Brand Vision

Build a company that matters.

If you honor God and the people who bear His image, your company will experience greater success by every measure.

We Make Vision Work

Whatever you're doing with your days is, by definition, what you're doing with your life. If you can't explain to yourself, your people, or your customers why they should give a portion of your life to your brand, you and your brand are inherently underperforming.

Worse, you've got a stewardship issue with the God who owns it all.

Value is not in the widget – it's in the vision. The founder of Chick-fil-A once said, "We're in the people business; we just sell chicken."

Centurion Response can produce a variety of deliverables, but our focus is on outcomes related to your vision in the form of value for your stakeholders.

We work with no more than 10 clients per year, always with the owner or CEO, and always starting from an ongoing engagement that's about their identity, calling, and vision. It's not coaching. It's an alliance to make sure the important parts of your calling don't get overwhelmed by the urgent tasks of your business. We work with our clients' teams and vendors, or produce creative deliverables, based on what our clients see as the best way to respond to their calling and vision.

The average day with Pete was worth maybe half a million dollars to our business, all things considered, and he helped me translate my vision like nobody else, so we talked about everything. He is a brilliant mind that sees the big picture but also can delve deep into a subject to uncover hidden causalities.

Ari Vidali

Founder, Envisage Technologies (Acquired by Vector Solutions)

Pete's talent for understanding the story behind a company's brand and effectively communicating it is the best I've ever seen. The ROS (Return on Storytelling) that Pete generates for his clients is beyond anyone else I've worked with in the industry - and I've worked with most. I am privileged that we've shared time together in developing strategies with clients and executing them.

Doug Karr

CMO, OpenINSIGHTS

Pete is an exceptional writer, uncovering underlying truths with deep insight and articulating his findings with words that have powerful, memorable impact. I am still using pieces he wrote many years ago, and still thinking in terms that he helped frame. Communication is an art that integrates many qualities, and Pete's strengths combine to generate electric results.

Kurt Wilson

President, EffectX

Your Executive Ally

You only have so many leadership points you can use in a day, and most of that budget needs to go to operational efforts. What burns leaders and their teams out is when the leader spends too much of their budget on selling the big idea – getting teams who are selling chicken to think about what it means to be in the people business.

We are your executive ally to keep the vision baked into the operation, so you can focus on the operational demands of the business that empower the vision to flourish.

Partial List of Brands Served

We Carry the Vision Everywhere

Every department has its own success metrics, and in the pursuit of those metrics, every department is incentivized to bleed brand value.

Your brand is the spirit and identity by which your organization navigates and drives value. Your vision.

A healthy brand feeds everything. Unhealthy brands get bled dry by the KPIs and temptations of departments.

We help you steward your brand and its vision to feed every part of your operation.

Sales

KPI: Revenue.

Temptation: sales volume over sales value

Sales tends to be great at the last mile, but horrible at choosing the right road.

A great brand feeds sales a value focus.

Marketing

KPI: Leads and traffic.

Temptation: fragmented messaging

Marketing tends to be great at hooks and product details, but not real value.

A great brand feeds marketing direction.

Public Relations

KPI: Exposure and optics.

Temptation: reactive inconsistency

PR tends to be great at pumping stories, but not deciding where to dig the well.

A great brand feeds PR a refrain.

HR/People

KPI: Engagement & retention

Temptation: Perk & program bloat

HR tends to get stuck playing defense and unaccountable feel-good efforts.

A great brand helps HR love well.

Product/GTM

KPI: Innovation & catalog growth

Temptation: Feature tunnel vision

Product tends to be great at refining the drill bit, but can forget people buy holes.

A great brand feeds product context and meaning.

Analysts

KPI: Revenue assessments

Temptation: "could" over "should"

Analysts tend be great at measuring what is possible, but not what is proper.

A great brand clarifies which wins are right.

C-Suite

And then there's you.

KPI: determining your operational "what" and "how"

Temptation: over-indexing on "what" and "how"

Executives tend to carry so much pressure on operational aspects and mechanical realities that they miss the more powerful irrational and spiritual truths that define their success.

A great brand helps answer "why" and "for whom" questions that produce true value.

Your Board

What about your board and investors?

