The Ad Copywriter Behind Billion Dollar Brands with Roy H. Williams – EP 247

Justin Donald: What's up, Roy? Good to have you on the show.

Roy Williams: You know, I always enjoy spending time with you, Justin. I've been looking forward to this. What are we going to do?

Justin Donald: So have I. And this is the fun of it is like we got into such cool content the last time you and I hung out and I had no expectations of what it was going to look like and it was just a blast. And I feel like today we're going to show up and we're going to go down some rabbit holes that we probably never thought we'd go down and I can't wait.

Roy Williams: Doubtless. We will do all of those things. I'll follow your lead.

Justin Donald: Wonderful. Well, I would just, first of all, like to say just so everyone listening, everyone watching this, I hired Roy for a day and Roy is a true marketing genius, just a whiz to play on words for wizard, which we'll get into here today. But I was blown away by your interest in me and my team and what we're up to, and I was blown away by the level of detail that you think with your ability to think outside the box, with your ability to draw stories and narratives around all the talking points and ideas you have. And so, I want to bring some of that to our audience here today because it was fun.

Roy Williams: Justin, most people are rambling. They said, “Roy, you're just rambling. You need to get…” You seem to appreciate the illustrations and the backstories.

Justin Donald: Yes, I do. And like you, I'm a huge proponent and just lover of film and books and poetry, and I know that you thrive in this world. I had the luxury of having you give us a personal tour of your facility, which was incredible, Wizard Academy. And it might be fun to give a little backstory. I mean, we could go through all the accolades. I mean, you've written tons of books. You've written, I mean, five big, huge books, but then probably another 20 smaller books. And I've read, I mean, I got a whole stack of them right behind me here, and I read all of them.

And beyond that, you've got this incredible campus and you teach. You're a lifelong student, as I am, and I love that, and you teach cool stuff. But I was just blown away by your collection of art and artifacts and history, historical, like just the books you have, the knowledge you have. So, it might be fun to start there.

Roy Williams: You’re very kind because everybody says, “Roy, you're a hoarder. You're a hoarder.” And I'm really not. If you have really cool stuff, you're a collector and you're not insane, you're eclectic. I think I'm eclectic and everybody else says, "No, you're just nuts.” So, now that we've got that cleared up, you mentioned poetry, the arts, you mentioned advertising. I call all of those things alternate realities. And in my business, the thing you have to keep in mind is if you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. And when you really understand that and you trust it, you can write really remarkable ads that grow very big companies.

And I’ve been doing this for 40 years. And along the way, you do gain a certain knowledge of literature and certainly poetry and music, and of course, all the arts and so sculptures and paintings. It's embarrassing. When we finish these last three buildings we're working on, I will distribute to people I care about many, many, many thousands of things that I love, but I love the people more than I love the things. And so, I said we've run out of wall space. We've run out of 32 acres of land to put buildings and sculptures and what we call the Easter eggs. The guidebook, Justin, whereas a self-guided tour on the campus, the last time I looked at it, I said, "If a person went and looked at everything, here's pictures and here's how to get there, it's about eight hours, maybe nine hours.”

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: You give yourself a self-guided tour around the campus and look at all the really notable things to look at. And so, yeah, maybe I am a hoarder. I don't know.

Justin Donald: Well, I love it. And you're a huge fan of Don Quixote. You've got tons of his art and books and writings and just pieces of history from him and from that era. But you've done the research around him and around other people in that time. And so, your whole facility is incredible. So, I love that you're actually gifting some of these to the people you love because the legacy lives on so much further than it being in one place. So, I think that's really cool.

Roy Williams: Well, the thing most people don't understand because we haven't talked about it, we're deep south Austin, Texas, which is on the Texas Escarpment. Now, the Texas Escarpment, if you're looking at a topographical map of the US, it's where the green meets the brown. Now, the Texas Escarpment is a ridge. It's 1,100 miles in kind of a backward C shape, and it runs from North Texas down into Mexico. And it's where the crust of the earth broke during continental drift. It just literally the tectonic plates and then, bam, it broke like this.

So, it's a very tall cliff, and all of these artesian springs, there's five of them in Central Texas, just tens, hundreds of thousands of gallons a minute gushing up out of the ground and it forms huge pools of water in the limestone of the area. We're on a plateau and we're actually just about 900 feet above the City of Austin. We have a tall tower on the top of that plateau. Now, sticking off the edge of the cliff, we're right on that break. And so, from that Texas Escarpment, Justin, all the way to the east, long smooth, flat decline to the Gulf of Mexico to the west begins the Texas Hill country, and then the high desert of West Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and then the mountains that border California.

And so, the chapel sticks off the edge of the cliff. 1,100 weddings a year there for free. We host weddings for anybody that wants to go to ChapelDulcinea.org, WizardAcademy.org. And like I said, it's a lot of fun. We got started exactly 20 years ago on that property and I've had our construction team working six days a week for the past 20 years.

Justin Donald: Wow. That's incredible. And beyond just these cool structures and the history and where you put certain buildings and this tower with the sword and all the cool things, the views that you have, you have this secret room that has one of the largest whiskey collections I have ever seen. It has to be one of the largest in Texas. Maybe it's one of the largest in the US. I mean, it is really incredible and you have sommeliers there that can do self-guided tours of whiskey, not just the facility.

Roy Williams: The top two largest whiskey review channels on YouTube belong to my son and it's the Whiskey Tribe. And then close friend, Daniel Whittington, is the chancellor of Wizard Academy, and he has a thing called The Whiskey Vault. And you were in The Whiskey Vault. Both of those are on YouTube and I'm not a whiskey guy. We built a distillery and the very first whiskey that was released like three and a half or four years after we built the distillery, you then have to let it age, it actually won in a blind-tasting best whiskey in Texas, which is remarkable because they had to, not me, but they, Daniel and Rex, had to beat two world champion whiskey… Because there are two Texas distilleries that won best whiskey in the world. And they accidentally won this thing by four-tenths of a point.

Justin Donald: Oh, my goodness. Is Garrison Brothers one of them, one of the two?

Roy Williams: Probably. And the other one is Balcones.

Justin Donald: Okay. Yeah.

