kind of success that looks the part but can’t quite swing the hammer. This cheap success is common among advertising consultants. You’ve seen it, I’m sure; an expensive suit, twinkling eyes, perfect teeth, a Rolex and a $100 haircut. Lots of name dropping.

Tim’s success was never cheap.

Tim can swing the hammer.

I invited Tim Miles to become my business partner after he had attended a few of my classes. You can tell a lot about a person when you grade their homework. Tim’s homework showed none of the tendencies common to young ad writers. Tim’s work reflected the wisdom of experience.

Young advertising professionals learn bitter lessons. The first of these lessons is that clever ideas don’t always work. When a man has a conscience, there is no better teacher than Failure. But you cannot meet this teacher until you’ve been given the opportunity to play the game of Marketing with real companies, real dollars, real responsibility.

As a criminally overworked ad writer for a group of radio stations with hundreds of clients, Tim Miles was crafting more campaigns every month than a Madison Avenue ad man will create in his entire career. This is not an exaggeration.

Think of it: hundreds of small companies running the ads you write for them, then reporting their results to you, month after month, year after year. Can you imagine a more perfect laboratory? Could there be a better classroom? In terms of real-world experience, Tim was 200 years old before he was 30.

All Wizard of Ads partners are given annual raises based on the growth of their clients. When I told Tim how much he could expect to make as my partner, his eyes widened appreciably. The amount I mentioned was about five times the salary he had made the previous year. Today Tim earns nearly four times what I promised him that day. Not because he charges a lot of money, but because his clients have grown and grown and grown.

And then grown some more.

Tim gets annual raises from happy clients who are delighted with the success he has helped them achieve. And now he is going to help you. With simple ideas, plain-spoken truth, the wisdom of experience.

Relax, you’re in good company.

Roy H. Williams, Tim’s partner and the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling Wizard of Ads trilogy

Thank you, Roy.

Good Company is on sale now. Buy one. Heck, buy ten.

If you buy a hundred, I won’t just cut you a deal.

I’ll cut your lawn.