Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

A rich knowledge of history is better than creativity.Let me qualify that. A rich knowledge of history is better than creativity if your goal is to make money.The most profitable form of creativity is to repurpose the proven.Do you want to put together a group of colors that create a powerful effect? Maybe for a website or a sign or a brochure or a living room?Common sense will tell you to hire an expert. That expert will ask you to describe the feelings you want the color scheme to conjure and then he or she will aim all their education, talent and experience toward doing what has already been done by minds far greater than their own.Yes, common sense would tell you to hire a talented expert. But common sense is merely the name we give the collection of prejudices we acquire before the age of eighteen. (If you feel you’ve heard that statement before, it’s because Albert Einstein famously said it in the 1952 book, Mathematics, Queen and Servant of the Sciences.)Common sense is overrated.An enlightened soul who has escaped the boundaries of common sense will quietly inquire of the giants whose footprints went deep into the earth, those giants whose fingerprints can be found on the hearts of billions of people they have touched.Why pay a lightweight for advice when you can consult Gustav Klimt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh for free?(1.) Go online and select a series of world-famous paintings whose color palettes have the mojo you seek. (Mojo, by the way, is just the name we give to high-voltage emotional juju. Einstein didn’t say this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true, anyway.)(2.) Download only the paintings of artists who rocked the world.(3.) Import those paintings into Photoshop and sample each of the four or five principal colors. Click a couple of buttons to reveal the precise CMYK formulation of each. BAM! Trust me, those colors will work fabulously well together.No, don’t trust me. Trust the giants.Lee Iacocca was chosen as one of Ford Motor Company’s ten “Whiz Kids” in 1946. But every time young Lee would go to his boss with a suggestion, his boss would say, “Show me where it has worked.”Your first impression of this man is that he was a follower, a lemming, a conformist with no courage or imagination, right? But Iacocca credits that boss as being the man responsible for all his later successes. Iacocca learned from him a pivotal lesson: if an idea is truly brilliant, you’ll find examples of its successful implementation scattered throughout history.The road to bankruptcy court is flanked on both sides by bright-eyed “creative people” dripping with enthusiasm. Ask any one of them for directions. They’ll make sure you get there.The secret of guaranteed success is to import a tested and reliable methodology into a business category where it has never been used.Repurpose the proven.They’ll call you a brilliant creative innovator. You might even be able to patent your breakthrough.But you and I know the truth. You’re merely an insightful historian.Roy H. Williams

We have, for the most part, the feelings we choose to have.Please don’t be angry with me if you prefer to be tragic. I do not deny you this choice. I deny only that you have no escape.Our feelings in the first moment are triggered by our circumstances. Happy news. Sad news. News that makes us angry. But in the second moment, and the third, our feelings are the produce of our chosen perspective.What angle of view do you choose when you examine the day that lies ahead of you and all the days that lie behind? What is your perspective? Where do you aim your eyes? What produce do you grow in the soil of your imagination and the sunshine of your life?Jeanne Hébuterne was a 19 year-old art student in 1917 who fell deeply in love with a dashing Italian artist named Amedeo Modigliani. A year later, their daughter was born out of wedlock and the Hébuterne family was horrified. When that little girl was 2, Modigliani died. The next day Jeanne Hébuterne threw herself out a fifth-story window. She was only 22 years old.Modigliani’s sister adopted the little girl and raised her as her own.The girl inherited no art. She died in 1984.What do you suppose the little girl felt as she was growing up? Did she say,“My father was an alcoholic, drug-addicted loon who refused to marry my mother when she became pregnant and my mother did not love me enough to raise me. She killed herself the day after my father died.”Persons who would choose this perspective, and the feelings that accompany it, always say they are being “honest and realistic.”But is that really true?Would this perspective be any less honest or realistic?“My father was an artist whose paintings of my mother sell for many tens of millions of dollars. My mother was so deeply in love that she literally could not live without him. I am the product of that love.”I do not know what the little girl chose to think, and feel, and believe.I know only that she had a choice.As do you.Roy H. Williams

