Dear Reader,

There’s a moment every owner hits.

The phones are ringing. The numbers look okay. And suddenly, the pressure shifts.

Not the pressure to survive — the pressure to decide.

Do you stay steady… or start chasing?

That’s where most mistakes get made.

In this episode, Roy and I talk about what actually creates momentum in advertising — and why consistency matters more after things start working, not before.

A new message won’t save a weak foundation.

More spend won’t fix unclear thinking.

Advertising only compounds when the message stays put long enough to be believed.

If you’ve ever felt the urge to pivot when results were almost there, this conversation will slow you down in the right way.

Because the real advantage isn’t creativity.

It’s patience with purpose.

Watch/listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: A lot of business owners believe that they can’t compete because they don’t have a budget that’s big enough like the big brands do. They’ll say, “Once we grow bigger, then we’ll start marketing.” But the truth is, if your message doesn’t work small, it won’t work big. Now, Roy has said this for years, that money doesn’t create momentum. The message does.

So today, Roy and I are gonna be taking on that myth that big budgets always win. We’ll talk about why small companies with guts, focus, and creativity often outperform those with millions to spend. Roy, I want to tackle another myth today, which is that the only way that you can win the game is if you have the absolute biggest budget, and that’s it. ‘Cause I think there’s a lot of people that think, because we’re talking about mass media, and when they hear the word mass, they think this must take a ton, a ton of money. But what you have always said consistently for as long as I’ve known you, is that it actually starts with the message. The message is over the money. Does it take the money? Yes.

Roy Williams: Well, of course, you have to have some repetition of the message.

Todd Liles: Absolutely.

Roy Williams: All right, so we’re talking about big budgets versus smaller budgets.

Todd Liles: Yeah. Okay. And the myth that only if you have the largest pile of cash can you win.

Roy Williams: Okay, so first, let me give you a thing that has been demonstrated, documented, proven, and is a reliable thing that has been observed and repeated enough times that it’s a metric. Okay?

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: Now, you can do better than this, but it’s not easy.

Todd Liles: All right.

Roy Williams: But to get four times as much for your money as the other guy in terms of results, to get 4x the results. In other words, will $100,000 compete with a million dollars? Not usually. But $250,000 can compete with a million dollars. Four times. And so you can do, if you’re doing the right thing, you can get the same impact as a million dollars, you can do it with 250,000. And so 4x, if you know what you’re doing, is pretty easy to get. If everybody else takes a million dollars for them to have a certain impact, you can have that impact for 250 if you’re focused and you don’t do the goober mistakes. You don’t do the idiot mistakes.

Todd Liles: What are the goober mistakes, Roy?

Roy Williams: The goober mistakes are reaching too many people with too little repetition. And so the first thing you have to do is you have to say, “Okay.” And even if you have a million dollars, you will probably still reach too many people with too little repetition. But a million bucks buys a lot of noise in most markets. And 250, if your ad is that much stronger and your campaign is that much more disciplined.

Now, this changes from city to city, so I can’t give you a hard and fast rule. But loosely speaking, mass media is the best value in the largest cities. It is the worst value in the smallest towns. And so the barrier to entry is low in a small town, but the efficiency of the media is very, very, very poor compared to the efficiency of the media in a large town. And so if you have the money to become a player, not dominant, but a player, if everybody else in the market is spending a million bucks a year in your category, but you can afford to spend 250, you can overtake the guy spending a million, and by the time you’re spending a million, you’re the king, and you own those guys.

Todd Liles: So I want to jump into the metrics here, because I have a little bit of insight just from being around you and the other partners. And I want to, loosely speaking, I want to talk some metrics. But I think if I recall, there are two cities that are extraordinarily competitive, which is Dallas and Los Angeles. Even if you have a really big budget, they’re just so competitive that that rule of “it’s best in large cities,” are those the two cities in America right now that that rule is true, but you still have to have a large investment to get going? And why, I guess, would be the other question, if it’s true.

Roy Williams: Okay. I love LA. LA is one of the most efficient media markets on the planet, and so is Dallas. Now, there’s lots of wonderful… I love Chicago. I mean, there are towns I love, love, love to buy media because you can just reach so many people and you can move the needle. But here’s the limiting… Here’s the barrier to entry. Okay. Distribution points.