Roy Williams: Yeah, Balcones and Garrison I think are the two. And so, it's a blind tasting. And this was Eleanor, which is the very first whiskey they made. And I think it was because of… I said I don't know what I'm talking about, but they talk about the narrow cuts. And if you want to increase your production, you make your cuts a little wider, but the heads and the tails are not good. And so, it's like the middle of a watermelon. It's really, really marvelous right there in the middle of the entire batch. And then you have to rerun it, rerun it, rerun it. So, if you take an enormous amount of time to make a very small amount of whiskey, you can make it really good. Isn’t that true in everything, Justin? Isn't that true of everything?

Justin Donald: Yeah, it is.

Roy Williams: The more time you spend on something, the better it is. And the more you hurry through it, the worse it is.

Justin Donald: That's right. But it's tricky because you spend all this money and all this time and it's years to know if you actually have a good batch or not. You don't know if you have failed or succeeded for many years.

Roy Williams: They did little pipings in the barrel. They stick a little pipe down in there and they draw some out. So, they kind of can be aware along the way how it's progressing. I seem to know a lot about it. Though I'm not a whiskey guy, I'm just listening to these guys discuss it as I wander around during the day.

Justin Donald: I love it. Well, for this last meetup, I brought our head of marketing, Phoebe Mroczek, and then our COO, Ryan Casey. And they're both just wonderful friends, great people, but Ryan is a whiskey aficionado and it was fun seeing all these whiskeys he's never seen, he's never tried, so many like I've never heard of. So, it was a special experience.

Roy Williams: There's many, many thousands of bottles and like I said, floor to ceiling with what, 14-foot walls. And it seemed ridiculous. It's kind of a… it's a little bit like a comedy.

Justin Donald: Yeah. It's great. So, let's figure out, let's talk through how Wizard Academy became what it is, how you became the Wizard of Ads. So, in your first book, you had a magnificent, I guess, what do we call it, just approach into the writing space. And you were heralded as, basically, it was the business book of the year and the aficionado like the expert when it comes to writing ads. And you followed that up with the second book, the Secret Formula of the Wizard of Ads. You followed that up with a third one, the Magical World of the Wizard of Ads. But then you have this whole campus called Wizard Academy, and I'd love for you to walk through this whole idea because if you just hear the name like Wizard Academy, you're like, "Okay.”

Roy Williams: It's a filter. Justin, it's a filter. Very good point. People and organizations, they can't get past the name. They didn't read enough about it. They just made a hasty decision. We think of that as a filter because if they can't push past that, we don't want them around. They're just going to be annoying. They're just going to be uptight and annoying. And so, it's kind of like, yeah, please stay home. But the real story is a person who cowers is a coward. A person always drunk is a drunkard. And in Matthew Chapter 2, it's the only book of the gospels that talks about the wise men and so the wise men come from the east. And it's actually a Milton in 1621, 1629, the very first thing John Milton ever wrote was a poem called On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. And he said:

See how from far upon the eastern road

The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:

O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,

And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;

Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,

And join thy voice unto the angel quire,

From out his secret altar touch'd with hallow'd fire.

That's just one verse but it's basically saying, "Look, there go the wise men. They're almost at the manger. Run. Get there before they do. Be the first to present your gift.” But here's the point. In 1605, what the King James translators translated as wise men, Milton, 18 years later, refers to as wisards, W-I-S-A-R-D-S. And if you get the Unabridged Oxford English dictionary, the OED, it will explain to you that it has nothing to do with Harry Potter or wands or magic. A person who has accumulated knowledge is a wisard, a wizard. And when we say Wizard Academy, there's actually a place just past Chapel Dulcinea, where all the weddings are, sticking out over the edge of the cliff.

And then there’s a thing that we call Explanation Point and very few people find it because you have to go another maybe 40 yards past the chapel down that trail. It’s a huge stone monument with these gigantic bronze plaques on it. And here's Matthew chapter 2 over here. And over here is the thing from Milton on the morning of Christ's nativity. And it's just kind of an explanation, wizard equals wise man. That's it. So, I started writing a thing, the backstory, Justin, that you were looking for. Golly, it's been 31 years ago. It was in 1994, May of 1994.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: I started writing a thing called the Monday Morning Memo. Now, ‘blog’ was not even a word yet. It would be a couple more years before the word weblog became ‘blog.’ And so, I started writing to my client, just a little thought for the week. And I would send that out on Monday, or excuse me, Sunday night at midnight. So, very first thing, the first moment of Monday morning, just after midnight. So, when they woke up on Monday, it would be there. And this was before email was a thing. Honest to goodness, most people did not have email. So, for the first few years in the mid-90s, I was sending this thing out by fax.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: You had to pay long-distance charges back in those days. That's pre-internet, pre-voice over IP. And so, everything was landlines and you had to pay long-distance charges. And all of these clients would say, "Oh, my friend read the thing you sent me. He wants to know if he can get on that list.” I said, "Sure.” And I would add all these numbers and after a while, I'm spending $2,000 a week in long-distance charges to send this little newsletter by fax. And I always made…

Justin Donald: And manually entering it, right, because back then you had to do it number by number.

Roy Williams: No. I got a special machine.

Justin Donald: Okay. All right.

Roy Williams: And they did have fax machines that would store numbers and it would have the numbers and you only had to scan the thing one time and it would store the thing you're going to send. Now, you'll notice in all of the Wizard of Ads trilogy, all the chapters are basically the same length and that's because that's the number of words you can put on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper in 11-point type Helvetica. And so, all of these things are this little one 8 x 11 thing. And the Monday Morning Memo has been going out now for 31 years every Sunday night at midnight.

Justin Donald: That's incredible.

Roy Williams: And the thing is…

Justin Donald: By the way, I have my Monday Morning Memo pulled up right now because I love your writing. So, as a friend and fan, your writing is some of the best out there and I just want to encourage people to sign up for your list.

Roy Williams: Well, anyway, it's a double opt-in. Most people get confused. They think about keep signing up, and it keeps not sending it to me. Now, I'm going to say something that's going to shock you, okay?

Justin Donald: Okay.