Use half as many words and they’ll hit twice as hard.Every writer knows it.Salespeople need to learn it.A few weeks ago I invested a day of training in the telephone staff of a client of mine and doubled their close rate as a result.“You’re working way too hard at it,” I said. “These people are calling you, remember? They’re calling you because they believe your company can solve their problem. In your mind, you’re being enthusiastic. But you’re coming across as anxious and nervous and defensive and combative. You’re not talking these callers into buying from you, you’re talking them out of it.”Selling is a transfer of confidence. The seller must transfer his or her confidence in the product to the buyer. When you babble, you don’t sound confident.When you act like the customer has asked the wrong question, you’re basically telling them that they’ve hit you where you’re weak.Always answer questions AS ASKED. This means that you should focus your energies on providing the simplest answer in the fewest words. If your customer wants to know more, they’ll ask you a follow-up question.Pennie and I know a woman with a 13 year-old son who recently said to her, “Mom, what is cunnilingus?”With no hesitation whatsoever, she answered, “That’s when a woman gives sexual pleasure to another woman.”He shrugged and said, “Oh,” and the conversation was over.Had our friend raised an eyebrow, acted surprised, gotten flustered, or asked, “Where did you hear that word?” the whole thing could have escalated into something it didn’t need to become.Our friend is a brilliant woman who gave a simple answer to an innocent question. She didn’t read anything into it. She is, in my opinion, an example of the perfect salesperson for 2013.When you provide simple and straightforward answers to your customer’s questions, they feel that you’re there for them. But when they provide ears for your rambling monologues, they begin to feel they’re there for you.Be there for your customer. Don’t make them be there for you.I was going to write a book about this, but then I found it has already been written. Dan Pink is a brilliant researcher as well as an insightful and entertaining writer. I haven’t yet read his newest book, To Sell is Human, but I did read the transcript of an interview he gave NPR.“We have this idea that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance — that is, how many times the cash register actually rings — the correlation’s almost zero. It’s really quite remarkable.“Let’s think about a spectrum on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is extremely introverted, 7 is extremely extroverted: The 6s and 7s — the people who get hired, the gregarious, backslapping types of the stereotype — they’re not very good. OK, now, why? … They’re just spending too much time talking. … They don’t know when to shut up. They don’t listen very well; they’re not attuned to the other person; they sometimes can overwhelm people.”The art of selling has changed more in the past ten years than in the previous hundred.Ten years ago, we had to rely on the seller to provide expert information. Today we’re just a few clicks away from anything we want to know.Salespeople are certainly necessary, but the roles they play have changed dramatically.Next week I’ll be teaching a 2-day workshop at Wizard Academy, “How to Advertise in a Noisy World.” I could just as easily have called it, “How to Sell in 2013.”If you can’t come to Austin for the workshop, you should at least buy Dan Pink’s new book. Based on the interview he gave NPR, I’m betting it’s really good.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

But at Least You're in the Parade"When your friend says something interesting, write it down. Better yet, post it online and give your friend eternal life.I was whining to Rich Mann over a plate of sushi one day when he reminded me to shut up and be happy. Rich didn’t even look up when he said it. He just mumbled, ‘You may be shoveling horse manure but at least you’re in the parade,’ while trying to decide whether to chopstick a slice of tuna or a piece of spider roll. But his words fell on me like Robert Frost’s *Dust of Snow. I smiled, pulled a receipt from my wallet, scribbled Rich’s statement on it, then posted it in the random quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com.Rich’s words reminded me of something Tom Grimes taught me about tribes. “Every tribe has a hierarchy,” he said.“Give me an example.”“A football team has a trainer who bandages the players. And if you’re the third-string quarterback who never gets put into the game, you can still look at the trainer and say to yourself, ‘Well at least I’m not THAT guy.’ But even THAT guy – the lowest ranked member of the tribe – gets to watch the games for free from the best seat in stadium and chat with the players in the locker room. Never forget, THAT guy is still part of the team.”“You may be shoveling horse manure, but at least you’re in the parade.”What horse manure have you been shoveling in this most wonderful of all parades?“When I hear somebody sigh that life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?'” – Sydney J. HarrisElmer Zubiate (Zoo-be-AH-tay) grew up embarrassed that his name was Elmer. After losing everything he owned in 2005, Elmer fought like a tiger to start a little HVAC business in San Antonio. Last year he decided to make the most of the whole Elmer thing. This is what he put on the radio:There’s Elmer Fudd, Elmer’s Glue, and ME, Elmer Zubiate of Elmer’s One-Hour Air Conditioning and Heating. We’ll be there within one hour of the time we promised you or whatever you need is free. No charge. There’s NO WAY you’re going to wait for US all day. Great prices. Fabulous service. Elmer’s One-Hour.Dial two one oh, thirty-three Elmer.