Todd Liles: Okay. What are these distribution points?

Roy Williams: So if you don’t have… Okay, look, let’s say you’re doing home services and you’re sending out trucks from a warehouse, okay, or from a central location somewhere. If you’re in LA, man, you’re not really serving the city without eight different points of distribution.

Todd Liles: So a distribution point isn’t a radio term per se, it’s how many spots are you physically in?

Roy Williams: Yeah, I’m talking about how many warehouses does your air conditioning company have?

Todd Liles: Thank you.

Roy Williams: How many parking lots are you parking trucks every night? How many parts counters do you have? How many… I mean, dispatch, points of dispatch. Okay. Or you’re gonna spend all day on windshield time. It takes so incredibly long to get anywhere in LA that if you only have like three points of distribution, everybody gets to make one call a day. See what I’m saying?

Todd Liles: 100%.

Roy Williams: And so you have…

Todd Liles: Distribution’s a big challenge.

Roy Williams: Yeah. So if you try to go to LA, and I mean, man, you could go in there cheap and get really maybe five really critically located points of dispatch, distribution. You know, when somebody get a call, think you were running ambulances. Could you cover all of Southern California with all of your ambulances being dispatched from one place?

Todd Liles: Only if you don’t make promises about getting people to hospital alive.

Roy Williams: Yeah, only if you have helicopters. If you have helicopters, you could do it. But no, if you have…

Todd Liles: You will die on our ambulance service, but we’re cheap.

Roy Williams: So what I’m saying is you can’t go into really big cities with a single location. You can in Dallas much easier than you can in LA, but you have to look at the cities and remember, a car is a radio on wheels. And the longer the commute, the more efficient radio is.

Todd Liles: Yeah. So what I see with those cities, and Chicago’s probably included in this too, especially because it’s up and down the lake, is if we’re gonna compete in those cities, A, because of their sheer size and the amount of time it takes, you better have multiple points.

Roy Williams: Yep.

Todd Liles: And then B, while mass media, if we take a look at the reach per capita, it’s very low, but the capita is still probably really high, which means I would assume that even if you’re highly efficient, that means you probably have to come in with a fairly sizable budget just because of the sheer size.

Roy Williams: Let me put it this way. I’m saying…

Todd Liles: Pardon.

Roy Williams: You can bark like a big, big dog in every town except LA for a million bucks. Now, you have to spend the whole million in one place. You don’t spread it out across five different media. If you do that, you’re an idiot and you’re gonna get your ass kicked by somebody spending less money than you that puts all their eggs in one basket and then guards that basket.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And what happens is people, “Oh, we don’t want to leave out these people. We don’t want to leave out these people. Oh, so we’re just gonna do some of this and do some of this and do some of this.” And so most people sprinkle their ad budget and they do too many things to reach a huge number of different people, but they don’t reach anybody with enough repetition. And so that is the single biggest, most common mistake. And it is so intense in people that, “Oh, we also need to do this because not everybody does this.” And I’m going, “Dude, dude, chill. You don’t have the money to reach everybody, so calm down. You are gonna leave some people out.”

As a matter of fact, you need to find out, “How much can I spend?” And then find out, “How many people can I reach relentlessly with that amount of money?” Your budget determines how many people you can reach. Now, do you want to reach 100% of the city and convince them 10% of the way?

Todd Liles: No, sir.

Roy Williams: Or do you want to reach 10% of the city and convince them 100% of the way? ‘Cause the cost is exactly the same amount of money. And so if you understand how to reach a group… What does it take to reach a group of people 100% of the way? We know what it takes, and we’re not gonna let you do less than that. We’re just not. Because if you do, it’s not gonna work and I don’t want to take the blame. And so that’s the thing that separates smart marketing from foolish marketing is discipline.

Todd Liles: We’re gonna keep digging into this topic because I think it’s extremely interesting, especially because we’re talking about metrics. And one of the concepts I want to hit on too is this four times concept. I have a way of thinking about it. It may be technically incorrect, but I’m gonna use two mechanical points of reference. I’m gonna use a truck and then I’m gonna use a rocket ship. And I’m using two analogies because you pick your analogy, listener, the one that you like better.