Roy Williams: My webmaster's been with me for about 20 years. He knows if he ever reveals to me how many subscribers we have or how many people we lost because they got annoyed at something I wrote, if he ever gives me any feedback of any kind, he's fired. It's an unbreakable rule. I just don't want to know. The reason is, for me, it's not a marketing tool. All I'm doing is I've got thoughts. I'm just going to share these thoughts. This is what I've been thinking about this week, and if anybody doesn't like it, just unsubscribe. Go away. But yet, I'm not thinking about I'm trying to build a channel here. And so, everybody wants to know how many subscribers we have. I literally have no idea.

Justin Donald: That's awesome.

Roy Williams: And so, I know that a lot of times people go, "Oh, you're probably going to lose a lot of subscribers over what you wrote this week.” And I'm going, “I’ll never know if I did or not.” If I got that feedback, Justin, if I got the feedback of, "Okay, people didn't like that,” or, "People did like that,” or, "They really loved that,” it would affect what I wrote about. I don't want to be affected. I want to just be able to do kind of a purge, a brain dump of the things that have been running through my head this week. And I write for myself very selfishly. I write just as an exercise of processing. Now, I just put it out there and whatever happens is fine.

Well, I’ve been doing this for several years and Ray Bard, he’s retired now, that Bard Press is the most prestigious publisher of business books in history. He's the only publisher that's ever gotten into double digits of his total number of books that were bestsellers. Most publishers have never even hit like 10% or 12% or 15%. It's just like an impossible dream. That percentage of your books would be New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. Ray Bard, in his career, more than 50% of all the books he ever published.

Justin Donald: That's unreal.

Roy Williams: Yeah. And so, he was reading the Monday Morning Memo and he said, “Hey, you've written about a thousand of these.” I said, "Yeah.” And he said, “I'm going to gather up a hundred of them and put them in a book,” and I said, "Knock yourself out.” And that was the Wizard of Ads. And then he picked up another hundred of them and arranged them and it was Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. And then he picked up another hundred of them and published it and it was Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads. And then my wife and I, she's the one that bought the land, had the idea for the school. Justin, you asked for the backstory. Here's what happened.

We got calls. Corrine Taylor's now been with me for 28 years. You met Corrine. Well, she's my operations manager and she schedules my world. And every day she answers the phone of people wanting to schedule a meeting or see if they can hire us and she explains that's more tricky than you realize. It's kind of hard and you have to fly here. He's not going to get on the phone with you. And so, I was feeling bad about that because it seems kind of standoffish, but you just don't have the time to just get on the phone with all the people that want to talk to you, and answer all the questions, respond to all the emails.

And I said, "Here's what we're going to do.” I said, “Penny, let's find a really nice hotel.” We did it at the Four Seasons. I said, "We'll rent a big room and the equipment and we'll just tell people, ‘If you're willing to fly to Austin, we'll spend a long day and I will tell you as much as I can possibly teach you in a day.’” And, honestly, Justin, it was about conscience. I just wanted to basically know once a month, I'm just going to give it a day and give everybody as much as I can teach them in a day and then they can go home and be better for it, hopefully. And then I said, "Okay. They're going to need to eat lunch and I don't want to charge them anything to come. And so, we'll pick up the tab for lunch.”

And every month I would say, “Hey, if you want to come, this is the day we're going to do it. This is the place to meet. You have to buy your own plane ticket and rent a room but you know what, you can stay wherever you want. You don't have to stay in the hotel where we're having it. Just stay with friends.” And so, those kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And pretty soon we're spending $20,000 on every one of these events.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: Coffee is $60. This was 20-plus years ago, by the carafe, you know, the little bundle pots of coffee. $60 apiece. I have no idea how much it is now when you're hosting an event.

Justin Donald: Oh, it's ridiculous. You don't even want to know. It's painful.

Roy Williams: She said, "Honey, for $20,000 a month, we could buy some land to build a building and just have our events in our own facilities and make our own coffee and serve our own lunches.” And I said, "Great idea. You're in charge of that.” And so, the next thing I knew, she had bought 32 acres on this cliff and we started building and have it stocked. So, the reason I quit writing books, well, I didn't quit writing, I just quit letting publishers assemble them into books because when you do that, then you have to go on a book signing tour. Now, as you know, and it's just exhausting. And I said, “I don't do that anymore.”

And so, Penny said, "Alright. Instead of you having to go on all these speaking tours and stuff, everybody can fly to Austin. And now we have the student mansions on campus.” And so, the number of people we can fit in the classroom in the tower, we have rooms on property for everybody, and they're very nice, and it's included in the price of tuition. But whenever we were just doing it at the Four Seasons, everybody could come for free. But when we started that, I made it a nonprofit, gave away the land and the buildings to the nonprofit, and then Daniel Whittington’s been running it and it's not free anymore. You’ve got to pay for class, but all of your room and board is provided when you're there. So, that was probably too much but you asked for the backstory. That's the backstory.

Justin Donald: Well, I love it. And actually, if we even take a step back further, the whole reason that this is a thing is because you did such a prolific job writing ads that you started having companies hire you. You started partnering with people and then the whole reason the Monday Morning Memo became a thing was because you had these clients that you were trying to share insights with. But it would be really fun to have you share some of the partnerships that you've had and some of the big wins that you've helped create that I think most people wouldn't think of. I think when people think about how to scale a company, most people think about it in a totally different vein than you do, but you've had tremendous success with your clients, helping them scale their company using creative writing, creative ideas, wonderful marketing. And I'd love to hear some of those success stories.

Roy Williams: Okay. So, here's what might be fun. I'll tell you the backstories of some of those clients. And there's a fellow I started working with six months ago, and I personally only add a client whenever somebody sells to private equity. And so, every time I lose a client and they sell out for however many hundreds of millions of dollars, I go, "Okay, I'll start over with another client.” Now, before I get started, I was asking myself earlier, "Is day trading still a thing? I hadn't heard about day trading in at least 10 or 15 years, but 20 years ago, everybody I knew was day trading.” Is it even still a thing?