[JINGLE]Two one oh, thirty-three ElmerLast year, One-Hour Elmer did $3.8 million and is trending toward $6 million in 2013. We have every expectation that Elmer will bag $12 million in 2015.I have another friend – and I promise I’m not making this up – who feels the great tragedy of his life was that he inherited 31 million dollars. The way he tells it, he’s never really recovered from that horrible day. He used to moan about it until I finally said, “Shut up, you crybaby. Maybe we should take part of that cash and buy you a spine. And then maybe we can hire an old woman to knit you a pair of balls.”Strangely, I think he still likes me.You want to hear something even stranger than that? I actually kind of agree with him: it would be truly horrible to wake up one day and learn that nothing in life required your effort anymore; all you had to do is point and it would be handed to you.It is good to be Elmer. It is good to be in the parade.Roy H. Williams

Today I’m going to tell you 3 new things you need to know about.My enthusiasm will probably make it sound like I’m giving you a sales pitch. Sorry about that. If you’re not in the mood, the tiniest motion of a finger will take you to a new and different place…You decided to stay? I think you’ll be glad you did.YouTube. Not FaceBook.Throughout the year I’ve been saying to students of Wizard Academy, “YouTube will deliver one trillion views during the 365 short days of 2012. It’s a message delivery vehicle that has yet to be maximized. YouTube’s potential to grow a business is vastly greater than FaceBook. The number of search strings typed into YouTube each day is second only to Google.”The actual number of views in 2012 turned out to be 1.46 trillion. Let’s put that in perspective:One million seconds is about 12 days. tick-tick-tick-tickOne billion seconds is nearly 32 years. tick-tick-tickOne trillion seconds is 31,688 years.This means 46,264 people per second click to watch a YouTube video 24/7/365. Nearly 3 million per minute, 4 billion per day. That’s 13 times the population of the United States every day.*You have things to say. Why not say them to the world?#1 VidBetter is a video production systemthat lets goobers like you and me crank out YouTube videos that look like big money. And there’s no learning curve with VidBetter. All the tricky stuff has been fully automated. The hardware comes in a box. Your professional editors are in the cloud and available to you 24/7. Take a look.#2 Do you talk better than you write?Dave Young and Paul Boomer have created a content-extraction service that pulls your very best out of you and puts it on paper. It’s a fabulous way to create witty and intelligent blog posts, craft award-winning web copy, record relaxed and informative podcasts, write training manuals, create policy and procedure documents, whatever it is you need to get out of your head and onto the web or onto paper. All you have to do is talk on the phone to a professional interviewer. BAM. The whole thing is recorded, transcribed, edited, and given back to you in whatever format you desire. These guys will make you sound like a genius. Check it out.#3 Become a happier you.Kyle Cease was voted the #1 comedian on Comedy Central in 2009 but his real passion is for transformative change. I’ve watched him lead his classmates through exercises that made a profound difference in their thought processes, their attitudes, and their expectations. When his 2-day class was announced a couple of weeks ago, the classmates who had already met him snapped up all the rooms in Engelbrecht House immediately. If you want 2013 to be VERY DIFFERENT than 2012, be at this class. Sleep in a hotel. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll catch Kyle’s class next time. Kyle did more than 200 shows last year and right now he’s hotter than ever. It took weeks to find dates for this class that would work in his schedule for 2013. It will be awhile before we can get Kyle back to Austin. This will be a highly interactive, fast paced, experiential workshop. You will definitely leave better than you came.I shared this stuff with you today because I want you to have the happiest possible 2013. I want you to be energized and productive. I apologize if I sounded like I was making a sales pitch. I’m an ad writer, remember? I sound like I’m making a sales pitch when I pray.But God’s okay with that. He understands.Hopefully you do, too.Roy H. Williams

I recently spent a day with two lawyers who practice the same legal specialty. We’ll call them Nick and Ralph. They live on opposite sides of the country. They met at a conference and became friends.Nick read my books, attended Wizard Academy, and decided to go fishing for customers with a net. He put his money in radio.Ralph thought it made more sense to target only those people in immediate need of a lawyer within his specialty. Ralph went fishing with a hook called Pay-Per-Click.Ralph said, “Nick, you’re hunting with a shotgun. I’m hunting with a rifle.” Ralph believes in targeting, you see. That’s why he fishes with a hook and catches just one fish at a time. But you don’t build a widespread reputation by waiting until your customer needs you and then targeting them through Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click.Nick the Net chose to win the public before they