But what I’ve often thought about when it comes to marketing and money and you’re in a truck, I don’t know what type of surface you’re on, but initially, let’s say these trucks are in a loose surface, maybe even a slightly muddy surface. And if that’s the case and I’m just gonna just spend as much money in it as I possibly can, I often feel like that a lot of money right out of the gate and you have no momentum, you’re just gonna sort of spin your tires. You’re gonna be spending money, you’re gonna be losing lots of opportunity. Eventually you’ll catch momentum and great, now you’re moving, right?

So that momentum can be caused by a number of things. It could be you’re ready to grow. It could be you’ve been building a reputation for two or three years and you’ve been serving your clients’ face off and you’ve got a stockpile of money to go, “Okay, I know I’m gonna burn a little bit of fuel to get going.” Every airplane that takes off burns a lot of fuel to get off the ground, but once it’s off the ground, it’s efficient. So now the other thing I’m gonna go to now… So that’s really about getting started.

Roy Williams: Overcoming inertia.

Todd Liles: Overcoming inertia. Now, the other thing that I’m gonna go to, and I think this might be a little bit more connected to your 250 to 1 million example, is I think about rocket ships. And imagine if we had the ability to fuel them up to the speed of light. The problem with that is that at a certain point, if you’re into physics, you know that you will reach an infinite number of energy that you’ll put into a rocket and you will only just increasingly approach the speed of light by increments, but it doesn’t matter. You will infinitely put in more energy than you will gain speed out of because at a certain point the resistance to break through is so great it doesn’t make sense. In rocket science, they know there’s a balance point where how much fuel do we need to put in this to get it off the ground, break through air resistance, and then once we’ve got that balance, we’re gonna dial it back.

So you’ve talked about this before, but whether it’s caused by just trying to get that extra 20%, if you reach 25% saturation, that’s pretty damn strong. And maybe you’ve done that on a million dollar a year budget. To think that you’re gonna go from 25 to 50% domination on another million dollar a year is fool’s game. It’s just not the way it works. And would you mind explaining why just doubling your budget once you’ve reached cruising speed isn’t actually gonna make you grow that much faster?

Roy Williams: Yeah. Okay. So let me add some nuance to what you just said.

Todd Liles: Please.

Roy Williams: Reaching with the correct amount of repetition 25% of almost any city is unbelievably efficient. That’s the sweet spot. But you can very, very, very, very profitably become a major, major, major force. There’s no city in America where you can actually hit 50%, but you can get 42 to say 47%, depends on the city. Somewhere between 42 and 47% of the total population of the city, everybody that breathes through their nose, right? You can be a household word to half the people. But that second half, you get somewhere… When I say 25%, it’s not a hard line in the sand.

Todd Liles: Sure.

Roy Williams: It’s sometimes 23, sometimes 24, sometimes 26, sometimes 22. But the point is you’ll find a place of diminishing returns and you pause there and you get real momentum with that group. Now, the second bite of the apple, to jump from say 22 to 44, is gonna take you twice as much money. The second 22% or the second 23% is gonna cost you twice as much money as the first 23% you bought.

Todd Liles: So if it took you, I’m just using easy numbers, call it 100,000, to get that additional bump up, it’s gonna go up 200, it’s gonna go to 300.

Roy Williams: It’s gonna go to 300.

Todd Liles: It’s gonna go to 300.

Roy Williams: And here’s why. I’ll give you real, real simple why. No matter what the media is, whether it’s television or whether it’s radio, even if it’s billboards, people have different patterns in their life. Now, the people who drive around the most see the most billboards and listen to the most radio. So the people that spend more times in vehicles see more billboards and hear more radio, right? People that sit in front of a television more hours see more TV ads. And so the heavy user is easy, easy to reach because they spend so much time doing the thing that you’re using. See what I mean? They spend so much time listening to the radio, you can reach them with a lot of repetition really efficiently.