Justin Donald: It is, but it is definitely not at the same level or, I mean, I think there was a period of time where people took pride in being day traders. Today, it's just impossible to compete with algorithms and AI and the micro trades and the quants that are able to do it at a high level, thousands of trades in a second versus your one trade in a second. So, it's less relevant from the standpoint of individuals doing it, but definitely, people still do it.

Roy Williams: Well, back in those days, everybody thought they had a system and pivot points and all kinds of absurd things. And those kinds of people are the same kind of, it's kind of like they think, “I want to make some money real fast.” And it's kind of like, “You know, that's really a dangerous idea.” Business owners, in general, they always overestimate what they can do in one year but they always underestimate what they can do in ten.

Justin Donald: True.

Roy Williams: And whenever you have a time horizon, your time horizon determines not only the size of your success but the certainty of your success. If you are a short-term thinker and you measure in short increments, you're going to fail. It's a law of the universe. If you don't fail, you married the money, or you won the money in Vegas, or you inherited the money. And I'm saying, "Nope, there’s a law of the universe that occasionally a knucklehead will get lucky and then he won't reinvest and he'll have some money for a while.” But whether you're running a business or whether you're investing energy or time, or investing money in investments, advertising is precisely like investing.

If you think long-term, and if you think about values, what do I actually believe in? If you build a business around the true personality of your organization, it'll work And it's called relational marketing. And this is going to sound crazy but, hey, we've warned them, right? If they’re still listening, that ship has sailed.

Justin Donald: That’s right. Well, and some of these stories are so crazy, I love it. I mean, you don't have many clients, but you have a lot that have had hundred-million-dollar exits.

Roy Williams: Oh, yeah. No. Way more. The point is I never worked with more than 12 clients at a time, personally. Now, I have 84 partners in branch offices, and collectively we work with almost a thousand clients. We work with 307 home service companies, plumbing, air conditioning, garages, doors, electrical, that sort of thing. One of my personal clients is 1-800-GOT-JUNK? I started with Brian Scudamore and I started about 13 or 14 years ago, maybe 12, I don't know. And he was doing 97 million system-wide. And I told him, I said, "You know what?” I said, "The first year is going to be a lot of hard work and the second year we'll start really reaping the benefit. We'll see some benefit at the end of the first year, but it really comes alive in the second year.”

And he trusted that because he had seen it happen many times when people tell other people and they go, "Here's what always happens with this guy.” And so, I said, "In four years, we'll be doing a quarter million dollars.” A quarter of a billion I mean, and I said, "We'll be at 250.” He goes, "Wait a minute. It took me 23 years to get to 97 million and you're saying…” And we're flat at 97. He goes, "And from 97 we're going to go to 250?” I said, "Oh, yeah.” And he says, "Well, if that happens, I'll take everybody, all my franchise partners and their families, and you and your family to Hawaii, all expenses paid for a week.”

And I said, "Great. Buy the tickets now and they will, you know, four years from now.” And he did. He took everybody. I'll tell you when that was. We'd been working together for four years in 2017. And so, that's how long, because 2017 is when I think, or maybe it was 2019, I don't know, but it was before…

Justin Donald: It's about 12 years. Yeah.

Roy Williams: Okay. Anyway, the point is I spent some time with Brian and he said, "Well, I haven't told you all about the company yet.” And I said, “I don't need to know about the company because I already know about you.” I said, "You own this thing. You have no investors. You have no partners. You own it. You are 1-800-GOT-JUNK? And he said, "Okay, what does that mean?” And I said, "Okay.” And so, I said, “Let me show you something.” I spent a minute. I put together a little five-slide PowerPoint. I just clicked through these five slides after I put it up on the screen and Brian turned to me and he said, "You've been talking to my mother!”

And I said, “Nope, I promise I've not been talking to your mother or anybody else.” And he said, "Well, how did you know my four favorite movies and the only breakfast cereal that I would eat when I was growing up?” And I said, "Because deep in your heart you always, always, always believe there's going to be a happy outcome and that everybody's going to live happily ever after, and you believe in magic.” Now, he doesn't actually believe in magic intellectually, but emotionally, he does. He believes in serendipity. He believes that the good always triumph and the evil always lose. And it's so deep in his bones.

And he says, "Well, how in the world did you know that about me?” And I said, "Dude, it shines out of your pores like sunlight.” I said, "It radiates out of you,” and I said, “I'm just going to take that personality, and all of your TV ads and all of your radio ads and all of your messaging are going to communicate that.” And he said, "Well, we're in the full-service junk removal business,” and I said, "Yeah, this is what we're going to tell people. We make junk disappear. All you have to do is point.” And that is the idea of magic. And he says, "Well, the franchise partners think we need to show people carrying all this stuff out of the house and being careful not to bump the walls.”

And I said, "Yeah, they weren't worried about you bumping the walls until you brought it up. So, no, we're not going to talk about not bumping the walls and a bunch of strangers in your house.” I said, "People would pay extra, Brian,” and he loved this. I mean, he and I became very close because he understood. “I get what you're all about. I get you're trying to make this effortless, seamless, smooth, frictionless, absolutely adorable, fun, lighthearted, easy thing for people.” And I said, “Brian, if we could ever perfect a way where you didn't even have to knock on the door and go in the house, if all of the stuff they wanted to disappear literally just disappeared as the truck drove slowly past the front of the house, people would pay extra for that.”

And I said, "So, we make junk disappear. All you have to do is point.” And of course, it came very painless. If this isn't the year we break a billion, we will definitely break a billion next year. And we've just kept growing, growing, growing. And here's what it's interesting about it. I'm raving because I love Brian and he's been a lot of fun these past dozen years. Keep in mind, I've been doing this for 40 years. And so, whenever Brian understood, if you just let people see you real the way that you really are, they will decide if they like you or not. And if they like you, they will call you.

And I say, "You just need to be the person they think of first and when they feel the best about whenever they need what it is that you do.” Well, that's my whole thing right there. That's it. That's it. And so, you first have to find somebody that actually has things that are remarkable. See, Justin, advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable. And so, you don't want to have ads that are predictable that sound like everybody else's ads. Bad ads are portable. They will work for anyone in that business category. Listen to one of the furniture ads, it works. If you're in the furniture business, here's an ad. It is one of the furniture ads. It works. It'll sell that furniture. It's a terrible ad. It's a stupid ad. It's never a good ad.