needed his services. Nick the Net wanted everyone in the city to know about him, even if many of them would never need his services. Nick the Net chose to win the hearts of the people 52 weeks a year.Ralph the Hook, by the way, practices law in a trade area that offers 22 times the potential of the area served by Nick the Net.Both men are smart and aggressive. They plunged. Hard.Ralph the Hook spends $180,000 per month on Search Engine Optimization, online marketing consultants, and locally targeted Pay-Per-Click. His annual ad budget of $2,160,000 brings in slightly less than $6 million per year in legal fees, leaving Ralph with a little less than $4 million for gas money. Not bad.One year ago, Nick the Net was spending $30,000 per month on radio. His $360,000 ad budget brought in $1.4 million the previous year in legal fees, leaving Nick with a little more than $1 million to spend on lunch.NOTE: Nick brought in 1/4 as much money but spent only 1/6 as much on ads.And then Nick asked me to begin writing his ads. This year he and I brought in $4.2 million with that same $30,000/mo. ad budget.About 6 weeks ago, Nick said he wanted me to add another $20,000/mo. to his radio budget. I said, “Not yet. First we need to improve your close rate.”“But we’re closing 30 percent of the people who call us,” answered Nick, “Ralph the Hook is closing barely 10 percent of his online leads.”When you advertise 52 weeks a year on the radio, you become a household word. Yours is the name the customer thinks of first and feels the best about. The leads brought in through radio are much warmer than the leads generated through pay-per-click.“Nick,” I said, “our close rate should be up around 60 percent. Bring all the people who answer your phone to Austin for a day of training.”Nick brought them to Austin for a day. They listened. They learned.At the end of the day, Nick drove his people to the airport and sent them home to answer the phones. Nick then returned to my office with his buddy, Ralph the Hook. As a favor to Nick, I spent a couple of hours with Ralph. Ralph, of course, only wanted to know “how to choose the right radio station.”Ralph the Hook still believes that “targeting the right customer” is the secret to growing a business.But Nick and I believe in building a widespread reputation with a warm predisposition in the hearts of the general, untargeted public.What do you believe?Common sense says targeting would be more efficient, right?My thirty years of experience say otherwise. One last thing: Nick’s telephone team is now closing more than 60 percent of all incoming leads. This means Nick the Net will likely do $8.4 million in 2013 with no increase in ad budget and no increase in sales opportunities.Release the Kraken.Roy H. Williams

The Miraculous Disappearance of Black-and-WhiteMost of the choices we make have effects we did not anticipate. This is due to the Law of Unintended Consequences.“Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it.”– Rob Norton, author of The Concise Encyclopedia of EconomicsHere’s an example of politicians ignoring it: The Chinese government introduced the one-child policy in 1978 as a measure to curb China’s population growth. Thirty-four years later,“The policy has been implicated in an increase in forced abortions, female infanticide, and underreporting of female births, and has been suggested as a possible cause behind China’s gender imbalance.”- WikipediaLimited to just one child, many families opted for a boy because men have always had more power in Chinese society.The unintended consequence of the one-child policy is that marriageable young Chinese women are in extremely short supply. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, unmarried men between 20 and 44 already outnumber their female counterparts 2 to 1.* This gives young Chinese women amazing power.Score one for poetic justice.All this seems perfectly reasonable in hindsight, but did anyone see it coming 34 years ago?Before you wag your finger at those Chinese parents, consider what American parents were saying to their daughters during those same years,“Why dream of being a nurse when you can become a doctor? Don’t be a secretary, become a CEO. Make something of your life! You can always get married AFTER you’ve established your career.”Thus warned against becoming that ultimate of losers – a stay at home Mom – American girls grew up and became “successful” by foregoing the creation of a family.And what did we tell our boys?“If you don’t go to college, you doom yourself to be a loser, son; a common, blue-collar laborer who gets no respect, no admiration, no love. Please, son, go to college. Don’t be a loser.”Thirty-four years later we have millions of college-educated, unmarried men and women returning to live in their childhood bedrooms at Mom’s and Dad’s house because they can’t support themselves, much less pay off the tens of thousands of dollars they owe in student loans. There are plenty of good-paying jobs out there, but most of them require a technical skill; something not taught in college.The Unintended Consequences of the advice America gave its children is that the American subgroup Bill O’Reilly likes to call “Traditional America” (code for “white,”) no longer controls the outcome of elections. Ironically, it is the subgroups who continue to value motherhood and skilled labor that have become the deciders of