But here’s the problem. Because you’re gonna buy the very best deals first. The most efficient schedules are what you’re gonna buy, the very best deals. You buy the best deal, best deal, best deal, best deal, and then you find that you’re somewhere between 20-something and 20-something percent, right? That’s where you’re out of good deals. And so you go, “Okay, we’re gonna rock and roll. Now we gotta give this time to get traction.” Inertia. We were talking about inertia earlier.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: In physics, inertia is the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest. It’s hard to get it to move. But that same inertia in motion is called momentum. A body in motion wants to continue in motion. And so getting it to move from sitting there, it’s like pushing a car by yourself or with a couple of friends. Man, getting it to move even on level ground, getting it to move that first six inches, it takes everything you’ve got. And man, it’s like 30 seconds later and you’re trotting along behind it. Car didn’t get lighter, you just broke that initial inertia. That’s called breakthrough, to get that thing to move.

So when you start using mass media, you have to overcome that inertia and you have to have enough repetition for people to finally notice that they’re hearing you. Yeah, that’s like 90 days. And you’re saying, “I’m paying bills, I’m paying bills, I’m not getting anything for it. Oh my God, this is a horrible mistake.” No, you just hadn’t got this thing rolling yet. This is why most people chicken out. Now, what happens is, so you’re rocking along, you’ve got about 20-something percent reach in your city, so about one-fifth of the city. You’re becoming a household word.

You do that for a year, maybe for two years, and life is good. Now you think you’re gonna double your budget. No, you ain’t gonna double anything by doubling your budget. You have to triple your budget to double the results. And so people think, well, they want a benchmark. They want every deal to be as efficient as this one. Zero chance of it happening. It’s mathematically impossible. All of the physics of advertising deny you that possibility. Here’s why. You’ve already bought up the good deals. So all the things you didn’t buy are the only things left to buy, and they weren’t as good to begin with. Which is compounded by another problem, Todd, a much, much, much, much, much bigger problem. You buy a station, it’s all virgin audience. They’re all brand new to you and your brand. You buy a second station, I promise you there’s a percentage of that second station that we were already reaching on the first station.

Todd Liles: Right, you have a overlap.

Roy Williams: You go in a third station, there’s a pretty good chunk of that third station that’s listening to one or both of those other two. Nobody listens. Swell, okay, the most loyal radio audience ever measured, and it’s been back in the ’60s, what’s called exclusive cume. Cume is the root word of cumulative. The exclusive cume. In other words, the number of people that if they’re listening to the radio, they’re listening to your station. The number of people, if they’re watching the news, they’re watching your newscast on television. Exclusive cume, largest ever measured, 9% of the total audience.

And so if you have this station and you say, “Man, if you’re not on our station, you’re not reaching our listeners,” that’s stupid. That’s idiot talk. You know why? Most loyal audience ever measured, 91% of that audience listens to other stations also. So I can get 91% of your station, if you have the most loyal audience ever measured, I can get 91% of your listeners on other stations. I don’t have to buy your station. So what happens is you can buy around anybody. And everybody goes, “Oh, well, I’m on that station. That’s the one I listen to and all my friends too.”

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: Now, if you just want to pay them what they want to charge, cool, go ahead. But if you’re wanting your budget to stretch, you buy the best deals.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: People say, “Well, don’t you care about the format?” Not really. You know why? They call it mass media for a reason.

Todd Liles: I think this is… ‘Cause the topic is you don’t have to have the biggest budget to win, but I think it might be…

Roy Williams: Discipline. You have to…

Todd Liles: You have to have discipline.

Roy Williams: You have to understand what actually matters. And if you bring in your inexperienced little gut feelings into it…

Todd Liles: There you go.

Roy Williams: Then you’re gonna do stupid things. And I don’t want to take the blame, because this is… It’s counterintuitive, but when you do it right…

Todd Liles: It’s the Zoolander effect.

Roy Williams: Yeah, the second group you’re getting to, you already got a lot of repetition. So every station that you add, whether it’s television or radio, you got some overlap and you’re getting fewer and fewer and fewer new people. And so to get the same number of people you started with in that first group, no, it takes twice as much money to add them because you’re getting more and more repetition with the people you already had. And there literally is no way to avoid it. There’s no way to avoid it.

Todd Liles: So going to the listener, right? I’m thinking about someone that’s in a business and they’re hearing this and they’re going, “I understand what you’re saying. You’ve given me a pretty decent benchmark. Somewhere between 22 to 26% should sort of be the target. When I start trying to go much beyond that, I’m having to double on top of what I’m already spending,” which makes me go, “Okay, that’s really, really, really important to know.”

