Mike Bales - Age 4
Early on, Mike displayed an insatiable curiosity about the world around him - something he still brings to his work each and every day.
As a great man once said, “The details of my life are quite inconsequential.” But if you must know, I grew up in Chattanooga, graduated from the University of Tennessee with degrees in English and Communications, then did what anyone with a freshly minted liberal arts diploma would do; no, I didn’t go to graduate school (yet), I joined a band. After 4 years of filthy vans and smoky clubs, I could see where that was headed. Which is to say, nowhere good. So I put down my guitar, picked up my pen, and spent a couple of years at the Portfolio Center putting a book together. Thus began my journey in the topsy-turvy world of big-time advertising. There were stops at McCann-Erickson, Atlanta, The Richards Group in Dallas, Goldberg Moser O’Neill and Hill Holliday in San Francisco, then back to Dallas where I am today, living comfortably in a really old house with a great family and two big German Shepherds. Pretty standard, really.