The best ads are not category specific and they’re certainly not even item specific. The best ads are client specific and they will only work for that client. No one else in the world could tell that story convincingly because it's not true of anybody else. And so, it was actually a guy named Nathan Ohrbach, who was the very first client of Bill Bernbach. Now, Bill Bernbach was DDB, Doyle Dane Bernbach, okay.

Justin Donald: Okay.

Roy Williams: DDB became one of the largest advertising firms on the face of the earth. In 1958, Bill Bernbach is working with Nathan Ohrbach who owned Ohrbach’s Department Stores. And Ohrbach was his very first client and he said, "Man, we got to figure out an angle. We got to figure out a gimmick. We got to figure out a way to make you special.” And Nathan Ohrbach said, “I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.” I've always subscribed to that.

Justin Donald: Yeah.

Roy Williams: I said, “Yes, I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s just figure out what’s actually here and let people get to know you. And if they like you, they will call you, but nobody else can be you.” And so, that’s relational marketing. It’s like people connect with you. And here’s the craziness. The craziness I was going to say that I forgot to say, I’m back to it now, went full circle, about somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of all the purchases we make are simply identity reinforcement. We don’t want to believe that. We really don’t. We want to believe that we’re objective and we measure and we compare and we get the data and all these things we tell ourselves.

But the fact is, if you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. And so, identity reinforcement is basically your purchases, whether it’s clothing or cars or the house you live in or the furniture you buy or the books you read or the wine you drink. It doesn’t matter. Anything that you purchase is a form of self-expression and a lot of what we buy, as a matter of fact, two thirds of what we buy, at least, we buy to remind ourselves and announce to the world around us who we are. We want to remind ourselves who we are. We want to announce to the world around us who we are.

And of course, I live a life with many, many, many thousands of books stacked around and amazing oil paintings and statues and just interesting antique artifacts. And I’m going, why? Because I love those things and I want to be identified with those things, they represent who I am. And everybody else does the same thing. They’re just sometimes not as conscious of it because frankly, it makes you start feeling a little bit broken and a little bit, what’s the word? Childish. And I’m going, “I’m okay with that. I’m okay with all of that.”

And so, to be a little bit self-aware and to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody’s broken a little bit. Everybody has their thing, you know what I mean? Whether they know it or not, they do, and it’s something that they identify with and it’s something that identifies them. And so, if you take that idea, okay, and you create advertising campaigns for people, based on that idea and if you write ads for people based on that basic concept, we need to capture who you really are and let people see that. Let them see who you really are. Okay? I’m going to listen if you want, I’ll pull up an ad. I wrote one ad this morning. I’ll show it to you.

Justin Donald: Let’s do it.

Roy Williams: Right? So, here’s the deal. I’m going to find this. I pulled up on a share screen. I’m assuming that works, right?

Justin Donald: Okay.

Roy Williams: Now, it should be right here in my desktop. And it’s for a company. He has a big plumbing company. He also does air conditioning and he is in Columbus, Ohio, Dayton, Ohio. And we just went into Cincinnati. And the reason I was writing this ad is because I wrote him three ads last week and he’s going to record those like tomorrow. We were on the phone on Friday going over the ads and he really loved them. And I said, “I got this other ad I really want to run, if you like it.” And so, if you read this week’s Monday morning memo, it’s called Which Kind of Customer Centric Are You?

Justin Donald: Yes.

Roy Williams: And the email that’s in there is from the guy who’s Adam, you’re about to see.

Justin Donald: Okay.

Roy Williams: So, there’s an email. I said, “I have this client. He sent me an email as an afterthought. I didn’t write it. He had already sent it to all of his team.” And he was really sharing his heart about we need to have, you know, one of his businesses, a plumbing business. And he said, “Most people can’t afford to have a new toilet installed. The price of the toilet plus for a plumber to come out and do it is shockingly expensive.” And he said, and he was calculating the average income of the average family. And he said, “That’s just too big of a chunk of a paycheck. We have to have a solution for people who are living the average life.” And he said, “These people are nurses and firefighters.” And he’s writing this to his team. It’s a big company, very big. And he was just saying it. And he was celebrating.

They found a basic toilet that they could install for 649 bucks, turnkey, installation, everything. And he said, “I’m just so proud to have that because if people have the toilet broken and it can’t be fixed and they need a new one, we need to have one that we can install that doesn’t have any bells or whistles, but it does what it’s supposed to do.” And this same idea, that’s who he is. And that’s why I love working with him.

And so, let me pull this up. I’m going to do the share screen here. Now, before we look at it, there’s a character called Jerry. And Jerry is his sidekick, and Jerry exists. He’s like Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Okay? He’s this kind of a crazy, impulsive character. And Jerry exists. So, we can see who Aaron is. Aaron owns the company. So, let’s go with share screen. Oh, I’m not seeing the little share icon in the bottom. Well, this is not Zoom, isn’t it?

Justin Donald: I am not seeing how. Nope, we’re on Riverside and I can share on my end. Yeah, well, we can just read it.

Roy Williams: Alright, look, I’ll read it. And so, I’ll just pull it up here. There’s an audio signatures, Get Eco, E-C-O. “Aaron.” “Yeah, Jerry.” “You know that air conditioning system that we sell for $12,000?” “Yeah, it’s for homes of 1,600 square feet or less.” “How big is 1,600 feet?” “Three bedroom, two and a half bath. The homes what America is made of.” Get Eco, E-C-O.

“Aaron, other companies are charging $15,000 to $18,000 for that same system.” “Yeah, I know.” “Why are we selling it for just 12?” “Nurses, police officers, office workers, firefighters, and school teachers live in those houses, Jerry?” “Oh, now I get it. The people that America is made of live in the houses that America is made of.” “We’re just doing what we can to restore balance to the universe, Jerry.” Get Eco, E-C-O. When a person is doing well, they’re making money, but when they’re doing good, they’re helping others. Give it away, plumbers, genius electricians, and going to make you cool again, HVAC technicians. And then Jerry says, “We’re bringing balance to the universe. What a great place to work. Go to GetEco.com.”

