Will Schroter

The difference between being broke and wealthy...

is a very small sum of money.

In other words, especially early in your career, I was 22 at the time.

If you can pull together enough cash to buy a house, to buy a car, to furnish your house, which by the way is not cheap, and to pay off debts, all these things that I did, you are about as rich as you're ever going to be.

A lot of people don't get that.

A lot of people think, well, I need to make $10 million or $20 million or $100 million.

And that's just not true.

The truth is, especially early in your career, if you can take down a lump sum of money that can get you fast forwarded through all the stuff that you're going to spend the next 20 years of your life trying to get to, that is one of the greatest kind of step advantages you'll ever get.

I think so.

Whatever I was quoting at the time would have been more accurate information than I can remember now.

Okay, so, but what happens next is kind of what really mattered in this whole thing.

Blaine did an amazing job of getting us in to pitch Eli Lilly for a bunch of their products that they are coming off patent, which is, or going on patent rather, or we're on patent, we're about to launch.

And this scrappy 50-person company ends up winning a $250 million a year piece of business.

One of the most lopsided agency wins in history.

It's both.

I don't remember what the pie chart differences were, but suffice to say, we were about 500 people too small for that project.

It was called Eli Lilly.

Lilly should still be around, assuming they haven't been bought up and merged by somebody else.

Their product at the time that was a huge breakout for them was Prozac.

Since then, they've had a number of interesting drugs, but that one was a game changer for us because all of a sudden, we went from this tiny little agency to what would then become a 700-plus person company all within the next four years, maybe?