But then you also say things like get the best buys. Which, the reason why I said the Zoolander effect was when you were talking about all of that additional money. And I like to use money… I like to call it fuel. It’s a tool, it’s fuel, it gives us momentum, it does all those things. There’s that scene in Zoolander where he’s telling the tragic story about all of his friends dying. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, a silly movie with Ben Stiller where he plays this male supermodel that’s extraordinarily dumb. And he’s, “I’m Zoolander,” and he’s got Blue Steel and… The audience have seen the movie, they get it. But he’s telling this tragic story about how he lost all of his male model friends. And then when they show the flashback, the tragic story is he’s pumping gas into his Jeep, a convertible Jeep, and then he pulls the gas out and he’s doing like this, and they’re all dancing in the gasoline. And then a match gets lit and all of his friends died because they didn’t know you weren’t supposed to play with gas. And money is fuel. It can do really amazing things. But when it’s put in the hand… And I am not calling our listeners stupid, so please don’t… But what I am saying is if you don’t know, you don’t know that you’re playing with fire.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: You’re potentially creating a scenario that could be very dangerous to you and your company when you start making decisions on, “Well, I’m gonna write my ads,” or, “I’m gonna buy my deals.” And we know that there are people that think they can do that because they’ve experimented in it, but it usually never works out. They don’t even realize the amount of waste that they’re wasting. The point that I’m making is that you don’t have to have the biggest budget, but no matter what your budget is, you should be as thrifty with it as possible, which means you need to be smart with your money and avoid that Zoolander effect.

Roy Williams: Right. Well, okay, let me put it this way. Evaluating and negotiating and choosing a media schedule is such a highly specialized thing that even when you understand it, to do it all day, every day for a year is when we find out whether or not you’re actually capable of doing this. It takes a year of doing it all day, every day before we even know whether or not you have the stuff. Now, Devin… I talked to Devin this morning, we had a Zoom call. And twice recently, he would be talking to a client and he would say what he thought he could do. And I was being totally serious, absolutely serious. I was not giving him a false hurdle that I knew he could clear. No. He said, “Here’s what I think I can do.” And I’m going, “Devin, do not let your alligator mouth overload your mockingbird ass.”

Todd Liles: Exactly.

Roy Williams: And he was going, “Really? You don’t think I can do that?” I said, “No.” And so we were going into a major city and I said, “I’m thinking you might get 30, 31% reach for that budget with at least a three frequency.” And he goes, “I can do better than that.” And I’m going, “Pff.” I’m thinking maybe 32, 33, maybe, but that’s really stretching it. I’m thinking, “I know pretty much what can be done.” No. He got 41.5% of the total city 3.8 times. Every person will hear it an average of 3.8 times a week. And I’m going, “Man, man.” Blew my mind. Did it again the next day.

Todd Liles: He did what you thought he couldn’t do.

Roy Williams: I absolutely… I genuinely told him, and I said… ‘Cause he said it in front of the client, and I’m going, “Dude, you’re setting us up to fail here.” And he did it again, talked to him today with television. I said, “We’re gonna buy…” I said, “I know we have enough money,” this other client, I said, “We have enough money to own one news, broadcast news station, either ABC, NBC, CBS, or Fox every night, at least six days a week. We might leave out Sunday because it’s really expensive, but we’ll start with Monday through Saturday, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. We’re gonna own one network and that audience, we’re gonna become a household word.” And that is always a solid thing to do. It works incredibly well.

And he says, “I think I can do more. I think I can get more than one network.” I’m going, “Devin.” And I’m doing the math in my head and I’m just going, “Dude, do not let your alligator mouth…” And so he got three. He got ABC, CBS, and Fox. Six nights a week, the nightly news, six nights a week, 52 weeks a year for the amount of money I thought he could definitely get one network. I’m going, “Gee.” Now you know why he can do that.

Todd Liles: Yeah, he’s capable.

Roy Williams: He’s been doing it all… No, no, no, no. He was skilled when he started 20 years ago.

Todd Liles: He’s experienced now, too, though.