And so, now, you know who Aaron Gaynor is. That’s how Aaron thinks. That’s how Aaron makes decisions. And this $12,000 air conditioning system, it’s 1,600 square-foot house, three bedroom, two bath. America is covered with those. And most of the time, people find out it’s going to be 15, 18 grand for an air conditioning system. He said no. He said, “I will find somewhere a solid system, not the cheesy builder grade one, but a good reliable system that we can get a good long warranty on. And I will figure out how to do it for 12 grand. I’m just going to.”

And he doesn’t make a big margin on that, but he says, “No, you have to serve the people and you can’t just price people out of being able to afford essentials.” And so, when you find people like that, if you cheat like I do, you always work for people who really do have something remarkable about them and then just communicating that. See what I mean?

Justin Donald: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And it’s just a radio ad communicating that, and it works unbelievably well. So, you ask for success stories.

Justin Donald: I love that.

Roy Williams: The guy that told Aaron how to get in touch with us, he bought an air conditioning company in Phoenix for a million bucks. And the Attorney General had basically gone on television and said, “These people are crooks.” And the company was collapsing. It’d been in business since 1939 and it was just tanking. And the people that owned it were just going to shut it down. Well, this guy is very successful. He couldn’t let that happen because he grew up in Phoenix and his father was an independent air conditioning mechanic, never worked for that company, independent repairman. And when his son, my client, was 10 years old, he would take him out to hold the flashlight at night while he worked on air conditioners in the dark.

And what happened is, the truth is, he was dying and he didn’t want to tell his son he was dying of cancer. And he would go out after dark and have his son hold the flashlight so he could talk to him. And he was just about to cry, but it was just a way of spending quality time together. And he said it was at his father’s funeral that he realized, oh, that’s what that was all about.

Justin Donald: It’s beautiful.

Roy Williams: Well, the whole time that he was holding that flashlight week after week, anytime his father was working this particular brand of air conditioner, he would say, “This is the one to always buy. Always buy this one. These are so well made. It’s unbelievable.” Now, the company had sold, of course, over the years and some people got hold of it, done some crazy stuff, deceptive trade practices. Attorney General just guts the company. And my guy doesn’t want to go under, so he buys it for a million dollars. He loses two and a half million a year, Justin, hard cash.

Justin Donald: Ouch.

Roy Williams: They had fallen from $24 million a year down to about like 11. Well, when you have the infrastructure of a $24 million company and now, you’re doing 11, you can’t bring expenses down enough. So, you’re losing two and a half million actual dollars a year. So, three years in a row, he is losing two and a half million.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: And he had it, but it was hurting. And so, finally, he convinced me to come in and help him. I’d known him for 15 years, but he’ll build companies and then sell it. And that’s not what I do. I think long term, I’ve got clients now I’ve had for 37 years, and…

Justin Donald: A long time.

Roy Williams: They’ll probably never sell. And they’re 70 times, 80 times the size they were 37 years ago. And as I said, everybody overestimates what their company can do in a year. They overestimate what their company can do in a year, but they underestimate what it can do in 10.

Justin Donald: Right.

Roy Williams: And so, that guy, he convinced me to come in and help him. He got it turned around. We branched out into another city, branched out into another city, and from the day we started until the day he sold was six years and 11 months exactly. The company they bought for a million dollars and lost two and a half million a year for three years. Six years and eleven months after I stepped in, it was valued at $500 to $5 million.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: And then sold it for $500 million in cash.

Justin Donald: That’s incredible.

Roy Williams: And bought a couple of jets and is living my life. And that’s not that unusual. I have a lot of exits that are many hundreds of millions. The very first client that sold a private equity, I think sold in 1999, we worked together for seven years, it was Robbins Brothers in LA. And so, Skip and Steve Robbins in 1992, I began working with Skip and Steve in Los Angeles, and the total ad budget for a year would not put you on the air for a week in a big way in LA to $100,000.

Justin Donald: Yeah.

Roy Williams: S100,000 had to last a year.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: And I said, “I know, I know how to do this.” I said, “Here’s what I’m going to do. It sounds crazy, but I want you to, every 90 days, look at how we’re trending and adjust the budget for where we’re headed.” And I said, “So, if we spend a certain percentage they’re comfortable spending for advertising and if we re-evaluate what the year is going to look like and as we start growing, we just every 90 days re-evaluate the ad budget and adjust it upward to reflect that percentage of top line.”

And so, instead of looking back once a year and adjusting it, which is very often what happens, I said, “Nope, when this thing takes off, we’re going to need to adjust the budget every 90 days.” Well, at the end of seven years, we had gone from, and the percentage we were spending on advertising never changed, okay? We had gone from $100,000 for the year to $7 million a year in LA. That was the ad budget. The ad budget, we were seven times as big as we were seven years earlier. And so, they had a remarkable story to tell. They would do the crazy things I asked them to do. And so, they sold to a private equity group that bankrupted the company in two years. It took them two years to bankrupt.

Justin Donald: Oh, my goodness.

Roy Williams: And what happens is what I call the spreadsheet weasels. When the spreadsheet weasels get involved, they don’t understand what built the company.

Justin Donald: Right.

Roy Williams: And so, the relationship, it’s relational marketing that works. So, the relationship that built the company, what people believe about this company, what they trust about this company and what this company always lives up to is abandoned when people step in and think, well, I know how to run a company, I know tricks you don’t know, and I’m going. You know what? You will tank the company. And I’ve seen nine companies sell to private equity for big, big, big, big exits. And of the nine, seven of them have floundered and deteriorated and fallen into crisis. And only two of them did the buyers realize, no, it would be wise for us to understand what caused this company to get as big and as strong as it did, because to think that marketing can be divorced from the reality of the company is stupid.

Justin Donald: Totally.

Roy Williams: It’s insane. But yet, guys that are purely financial guys, they always believe that all you have to do is, you know, Adam make an offer. We’re going to create some artificial urgency, we’re going to have a discount, we’re going to do some targeting. And I’m going, “Nope. Believe it or not, when you’re building a company with relational marketing, you don’t target by who you reach. You target by what you say. What you say in the ads targets people of like mind.” See what I mean? The like-minded person, the people who thinks, acts, speaks, and sees the world the way that you do. If they think, act, speak, and see the world the way that Justin Donald does, so everybody that read your book, right, everybody that read your book, they know what Justin Donald, how he thinks, acts, speaks, and sees the world. Okay?