America’s future.And I, for one, have no problem with that.America has a surplus of young adults empowered with pointless educations and staggering student loans. For now, at least, it would appear the spotlight belongs to men and women who are skilled in a trade, who take pride in the work of their hands; chefs and carpenters, plumbers and electricians, mechanics and technicians and jewelers who can set a diamond in gold.The American Success Myth of the 20th Century taught us to buy things we didn’t need with money we didn’t have to impress people we didn’t like. We were taught, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.”So we chased happiness with dollars in our hands and it fled from us faster than we could run. Exhausted, we sat down and learned the truth:“The key to happiness is an ability to celebrate the ordinary.”Family. Friends. Food. Fun.Having been born into a 1958 America that was strictly black and white, I will finish my days in a full-color nation.And what, I ask you, is so terribly wrong with that?Roy H. Williams

Voltaire is often quoted as having said it, but he never did.It was actually Pierre de Beaumarchais in 1775, just a few months before Thomas and George and Ben and the boys wrote their scathing letter to England’s king.Beaumarchais was working on the second scene in the first act of The Barber of Seville, when it hit him, “Aujourd’hui ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.”“Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.”Now before you get all hinky-dink and say, “But George Washington didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence,” allow me to assure you that my statement is six times correct: Clymer, Read, Ross, Taylor, Walton and Wythe. Georges all. Declaration signers.Isn’t it funny how the mind makes assumptions based on fragments of information? I gave you 1775, Thomas, George, Ben and the boys, and a letter to England’s king. You thought, “Revolution, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and the founding fathers, and The Declaration of Independence they sent to King George.”Your mind filled in the empty spaces.But what if there were no empty spaces?What if the mental bandwidth of your attention was filled with other information?Fill some of that vacancy with music and you’ve got a song.Crowd the remaining emptiness with images and actions and you’ve got a movie. Make it participatory and you’ve got a video game, but now we’re introducing an entirely different lesson…Allow me to get back on track: song lyrics don’t have to make sense because words that are wrapped in music aren’t held to the same level of scrutiny as words that must stand on their own.Every language is made of obstruent and sonorant phonemes with the vowels of the language supplying the musical tones. The letters of the alphabet are not phonemes. The sounds represented by those letters – and certain combinations of letters such as sh, th, ch, ng, – the sounds are the phonemes. (I’m not making this stuff up. It is a studied and known science. We can look further into it in the rabbit hole, if you like.)Humans are uniquely gifted to attach complex meanings to sound. Some of these sound-messages are the combinations of phonemes we call words, but a complex sound-message without phonemes is called music. Mix phonemes with music and you’ve got a song.Words wrapped in music are no longer strictly words, but components of a complexly woven auditory tapestry with additional messages embedded in the pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, interval and contour of the tune. Song lyrics cannot be easily evaluated until they’ve been separated from the music that has swallowed them.When the music feels happy, we usually think of the song as being happy, even when the lyrics are tragic. When the music is sad, we feel the song is sad even when the lyrics are joyful. When the music is triumphant, we feel the song is triumphant even though its lyrics may describe rejection and defeat.On September 12, 2001, the day after 9-11, the most-played song in America was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. This is a fact. Radio stations across America wanted to lift the mood, remind us of our heritage and defy Osama Bin Laden, so they filled the sky with our favorite anthem to American exceptionalism:“Born down in a dead man’s town,The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.You end up like a dog that’s been beat too muchTill you spend half your life just covering up.Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A….Those lyrics get increasingly sad, describing rejection and defeat without redemption, as a returning Viet Nam vet can’t find a job even though he turns to the Veteran’s Administration for assistance. In the end, he winds up working without hope in the shadow of a penitentiary and he blames it all on the fact that he was born in the U.S.A. The End.Yet we shout the chorus to Born in the USA at the top of our lungs because the triumphant arc of the music and the defiant tone of Springsteen’s voice feel profoundly patriotic and proud, lyrics be damned.Music is a language of emotion so powerful that it is capable of contradicting the very words it carries. Control the music and you control the mood of the room. But choose the music for its feel, never for its lyrics.Sound is a stunning phenomenon.Learn how to use it, then choose whom you would like to stun.Roy H. Williams