Roy Williams: No, he’s been doing it for 20 years. I mean, when you do it all day, every day, and I promise you this, he couldn’t have done it five years ago.

Todd Liles: Why can he do it now?

Roy Williams: That much more… Remember, 40, 50 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, times five, 260 more weeks of doing it when he was already good. People like him, they don’t quit getting better. They become unstoppable.

Todd Liles: So he’s not the personality that has 20 years of experience, but actually has got one year of experience 20 times.

Roy Williams: No, he doesn’t have one year of experience 20 times. That’s what I’m saying. And the best media buyers, they can have the talent, and when they’re five years in, man, they’re doing a fantastic job. When they’re 10 years in, they’re doing stuff you just didn’t expect could be done. And five years ago, I’m going, “Nobody’s ever gonna do better than this.” We’ve got three or four media buyers like that that are at that level, and we’ve got another three or four that are incredibly good compared to anybody else. But I’m saying to be a true master, you don’t get there in a year or five years. To really be a master, till you really know what you’re doing. And I sit back now, because I was incredibly good when I was doing it, but I haven’t done it in 25 years. And I’m sitting back and I’m going, “Man, these guys have taken this stuff to a whole new level.” And whenever I say I can explain it to people, but that doesn’t mean you can do it. That just means you understand how it is being done.  I’ll tell you what, and this is an insane thing for me to say, but it’s true, right? I would encourage somebody to write their own ads before they tried to buy their own media.

Todd Liles: Really?

Roy Williams: I actually would. You know why?

Todd Liles: No, I don’t.

Roy Williams: Because when you’re getting three or four times as much impact just in terms of media than your competitors are for the same amount of money, man, your ads can be kind of average and you still kick ass. And what I’m saying is, whenever you have a better message, a better message will get you 4x…

Todd Liles: Yes.

Roy Williams: What the average message will get you. And you’ve got a media buyer that can get you at least 3x what everybody else is getting for their money. And I’m going, so now when you double down on that stuff, we cheat. We get more media for the money and we write better ads. It’s just not that hard if you understand what counts and what doesn’t count and you don’t make the silly mistakes. And so I’m telling people, it’s like, no, no, no, no. I need you to understand how this is done. Because all of your instincts are, “I won’t leave anybody out. I’m gonna do a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this.” Most of the time we see a company, they’re spending a lot of money, they’re spending enough money to be a player. And you’re looking at it and you’re going, “Yeah, but you’re sprinkling it on like six different things.”

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And I said, let’s pick one thing and do that with all of the money. Except you have to set some aside for digital. You have to have some pay-per-click money. Even if the only thing you’re buying is branded keywords, when somebody types in your name, your name better pop up. And I don’t mean organic, I mean paid search. And so I don’t trust SEO as much as most people do, because organic shows up below paid search. You know this, right?

Todd Liles: Yeah. And SEO is becoming a whole ‘nother interesting topic as AI is starting to serve that up. And I’m gonna make one sidetrack, then I’m gonna get to my last point. This is interesting.

Roy Williams: All right.

Todd Liles: I went looking for an overnight oats recipe. I promise you this is going to go somewhere. At every site that I went to that was a recipe site, it was just nauseating bull crap where they could have just given me the recipe. What they did was try to keep me on their site for too long. I eventually went back and just got AI to tell me. So my only point to SEO information is that if you’re going to write SEO information, people need to find what they’re looking for. They need to know what it is in a hurry. And if you are taking an old technique of going, “Well, I’m just going to write never-ending nauseating material,” they will skip your site and they will start using AI over you.

Okay, let’s go back to this because you’ve made some very good points. And that’s a little side note. Here’s the last segment that I want to talk about and I’m going to introduce this with a concept, and it’s that advertisement and branding is an investment. It’s not an expense. But it could be an expense. So I want to share with you a mindset that I’ve had for a very long time. And I know this is one of those areas where you and I have a slight difference of opinion, but I’m going to give you my opinion.