And so, your book, the content that you present the world is the filter that causes some people to be attracted to you and pushes other people away from you. And that’s what marketing should do. Everyone’s happy. And so, if it’s attracting the right people, they’re always going to have, they’re going to get what they’re expecting. If you have marketing that attracts the wrong people, they’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to be frustrated. Why would anyone want to do that? I know I’m rambling, but you ask me to.

Justin Donald: Well, and I love this and I love your model because you live in a world of storytelling and creating ads and marketing and your gift of art is displayed readily there. And I live in this world of wealth creation and wealth multiplication. And what’s interesting is there is this ability to parlay the two where you can use the power of storytelling to build wealth. And you can see it, like in the stories you’ve shared, these emotionally resonant stories that drive customer behavior that really help to create brand loyalty. And that’s going to create long-term revenue. And we’re running low on time, but one thing that would be interesting, if you could do this quickly, I want to respect your time, there’s a big difference between branding and sales, and that was something that I learned from you that I think is so important that we cannot get off this podcast until we hear your words on this.

Roy Williams: Well, a brand is strangely an entity. It’s a character that lives in the imagination of the public. And Apple has a personality. Apple computers has a personality. I argue that Dell computers does not. Dell is a commodity. It doesn’t really have a personality, but Apple, particularly during the Steve Jobs years, had a very identifiable zeitgeist, a personality, a worldview, a style. And you knew how this company, how they fought by what they said and you knew how they saw the world by what they said and what they did by their actions. And so, you go, I know these guys. I know what they stand for. And either you were attracted to that or you weren’t. And that’s always the essence of good marketing.

And so, when you’re going to create relational marketing, sales is features and benefits. And anytime you start spewing features and benefits, your ad sounds like an ad, and everybody will kind of like, yeah, yeah, shut up. I hate ads. Go away. And just because you’re paying for the TV time or the radio time or the space or the click, doesn’t require people to be interested. And so, everybody thinks the world is looking for information. They’re really not.

Here’s the four things people are looking for. And then I’ll tell you about how to create a personality. And then maybe, if we’re done, we’re done. First, what people are looking for, there’s four things. And it was Ray Barr that taught me this, my publisher. He said everybody instinctively does the first two. But number three, very rarely ever see it. Number four, almost never. And number one is a big idea. So, what’s the big idea? Okay, well, everybody has a big idea.

And then number two is nuts and bolts is what Ray calls it. Nuts and bolts. Now, nuts and bolts is the step by step, the how-to, the examples. The step by step, the how-to, the examples. That’s the nuts and bolts. Now, number three, besides the big idea and the nuts and bolts is entertainment. Entertainment. Entertainment, Justin, is the only currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too busy public.

Justin Donald: That’s good. I love that.

Roy Williams: And so, number four is hope. Now, let me define hope for you. You never want to accuse somebody of being hopeless, but whenever you communicate hope, you’re telling people, and this is what you do, Justin, next time can turn out different than last time. Tomorrow can be better than yesterday. Your future can be better than your past. And so, when you can communicate that you have the ability, if a person will listen to you to make the future better than the past and to make next time turn out better than the last time.

And so, as an investor, as an investment advisor, you do that. As an ad writer, I do that. And so, big idea, nuts and bolts, how does it work? And then entertainment, is this interesting? Is this fun? Am I engaged? Do I enjoy this? And then number four, do I feel better about the future after spending time with this person? Okay? Big idea, nuts and bolts, entertainment, hope. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. And then another thing that’s true, and I think everybody knows it, but it bears saying, regardless of the business you think you’re in, every business in the world is actually in the same business. You’re in the business of making someone happy.

Justin Donald: That’s good.

Roy Williams: You get paid to make someone happy. What is you’re going to do to make them happy? Making them happy is what you’re paid to do. Changing their condition, moving them from a less pleasant state of being to a more pleasant state of being in, at least one aspect of their life. Now, we talked about personality in a company. Okay? I think either a week ago or two weeks ago, longest memo I ever wrote in 31 years was called Alternate Realities & Brands with Personalities. And so, I couldn’t figure out how to make it a two-part thing or a three-part thing, so I just made it three times as long as the average Monday memo. I said, “Eh, if they want or don’t want to read it, they don’t have to.”

But an alternate reality is anytime you’re reading a good book or watching a movie or a TV show or someone is telling you a story and there is a willing suspension of disbelief and you’re engaged and you’re in a different place, now, the human body contains about 100 million sensory receptors. These sensory receptors allow you to see, feel, taste, touch, smell the world. It puts you in touch with the reality around you, a hundred million century receptors. But the brain contains about 10,000 billion synapses, which means you’re approximately 100,000 times better qualified to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does. And so, the places we go in our mind, and so, we are more willing to believe fiction than nonfiction, entertainment. We adore fiction. The last time you paid to see a movie, it was fiction. All of the bestselling books are fiction. As a matter of fact, did you know that every year there’s a couple of million new books written in the United States? Did you realize that?

Justin Donald: That’s a lot. Yeah. Probably, not that many.

Roy Williams: Actually, well, most of them don’t ever sell. Okay?

Justin Donald: Okay, that makes sense.

Roy Williams: What happens is the average business book, in the old days when they had the actual bookstores, when there was Borders and B. Daltons and Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble, all these bookstores, right, that no longer exists for the most part, if you wrote a business book and it made it into the bookstore, which is like 1 out of every 10,000 business books, if it made it into the bookstore, the average business book will sell 5,000 copies in the life of the book.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: In the life of the book, it’ll sell 5,000 copies. Now, here’s what’s interesting, nonfiction, 90%, Justin, 90% of all the books written every year are nonfiction, 90%.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Roy Williams: Did you know 90% of all the books purchased in America every year are the 10% that are fiction?

Justin Donald: Huh. I did not know that.

