I was clever for a living.
For ten years, that was the whole job. From 1995 to 2005 I won more than eighty awards for my creative work in advertising and marketing, and I built a million-dollar company for someone else. In late 2005 I left to build one of my own. Then one night, in the living room, we realized our son was going to see the world differently than we did. Almost everything I believed about communication came apart, and it turned out very little of it was true.
“It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
Tom Stoppard
“Daddy, I have a question.”
For years I could make words dance. I was a master of metaphor with the trophies to prove it. My son Will is a literal thinker. Tell him it is raining cats and dogs and he will run to the window looking for labradoodles falling from the sky. (Not really… but he was very confused by it when he was younger. We’ve all learned a lot since then.) The one thing I was best at was lost on the person I most wanted to reach, and that person had lots of questions. So I had to learn to communicate all over again, this time for clarity instead of applause.
The people who taught me were the therapists, teachers, and coaches who worked with Will, the quiet professionals who lead with love and measure with rigor. One of them, an autism specialist named Staci Bowlen, ran something she called a parent training. I bristled at the name and asked her why. She said, “You cannot expect someone else to change his behavior until you are first willing to change your own.”
That sentence rearranged my life.
I spent the years after turning what those practitioners do into something a busy owner can actually run. It became the HQ Method. The whole story, Will included, lives on the HQ Story page.
Minneapolis, 2025
These days I’m a writer, a keynote speaker, and the founder of EmpraxisHQ. I also run a marketing and management practice for family businesses and nonprofits and the people who pour their lives into them. What I care about is the owner lying awake over payroll and the families depending on it, the manager who wants to do better and was never shown how, and the people who just want to work somewhere that seems them.
I took everything that made me weird as a kid and got people to pay me for it as an adult. I am a chronically curious father of two and a semi-professional squirrel chaser. I would love to help your company.
In the words of the late John Prine, Tim Miles grew up “a young man from a small town with a very large imagination.” He is a bestselling author and keynote speaker who has worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of people. More than a few people have called him savant-like, which he’s fairly certain is a polite term for his remarkably severe ADHD: His brain does a few things impossibly well, a few things impossibly awful, and then gets distracted by nearly everything in between. He’s not unlike a juvenile Golden Retriever in that way. And in many other ways, actually. He dislikes writing in third person.
To bring him to your event, visit TimMilesTalks.com.