I told my nephew this. When I was 21… I told him this when he was 21. When I was 21, I made decisions about things like Starbucks coffees. And my thought was I could get this $4 cup of coffee here or I could make a cup of coffee at home for 15 cents. Now I enjoy Starbucks. You know this. I’ve bought you Starbucks. But when I was 21, this is what I tell my nephew when he turned 21. He’s 24 now. I said, when I was 21, I figured that four bucks would be worth eight bucks to me in seven years. When I was 28. When I was 35, it’d be worth 16 bucks to me. When I was 42, it’d be worth 32 bucks. When I’m 47, it’ll be worth 64 bucks. I’m almost 47. I said, I have this investment mentality to branding and advertisement like I do to this.

And then he asked me the question, “Well, what about when it dips?” And I go, this is when it’s interesting. Because look, I agree with you. If I were only in it for a short period of time and it hasn’t experienced that much growth, and it dips, it scares the shit out of me. I feel like, “Oh, my gosh, look at this dip. Look how much I’ve lost.” I said, but after you commit to it for a very long time and you’re steadily putting in new while the old is growing, I said, an interesting thing happens. Eventually you get to the point to where your growth has far outpaced everything you’ve put into it. This is where I’m at now. And when there’s a dip in the market, I go, oh, geez, that really stinks. I am playing with so much positive investment money that the momentum is now carrying me through. And I’m way past the escape point. Like, if the market, I hate for it to happen, but if it lost half of its value, I’ve been doing it for so long, my money in would still be less than my investments, even if it lost half of its value.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: And having that mindset of, this is long term, I’m going to keep doing it. I’m going to keep feeding the machine. I’m going to keep dollar averaging, in other words, of saying, I’m going to commit to it every single month. If it’s up or if it’s down, I’m investing, I’m investing, I’m investing. I think is what I see out of the best people. We’ve mentioned Ken so many times on here. But this is what I see out of people like Ken. You’ve talked about guys like Aaron Gaynor. It’s what I believe they do. They have a mindset of, I’m not going to stop advertising because if I do, I’m limiting my growth. When it’s low…

Roy Williams: My description is they’re not twitchy.

Todd Liles: They’re not twitchy little bastards.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: Yeah, yeah.

Roy Williams: They’re grown men. They go, I’m gonna do this. And they don’t blink.

Todd Liles: They’ve made a decision. They believe in the power of it. And so I’m sort of making the point here. But I think if you treat your branding and advertisement campaign like a savings account that has massive dividends as opposed to a lottery ticket. I think a lot of people treat it like a lottery ticket. Like, oh, I’m gonna go buy this lottery ticket. I’m gonna be rich when the Powerball numbers read out in two weeks. That’s not the way it works.

Roy Williams: Yeah, really.

Todd Liles: You got to be patient. So I just want to see if you have any additional thoughts on that, because one of my core values is delayed gratitude. And I think that if you’re going to be successful in the world of mass media and branding, you have to have a certain amount of delayed gratitude.

Roy Williams: You mentioned that you and I have slightly different belief systems.

Todd Liles: Just slightly. When it comes to the stock market.

Roy Williams: Okay, well, when it comes to investing in general, and for the sake of the audience, I will articulate what that difference is.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: Okay. You’re actually more disciplined than I am. You are more relentlessly disciplined and focused. And I’m going, “Nope. I will delay, hide and watch and keep my gunpowder dry and raise up what I could get the most bang for the buck.” Now, is that a foolish thing to do? Probably, because I’m pretending I can see the future. Right? And you have the discipline to say, nope, I’m not going to convince myself that I can see the future. I know that I can’t. And nobody knows what’s going to happen, so I’m going to make a commitment, never blink. Now, I’m that way about writing, and you’re that way with money. And so nobody has my discipline at how much content to create every day. And nobody has as much discipline as you when it comes to setting money aside. And so I’m saying, so we’re not different. It’s just that you have astounding discipline when it comes to financial discipline and money discipline. And I have discipline in other areas, but not so much money.

Todd Liles: Yeah. Well, thank you for making that…

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: Roy, today’s ad is one that you and I have seen before. So I’m going to play it for the audience. You guys can listen to it and check it out. You and I are gonna watch it. We’ve seen this. It’s the Dollar Shave Club ad.