Roy Williams: See, everybody thinks the world wants information. No, they do not. They want to escape.

Justin Donald: Yeah.

Roy Williams: They want to escape into an alternate reality, whether a movie or an incredibly well-written book or a museum or a concert. They’re looking for someone to take them out of the monotony and predictability of their daily life into a place where they can forget all about that for a while. And so, here’s my point, they do not teach this in any advertising school in the world, but every screenwriter, every novelist, any person that has ever created fascinating, magnetically engaging characters, just attractive, interesting characters, there is an actual technique for that. And a guy named David Freeman taught it to me. And it has to do with parrot opposites.

And so, we teach a class on it. It would take maybe too long to do today, but think of a baseball diamond. Okay? A baseball diamond. So, the first thing you notice about the characters up here is what would be second base. And then the second thing you notice kind of contradicts the first thing. So, these two, they don’t belong together. It’s very surprising that these two characteristics, so you notice this, and then this other thing kind of contradicts that, and that’s where the home plate would be.

Now, that is what you notice about the character. It’s highly conflicted, okay? Now, anytime you create an unconflicted character, you literally have created a cliche, a very predictable cliché, which is why people put together mission statements and values station. There’s all this, and it’s always bland, it’s tedious, it’s boring, and it doesn’t matter because when you put together an actual personality, you have to identify in the company, in the business owner, in Brian Scudamore and in Aaron Gaynor, you have to identify who are they going to continue to be after I turn my back. Who will they always be? Who will they never fail to be? I need to promise the world that. Does that make sense?

And so, then I have to find things that exist within those personalities, things that actually exist and say, I’m going to focus here and this, and I’m going to turn those up to like 20 on a scale of 10. And then the other two things are over here on third base of this baseball diamond. Okay? Vulnerability, weakness, or flaw. A character that does not have something that makes them vulnerable or is a weakness or is a flaw is an unbelievably boring character.

Justin Donald: Yeah, that makes total sense.

Roy Williams: And then over here at first base, on the horizontal axis, you have vulnerability, weakness, or flaw. And over on the right-hand side at first base, you have the mountain they’re willing to die on, the thing that they protect at all costs. This will never be compromised. This will never change. They will overcome the vulnerability, the weakness, and the flaw, and they will quit being the first thing and the second thing to protect this one thing that is non-negotiable. And you have to identify what that is. It has to be real. It can’t be aspirational, it can’t be some yada, yada, yada. It can’t. And so, whenever you’ve extracted just those four things, and in a class that we occasionally teach, you can actually show the character diamonds of famous brands. And you realize these four characteristics and you can go, oh, yeah, everything suddenly makes sense. Why does this character act the way they do?

Now, when you’ve done this correctly, Justin, when you’ve done it correctly and you do the hard work, you can’t reverse engineer it. AI can’t do it for you. But whenever you’ve extracted those things out of the client, then you said, okay, a really, truly interesting character that’s conflicted north to south and that’s what we notice. But what we bond to, okay, is the horizontal. And that’s why we trust the character is the horizontal, the thing that they will die on that mountain, they’ll go down on with that ship. They protect that at all costs. And their vulnerability, their weakness to the flaw is tied to that.

And so, you go, okay, you bond with them because of that. That’s why you trust them. But you notice them because of the vertical, the two contradictory things that are dominant about them. Once you’ve done that, you will always be able to, just in a matter of minutes, think of famous, famous, famous characters from big movie franchises and from the biggest novels ever written, the bestselling books ever written, and from cartoons and from nursery rhymes and, suck, all of these unbelievably famous imaginary characters.

So, what is a brand? What is a brand? What is a brand? That’s what I set out to answer. It is an imaginary personality that exists in the mind of the perspective customer and if your brand has a personality, we can grow that to the moon. If your brand doesn’t have a personality, you are reduced to gimmicks, features and benefits, pricing, and hype. And it’s just not that productive.

Justin Donald: And all of those are not sustaining. Yeah, you can’t sustain long term on that. You might be a one-hit wonder for a short season, but you’re not going to hold a brand in that.

Roy Williams: It’s basically day trading. Whenever you don’t have core values of a company, you’re a day trader. And it’s like you’re just looking for a gimmick or some kind of an angle. And I’m going, there’s no soul in that. There’s no purpose in that. And I know I sound like a nut, but these things matter to me and they obviously matter to you or you wouldn’t have invited me onto the show.

Justin Donald: That’s right. I love this Roy, and I know people are going to be interested to learn more about you and Wizard Academy. So, where can people find out more about all the cool things you’re up to.

Roy Williams: Okay, WizardAcademy.org is the school. And the only thing you need to know about me is MondayMorningMemo.com. MondayMorningMemo.com and WizardAcademy.org, and that’s pretty much anything anybody could want.

Justin Donald: Roy, this was awesome. I appreciate your time so much. I appreciate that you’re a wise-ard and a wizard.

Roy Williams: Thank you.

Justin Donald: This is just great. And you said something I want to share this with my audiences. I think part of the reason why I’m such a lover of film and books and TV shows, which to me, that’s still film, and you all appreciate this, the person I’m having on the podcast immediately after this is done is a big producer named Matt Earl Beesley. He produces Chicago Fire. He was an assistant producer on Braveheart and National Lampoon. And so, that’ll be the next one I’m doing and so, you’ll have to check that one out.

But for me, my brain is on constant overdrive. It is hard for me to turn it off. It just wants to go and think and solve and do things. And by the way, it’s a great blessing. I would never change anything about it. But the downside of it is, it just wants to run even when I want to relax. And so, my escape is film and TV and book where my mind can shut off and technically, it doesn’t shut off, it just converts to the story. And I start thinking about that and I start forgetting about all the things I’m trying to optimize and maximize and troubleshoot.

Roy Williams: To escape mundanity of the daily, the theory, the merely urgent.

Justin Donald: I love it. Well, I ask a question of our audience to wrap up every episode, and I’m going to ask them this, what is one step that you can take today to move towards financial freedom and really just move towards living life on your style, and on your terms, one that is not by default, but is rather by design? Take something you learned from Roy today, implement it into your life and take a step forward. Thanks, and we’ll catch you next week.