About wRatings

Since 1999, we’ve helped the CEO and executive community drive sales growth by determining the best levers to pull to make investments and cut costs.

Our Story

The catalyst for wRatings goes back to the 1980s, when founder Gary A. Williams started a software company focused exclusively on the original Apple Macintosh®. By the time he sold it in the 1990s (for pennies on the dollar, unfortunately), he had missed the substantially larger market for Microsoft Windows® 95 and its precursors.

How could this happen? Why didn’t the best, most elegant product win? The answers would not be discovered for many more years, but Gary vowed that other executives would not have to experience that similar pain of defeat when missing a massive market opportunity.

In the late 1990s, Gary teamed up with sales guru Robert B. Miller (co-author of best-selling book Strategic Selling®) to form Miller-Williams Inc., a sales research firm based out of San Diego, CA. By combining Gary’s patented Strategic Profiling research method with Bob Miller’s sales process, they focused exclusively on helping 12 CEO’s and their executive & sales teams on growing sales.

Between 2004 and 2007, Gary incorporated financial metrics into his research methods to create an investment grade product for the hedge fund community. At this time an during one of the worst US recessions ever, Gary found the precursor to financial success and built it into his methods based on a comprehensive, five-year study of 2,628 companies from all sectors of the global economy.

A leading indicator to future financial gain exists: The wRatings method measures the gaps between customer expectations and company performance to generate rankings.

The unique rankings and data were initially listed on several investment sites, including Bloomberg, FactSet, and S&P Capital IQ. Since 2011, partners of wRatings have launched a series of funds, and licensed its data for inclusion in many investment-grade products. The Drucker Institute, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal and S&P, utilize wRatings data in their annual rankings on corporate effectiveness.

In 2015, wRatings CEO Gary A. Williams teamed up with Gerard F. McDonough to form G2 Equity Partners and combine their competitive & human capital research methods (respectively). The firm collaboratively engages with other equity holders to accelerate sales growth.

In 2019, we launched the wRatings System for continuous delivery to put our predictive analytics into the hands of senior executives around the globe. Our SaaS platform (Software-as-a-Service) is available on demand 24×7 so customers can grow their sales today, which is when they need and want it.

  1. 1998
  2. 2002
  3. 2004
  4. 2008
  5. 2019

  1. How wRatings Started

    Over the past decades, we’ve transformed basic customer satisfaction data into a highly levered platform that makes revenue growth visible to executives. In the late 1990s, our current CEO, Gary Williams, partnered with sales guru Robert B. Miller, co-author of the best-selling book Strategic Selling and co-founder of Miller-Heiman, to form Miller-Williams. That company specialized in building customer value research used for training large sales forces.

  2. Nationally Recognized

    The pioneering research methodology, which was originally called Strategic Profiling, gained its first patent near the end of 1999. The research launched the company into its next growth phase as we gained national recognition. In May 2002, wRatings CEO Gary Williams was the author of the cover article for Harvard Business Review. More publications sought out the research data due to its ability to predict pricing power for a company. In April 2003, the research was again featured on the front page of Investor’s Business Daily. By 2008, over 800 publications had written articles or quoted data coming from the Strategic Profiling methodology.

  3. Financial Metric Integration

    In 2004, wRatings CEO Gary Williams discovered an innovative way to integrate financial metrics with customer data to better predict a company’s future financial performance. Over the next several years, he licensed his research to IT consulting firms for their internal use at Adjoined Consulting, Kanbay, and Cap Gemini. In 2007, Gary was a keynote speaker at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show in New York City.

  4. wRatings New Model

    In 2008, Barron’s featured an article about wRatings data in its roundtable edition. Over the next decade, the integration of financial metrics with customer research became substantially more refined. The introduction of subscriptions to research launched wRatings into a new business model that continues to thrive today. Numerous hedge funds and private equity firms subscribed to wRatings data for use in their investment models, including funds listed on Bloomberg.

  5. Software-as-a-Service

    In early 2019, the various software programs utilized by wRatings were incorporated into one consistent platform that drives revenue growth. Today, wRatings offers companies subscriptions to its Software-as-a-Service. We are the only platform focused exclusively on generating future revenue growth using customer perception and financial/operating metric data.