KPI: profits, threats, and viability

Temptation: tyranny of second-guesses

In the absence of a compelling vision, boards & investors tend to just whip the horse harder, which orients everyone to, and generally produces, the wrong results.

A great brand aligns investors around the purpose of the success the brand enjoys.

How We See It

Brand is less a business discipline than a spiritual one.

We can discuss this further in person – we have presentations and talking points that will excite you until they put you to sleep – but brand comes down to identity and vision related to identity.

Our role is to be your prayerful ally, focused on your vision and your calling, helping with clarity and engaging anywhere in your operation (or with vendors) we can.

As to the faith part of all of this: You don't need your people to be Christians. What you need is an authority structure and persistent vision that ensures all people are treated as though they bear the image of God. He takes care of things from there.

It Goes Deeper Than That

The math related to living impact favors you in a huge way.

Your company has vastly more impact potential than churches do.

Consider the hours that go into a career. Call it 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That's 80,000 hours in an environment that elicits deep investment and draws out all sorts of heart needs from a vastly wider audience.

Compare that to hours at church, if a person goes at all. Call it 3 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That's a generous 6,000 hours, spent with the choir, being thanked for attending, often focused on Bible trivia.

You don't even have to be great at it, and you don't have to be in a hurry. The competitive bar is super low. All you have to do is create a setting that cares and points to meaning, and you'll create more impact and draw more investment than anything else in your people's lives.

That's a great thing, so long as you're pointing that investment to God.

Our Small Batch Process

Centurion Response serves 10 clients per year, and we structure the details of our engagements according to their visions.

You are the centurion, the one going humbly to Jesus on behalf of people you lead. Our job is to help you in your response. We align with you, and then we focus on delivering your vision with and to your team so you can stay focused on operations.

Explore

We'll talk about you and what responding to Jesus in the context of your audience looks like. We'll define the initial gist of your vision and begin to walk around with it.

Capture

We conduct interviews, do research, and find ways to round out and position your vision. This phase is about clarity more than expression. It's where the beauty will shine brightest for you.

Ratio

This is your response to God, and we're always on guard about stealing voice from you or your team. We'll work with you and your team in whatever balance serves your vision and calling.

Deploy

This is the production phase, and the details will vary based on your team's needs. We tend to think the best first spend is the top of the Christmas tree, and everything else gets easier.

Host

As the pieces come into place, we persist as a resource and "keeper of the vision" for you and for your team. We help every department get what it needs from the brand.

Amplify

There is always more to explore and more to do when it comes to casting a Kingdom vision. We stick around to keep the pursuit alive and joyful as it shapes the lives of your people.

What You Get

Will vary based on your vision.

We work from a deliverable-based rate sheet layered onto a minimum engagement fee.

What we want you to buy is the engagement, the ongoing support that's dedicated to your identity and calling expressed in your business. That's the non-commodity part, and the part you have to decide matters first. The rest is creative services.

We recognize you already have staff and other partners, and we have plenty of ways to integrate with them.

Timeline

We can go faster, but we typically spend the first two to three months with you, interviews, and defining your brand and its vision. Deployment varies based on the plan and your team, but that's typically a six-month run. We focus on seeing how things are working for a few months after that, and then at about the one-year mark, we review options for amplification or how your vision and brand are best served. We absolutely believe there is a point where having an outside voice becomes a net negative for your team, which in spiritual terms is akin to idolatry (bad things happen to idols), so we get out as soon as we can, dropping to a focus on you and either core leadership or basic friendships.

Relationally

Unlimited access and time

Executive guidance, not agency menus

Prayerful pursuit of your best interests

Flexibility on timelines and workloads

Extended payment plans

Introductions to peers

Deliverables

Brand vision product

Website / website content

Sales primers / playbooks / presentations

Articles and vision documents

Creative deliverables

Value delivery training

Ongoing help for team leaders

Employee program and non-profit vetting

Impact studies

Testimony collection

Book the Conversation

You don't have to have any of this figured out yet.

Our calling is to help revitalize the rustiest weapon in the Kingdom: testimony. Testimony is not a person's before and after story or a one-time experience presented as a sales pitch for church. It's supposed to be you, God, and His will in your life combined as Presence. We focus on centurions because we see the price centurions already pay for their obedience, and that's where we believe we're called to serve. We don't know you yet, but we're already praying for you.

Call. Let's see what happens.