Gary Williams
CEO and Founder, wRATINGS CORPORATION
For more than 20 years, Gary has served as an advisor to CEO's, senior executives and investors around the world. A recognized authority and speaker on competitive advantage, he has been honored for his strategic insights and uncanny ability to interpret data. In May 2002, his research was featured as the cover article in Harvard Business Review, Change The Way You Persuade. Gary's first book, The 5 Paths to Persuasion: The Art of Selling Your Message (Warner Business Books 2004), has been translated into seven languages and was voted by Fast Company readers as book of the month in July 2004. His upcoming book, Moat Makers: How Companies Build Barriers to Protect Profits, details how companies today generate superior economic profits by focusing on nine sources of competitive advantage. Just like a castle needed a moat for protection, companies also must build durable advantages to protect their profits and customers.
His work has been quoted in 800+ publications and used all over the world, including the Australian Financial Review, Barrons, BusinessWeek, Chief Executive, ComputerWorld, CIO, CNBC, Inc Magazine, Investors Business Daily, London Financial Times, New Zealand Business Review, Selling Power, and the Wall Street Journal. Gary is a frequent keynote speaker at many of the top industry conferences, including the National Retail Federation's Big Show, Oracle Open World, Book Expo America, National Restaurant Association, Entertainment Supply Chain Academy, JDA Focus, and the Teradata Partners Conference.
Ever since his Macintosh software company missed the Microsoft Windows market in the late 1980's, Gary has been on a quest to discover what truly drives a company's competitive advantage. He has extensive industry experience having worked as a senior executive for small entrepreneurial as well as large firms including Glaxo, IBM and Sykes Enterprises. In the mid-1990's, he was the Vice President of Strategy for The Sentry Group, a consulting firm that was acquired by The Meta Group.
In 1998, Gary co-founded Miller-Williams Inc., a research firm dedicated to measuring market movements based on consumer behavior. He built the strategic profiling research method (US Patent 6,658,391) through extensive field studies and academic interviews with authorities in behavioral psychology and statistics. In 2004, he extended the research system to correlate consumer pricing power with financial metrics that identify whether a company has built a competitive advantage. His latest patented methods incorporate details that clearly illustrate the nine sources of advantage.
Through his patented system, Gary and his research team study competitive advantage across all sectors of the US economy. They build comprehensive market models based on consumer expectations, and then measure how today's companies are meeting those expectations. Using insights from his extensive database of successful strategies, he provides advisory services to many of today’s business leaders on how to prioritize spending that builds and sustains their competitive advantages. His data also serves as a leading indicator to Wall Street on how well a corporation will meet earnings expectations.
Gary graduated from the University of Alabama in 1984 with a Bachelor of Science in Biology with an emphasis on Psychology. He lives with his wife and two children in northern Virginia, where he is an avid runner of 5 miles every day.