Roy Williams: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: Hi, I’m Mike, founder of DollarShaveClub.com. What is DollarShaveClub.com? Well, for a dollar a month, we send high quality razors right to your door. Yeah, a dollar. Are the blades any good? No. Our blades are f****** great. Each razor has stainless steel blades and aloe vera lubricating strip and a pivot head. It’s so gentle a toddler could use it. And do you like spending $20 a month on brand name razors? 19 go to Roger Federer. I’m good at tennis. And do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back scratcher and 10 blades? Your handsome ass grandfather had one blade and polio. Looking good, Pop-pop! Stop paying for shave tech you don’t need. And stop forgetting to buy your blades every month. Alejandra and I are gonna ship ’em right to you. We’re not just selling razors. We’re also making new jobs. Alejandra, what were you doing last month?

Alejandra: Not working.

Mike: What are you doing now?

Alejandra: Working.

Mike: I’m no Vanderbilt, but this train makes hay. So stop forgetting to buy your blades every month and start deciding where you’re gonna stack all those dollar bills I’m saving you. We are DollarShaveClub.com and the party is on.

Todd Liles: But why am I bringing up a second ad when we’ve already done this before? It’s because I didn’t know something. I went back and was looking, and this one kept coming up as an example of how to do amazingly creative things on a budget. And this is what I found out. So, listener, you’ve watched the ad by now. Roy, do you know what they produced that ad for? Total, all-in cost.

Roy Williams: I think it was like five grand.

Todd Liles: How did you know that?

Roy Williams: Because I study these things.

Todd Liles: It was 4,500 bucks.

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: 4,500 bucks all in.

Roy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Todd Liles: An amazing, amazing ad, which, by the way, within 48 hours, Roy, that ad sold 12,000 subscriptions and put them on the way to their billion dollar valuation.

Roy Williams: Let me tell you what the magic of that ad is. It’s called creative handcuffs. There is nothing harder than having an unlimited budget and a blank sheet of paper. But when you’ve got five grand, said, “Hey, man, we’ve got five grand and we can’t get another grand. Five’s the number.” And it’s kind of like, so we gotta work with what we got. And what have we got? We got that guy and we’ve got these boxes. We got some rolls of tape and a machete. What can we do with that? [chuckle]

And so whenever you put yourself in a corner, and so you can do it intentionally, and even if you have an unlimited budget, or effectively unlimited, and a blank sheet of paper, you know what the smart play is? Give yourself some creative handcuffs and put yourself in a corner so that you have to focus with fewer options. And when you have on, even if they’re artificial handcuffs, handcuffs give you infinitely, infinitely more powerful creativity. And you know what? That was his first one when he was poor. He’s never done another one as good as. Did you hear the point there?

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: It’s not beginner’s luck. It is having limited options and having to figure out how to do something amazing. And right here, what we see in front of us is all we have to work with. And we’ve only got this guy for a day, the camera guy, perhaps. And you see, that’s all we got. We got what we see and we got that guy for one day. We better get scrambling. And so people are just making up crap. “Alright, let’s try that.” And they just do it. And the mistakes are so good that they look planned. No, they weren’t planned. That’s an actual mistake. That’s why it looks like an authentic mistake, because it was. And then you go, “Okay, that’s cool.” And I’m saying, so when you’re good, you say, “How can you make things feel spontaneous?” And this is stuff I always have to prepare the client for. So I say, “Look, this is going to seem like it doesn’t belong there.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: “Let me tell you why it belongs there.” And when people start giving you crap, saying, “That line should not be there. It doesn’t fit,” I’m saying, “I put it there because it doesn’t fit. It’s going to elevate attention, and people are going to try to figure out what that was about.” And then later on, there’s the full reveal, and they go, “Oh, now I get it.” See what I mean?

Todd Liles: 100%.

Roy Williams: And then, so I’m saying is these things, there’s a method, there’s processes where you can use things like that. But when you’re talented, you do it unconsciously because you have a time budget and a money budget. When you’re experienced, you do it consciously.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And so it’s the same… But yeah, I know the ad and it was genius.

Todd Liles: You said something well and it’s very true is that there is so much creativity within the boundaries. I think that’s one of the beautiful reasons why artists will still frame their work before they paint it, or at least they know the size of their work before they paint it.

Roy Williams: Yep.

Todd Liles: Very well said.

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