An auction house is an island of cast-offs and misfits where the rejected and broken feel finally at home.I am speaking of the merchandise, of course, not of the people.Perhaps I am speaking of the people, as well.From the age of 18, Pennie and I have searched for buried treasure in auction houses. When you collect the misfit and the broken, you quickly learn how to accentuate natural beauty and disguise the inevitable flaws. These are valuable skills for a marketing consultant.There is magic in that moment between Before and After.AThe most miraculous makeovers happen when the misfit is made of wood. Formby’s Conditioning Furniture Refinisher is an amazing solvent that dissolves old varnish, lacquer and shellac, gently melting the crackled, grimy layers of age into a homogenous, flowing liquid.It’s not a stripper, exactly. Formby’s refinishing solvent merely allows you to redistribute the accumulated weirdness that was already there, giving the piece a rich, original, old finish.Time is like Formby’s Refinisher; a solvent dissolving memories and events into one another, creating altogether new realities based only loosely upon the ones that were before.The past was reality. But it does not remain reality.What is today’s reality? Yours, I mean.My mind has been topsy-turvy for a year. Last month marked the first anniversary of the death of a lifelong friend. I am only just now beginning to regain my balance.A couple of weeks before the anniversary of his death, I contacted his right-hand man of many years and asked him to organize a “memory party” with good food and fine wine to be held on the anniversary of our pal’s departure. I sent a significant budget and asked that he invite everyone who might have a story to tell about our friend.I believe good stories need to be spoken into the living memories of others, a sort of cross-pollination of realities.The party was a big success. Lots of people came and I’m told the stories were wonderful. I’ve decided to make it an annual event.I suspect that in the not-too-distant future, citizens who never met my friend will be able to share sparkling memories of moments with him that never really happened.And it is possible that these true stories will be the most magic of all.Myths and legends are true, you see, even when they are not.Roy H. Williams

A wise man sees both sides of a matter. The fool sees only one.The origin of the word “wizard” is wise-ard. It means wise man. Nothing more.The wise-ards of the Christmas Story followed a star, had an adventure, made a discovery and leaped onto the pages of history. What did they talk about along the way? Who did the cooking? What pressing issues did they leave unattended back home? What did they do with the rest of their lives? Where, when, and how did each of them die?We know only that they followed a star everyone else was content to ignore; that they were nonconformists with strange beliefs who had the courage of their convictions.They took action. They left home and found the thing they sought.How about you? Will you run with the big dogs or sit on the porch and bark at the postman? Talk is cheap, the buzzing of flies. I didn’t say that to hurt your feelings. I said it because I love you.What are you trying to accomplish?How will you measure progress-to-goal?Do you know what needs to happen next?Which star do you follow?An encounter with the wise man in the woods is part of every hero’s journey. Athena was the wise man in the woods for Odysseus. When Obi-Wan was gone, Luke went to Dagobah and Yoda became his wise man. Mr. Miyagi was wise-ard for the Karate Kid. Morpheus for Neo. Galadriel for Frodo.When you’re in the darkness of the forest – the belly of the whale – look around for the wise-ard who will help you complete your journey. The wise man in the woods exists only to assist the hero on his or her adventure.21st century wise-men-in-the-woods become faculty at Wizard Academy. Putting you together with them is why we built this place.Mark Huffman from Procter & Gamble.Dave McInnis from PR Web.Tim Storm from FatWallet.comDean Rotbart from the Wall Street Journal.Greg Farrell from Bloomberg News.Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg, Dr. Lori Barr, David Freeman, Michele Miller, Kyle Cease, Ze Frank, Jean Backus, Jeff Sexton, Rich Christiansen, Mark Fox, Dr. Richard D. Grant, Ken Brand, Dennis Collins and the unforgettable Beate Chelette.Wizard Academy is America’s small business institute, a training facility and think-tank for open-minded and courageous business people from around the world. The star you follow is entirely up to you. We simply prepare you for your journey, tell you what to expect on the road ahead, and celebrate your success when you find what you seek.Two or three days at the academy is an informative experience for some, transformative for others.I’ve rambled enough for one day. I thank you for your kind attention.As I bow at the waist and back slowly off the page, I pass along these carefully crafted words from heroes who carved their names deeply in the tree of life.“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!'”– Hunter S. Thompson“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”– Wes JacksonNever forget that failure is temporary, a moment quickly forgotten. 2013 awaits you. Damn the torpedoes.Full speed ahead.Roy H. Williams