Gary A. Williams

Gary is the Founder & CEO of W Ratings Corporation, an American cloud computing company based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that operates its proprietary SaaS research platform. He also serves as a mentor for the Novella Center for Entrepreneurship based in Columbia, Maryland, a venture lab for early-stage, purpose-driven companies that integrate the tenets of Stakeholder Theory and Conscious Capitalism to help companies achieve Series A financing.

The W Ratings Corporation uses patented methods to interview customers about their expectations, pricing perceptions, and performance levels of companies, universities, and other organizations. Their machine-learning algorithms and analytics form the foundation of their innovative, proven platform that measures future sales growth. Working primarily with Fortune 500 companies, the company has conducted 600+ research programs in 40+ countries since 1999. Similar to how baseball team owners and General Managers used the book (and subsequent movie) Moneyball to win more games, corporate executives use W Ratings’ proprietary metrics to win more customers and grow sales. Investors use their metrics to project future growth of the companies in their portfolios. To their knowledge, W Ratings has built the world’s largest database that measures the competitive strength of companies based on future sales growth.

In his 40-year career, Gary has worked as a senior executive for small, entrepreneurial and large firms including Glaxo and Sykes Enterprises. His work has been quoted in 800+ publications and used all over the world. His data is used by the Wall Street Journal & Peter Drucker Institute every year to help rank the 250 Top Managed Companies.

In May 2002, he authored 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, has been translated into seven languages and was voted by Fast Company readers as book of the month in July 2004.

He has been a frequent keynote speaker at top industry conferences and universities, including the National Retail Federation’s Big Show, CTIA, Oracle Open World, National Restaurant Association, Entertainment Supply Chain Academy, RIS Retail Executive Summit, the Teradata Partners Conference, High Point University, Kent State University, and the University of Delaware.

Gary graduated from the University of Alabama in May 1984 with a Bachelor of Science in Biology, minoring in Psychology. He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his wife, three children, and three dogs, where he is an avid runner of 4 miles every day.