Whatever you’re doing with your days is what you’re doing with your life.
If your employees or customers can’t connect your brand with why they should give a portion of their life to it, your brand is inherently underperforming. We can fix that.
We call it executive brand strategy.
The stuff that's sacred and true and feeds every aspect of your business.
It's pre-marketing, pre-sales, pre-product, pre-all the rest of the business. It’s the vision that shapes and defines everything else. Do it right, and the rest follows.
“The average day with Pete is worth about half a million dollars to our bottom line, so we chase the brand down every corridor.”
-Ari Vidali, CEO Envisage Technologies (just before a successful acquisition by Vector Solutions)
Partial List of Clients Served
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What makes it
executive brand strategy?
Executive success metrics are broader and richer than what your department or discipline leads execute against.
Sales is great at the last mile, but not wired or incentivized to choose the right road.
Marketing and PR are great at pumping our your message, but aren’t built to decide where to dig the well.
HR or People Teams are critical for fostering culture and employee experience, but they’re not the source for vision or defining what the work you do means.
Product, Operations, and Delivery are critical for delivering on promises, but they’re not the best source for deciding which promises you should make.
Brand vision is what feeds all the rest. It’s the hub of your wagon wheel. It’s where command intent lives. Brand is where value and meaning are defined for your customers and for the families your company feeds. You know what “heavy is the head that wears the crown” feels like. You know the sacredness of the burden. We help you apply the strength that crown has built in you.
Our Assertions
Brand vision is not marketing …
… brand comes first and feeds marketing, as well as the rest of your business. Brand is the top of the Christmas tree, and everything else cascades down from there. Spend your money and energy here and every dollar you spend down the cascade becomes more efficient and more effective.
Brand vision is for your intimate leadership team…
… it’s an expression of your identity and your response to an invitation from God. If you’re doing it right, your people will experience the shelter and provision of your clarity and obedience, but they’ll never have to wrestle with the decisions to which you’ve been called. This isn’t about power – it’s about submission.
Brand vision is dedicated to highlighting meaning…
… people find their primary meaning at work in five evenly distributed categories. We call them The Five Cs. Career = personal income and advancement. Customer = keeping the right promises for happy customers. Coworker = belonging and respect for expertise within a team. Community = how the organization impacts the larger world. Company = how personal identity aligns with corporate identity. Every time your brand misses one C, you lose 20% of your audience’s most important category of meaning.
Virtues shape cultures …
… as do vices. Consider what “excellence” means in precision-engineered Germany vs. design-vaunted Italy vs. the perfection in discrete expressions in Japan vs. thrift-focused India (or the pragmatism-obsessed United States). The different virtues in each country and culture shape how core concepts are engaged. The same is true in your company. Do you know which virtues drive your team, and which vices tend to be your sticky hiding places?
Hire us so you can hire agencies better …
… we are pre-agency. We don’t design websites, create marketing campaigns, concoct sales scripts and playbooks, do customer journeys, run culture development programs, raise funding, or any of the services you should hire bench- and retainer-focused vendors to help you accomplish. We work with you for three to six months defining and helping you communicate your vision to your team. If you or your team want to keep us around or bring us back for refreshes or to help onboard additional vendors, we can be your big-picture champions, but we’re aggressive about not fostering relationships that depend on our ongoing services.
We work from a project rate sheet …
… as opposed to pricing based on what the market will bear. We’re expensive for startups or companies in “cruise control” phases. Our sweet spot is privately held companies in the $100M to $500M range, or larger companies with private equity support who are actively making acquisitions or are one to three years of selling.
Why we chose the name Centurion …
… it’s from the Bible. A Roman military leader, a centurion, comes to Jesus seeking help for a servant under the centurion’s care. He carries a burden for the person he leads, and he works as a go-between between the person he leads and God. In our logo, the centurion is the rectangle in the middle, the lower triangle is the person being led and protected, and the upper triangle is God. The centurion is pierced by his role as a connector between follower and Father. Our calling is to serve people who take on the centurion’s burden, and to do everything we can to reward their faith and help them achieve the mission to which they’ve been called.
Better Use of Time
We understand what you need to define, and we can help you define it in ways that translate to your entire team, efficiently.
Skill and Process
This isn’t a “discovery” phase to sell what we really do. This is all we do, and we’ve been doing it at a high level for years.
Take Your Story Further
Done well, brand vision feeds the entire company what each part needs to grow and thrive.
Go Deeper, Get More
You will be invited, safely, to see, love, and lead your people more effectively than ever before.
Invitation and Impact
The choices you make with us will directly impact which version of your team their families greet at the end of every day, and which version your team and customers meet all day long.
Get it Finished
Most clients call with at least one dusty old binder of stale cliches, or some half-baked trophy of misspent funds started. Let's finish yours, well.