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Vision is Legacy

Vision across generations.

Private memoirs and family expressions to heal, draw together, and translate family members to one another.
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For your dad and for your family.

A general who thinks their job is to keep soldiers safe has lost sight of the Army’s purpose. The job of the general, or the patriarch (or matriarch) is to prepare those who follow to engage in worthy battles.

Until that vision is clear, expressed, and embraced in a way that fulfills its inherent promise, dads are just dads. Becoming more is a centurion’s most profound call. We’re here to help you respond.

And if your have a patriarch (or matriarch) whose legacy is something you want to capture and honor to pass to future generations, start there.

Our goal is to help your family flourish in pursuit of a shared vision, and we have a laundry list of ways to serve you.

Family and Personal Samples

We create private memoirs and other legacy expressions for prominent families. The names and work samples are highly confidential, but the objective is always to help people make better sense of their "first name experiences" within their "last name contexts." 

This work requires a prayerful focus on identity beyond the trappings (and traps) of success.

 

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Loving Enough to Sacrifice is Easy

What's hard is to name that love, and then invite the people you care about to see it the way you do. Especially if they're the ones who paid for the sacrifice.

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Memoirs

Our deliverables are verbatim stories without editorial from us. We bring some structure and we help define key metaphors with the person sharing their story (as well as wisdom from interviewing 2,000 executives over the years), but the focus is on capturing exactly the story and blessing the person sharing is ready and willing to offer.

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Proverbs

Family proverb collections are living documents. They look like a headline – the proverb – with a few paragraphs unpacking it. We help you define the ideas that shape your family's perspective and then we employ copywriting skills to create the proverbs. The big ideas endure, but in healthy families, the nuances change over time.

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Annual Report

Imagine a shelf full of hard cover books or magazines, produced one per year. Inside, you find the stories of family members, the family business, philanthropic endeavors, finances, adventures, dreams, stories, poems, prayers, and everything that keeps a family story going, and family members fresh in your heart.

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Life Plan

For individuals or couples as they start, or restart, their lives. We explore options and help define a compelling vision that translates into a plan. We most commonly do this work with first-born children who need help differentiating themselves from high-performance families. Lots of reading, talking, writing, and prayer exploration together.

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Family Primer

Intended for couples during their engagement, the primer is a "welcome to the family" gift that introduces names, inside jokes, traditions, and which grains of salt are most useful for learning to love the family. Ideally, both families engage in the work, and bonds between the family are formed and celebrated at the wedding.

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Family Meetings

We focus on two types of family meetings. One is to deliver what's been created so the items don't just get slid across the table or fall to normal family dynamics. The second is a working meeting, where sacred work is explained, treated as sacred, and where people are invited to go to deeper places – with help – than their default.

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Crafted Touches

You know when you have something important to say, a blessing to offer, or an opportunity to connect in new ways with a family member. We can help you think through and communicate what you have to say, especially when you're dealing with highly volatile or secret stories. We can also help you make the most of vacations together.

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Gifts & Symbols

The hard part about doing verbatim memoirs is sometimes there are things the family desperately needs to hear, but never has. So we started creating various gifts (children's books, branding irons, custom art, etc) to inject blessings that were lacking. We can start there with your family if you have specific people or ideas in mind.

How We See Your Work

We call family stories "apologia."

Apologia comes from the same root as apologetics and apology, but the meaning is different.

Apologetics focus on defense, like someone defending faith or facing charges in a court of law. An apology, in our world, is the confession of wrongdoing, and a request for forgiveness.

An apologia (apple-OH-gee-ah) is somewhere in between, and the focus isn’t on right or wrong, but on motivation.

Why did Mom choose a life of so many sacrifices for her art? What inspired Dad to pour so much of himself into his construction company? What makes faith so important to one set of parents, and education the preoccupation of another?

There are rational reasons behind every apologia. But beyond the rational and familiar we find all sorts of motivations built around passion, fear, desire, vows, and stories both sweet and heartbreaking that few people explore deeply, let alone share effectively with their families.

Timing is Everything

There are rules about offering and receiving sacred family stories.

An apologia is a subtle gift, a chosen vulnerability, and if it’s not offered in a very open-handed, easy-to-reject way, manipulation is sure to come as part of the package. None of us can expect our pasts to be trump cards we can play on others. It is a great gift when someone is willing to indulge our wounds or unmet needs, to find such parts of us charming, but there is no such thing as forceful charm, or a demanding apologia.

Your story will include many layers of apologia, because it will be offered with love and honesty. It will stand ready, as your love already does, until the time is right for any who read your words to receive whatever gift your apologia may hold for the their hearts.

The DIY Option

Centurion Response projects are expensive, but the price we charge is not a reflection of the value of your story. We've created a free (no email address required or anything) PDF guide for writing your own legacy letter (also called an Ethical Will). We don't believe our overhead should limit your legacy.

FREE RESOURCE Writing a Legacy Letter  

 

General Pricing Summary:

There is more variability and customization in these projects than in anything else we do, but we can offer some general pricing marks for you to have a sense of what we’ll be discussing together.

A single-person memoir is $100k, and a couple is $150k. 

Proverbs collections average $25k.

An annual report agreement is a ten-year engagement (you can cancel after three) because a single issue isn’t worth as much, and the depth of the work grows as we build rapport with households. $300k for the first year, and $200k/year for the next 9 years.

A life plan project is $20k.

A family primer is $25k for one side of the family, and $40k to do both sides.

Family meetings as delivery events average $5k. Working meetings average $10k. There are lots of variables here though.

Crafted touches are free to existing clients, but if free isn’t your style, you can do math off our $5k day rate.

Gifts and symbols began as gift items from us to our clients that the clients didn’t know were coming. That’s still true. Today, though, you’re invited to discuss ideas with us, and we can create bespoke pricing if there are things you’d like to do for your family.

Unlike most agencies, we do not staff a bench. We also work with a caveated “unlimited” time model (the caveats relate to defining your priorities, making sure all decision-makers are in the room for meetings, and tracking any specialty subcontractors and some deliverables in parallel to the main engagement). You will never work with a “b team,” nor will you pay hourly rates for a room full of people who don’t need to be in the room.

To protect the quality of your experience and our home lives, we set a cap of 10 clients for 2025.

As you weigh the value:

Our number one focus is you and how you respond to God in the context of your leadership position.

You know where your family is strong and where it can use support. You also know both your vision and the limits you face in gathering your family together around it. We’re here to help, not to sell.

We pay attention to your calling personally, with your family, with your company, and with your platform. This gives us a unique ability to translate value into each of these arenas.

We’re big believers in the idea of prevenient grace – grace the draws and invites before a person makes a decision to welcome Jesus as Lord. One of the greatest tools used by prevenient grace is generosity and celebration. We love God because He first loved us. The same dynamics work everywhere, especially in families. Your consistency and generosity, without trying to “set the hook,” is key, and we can help.

Our “brass ring” is to travel with you for decades as stewards of your vision in every arena of your life, especially where your objective is to pass your vision to others for them to carry it, as happens with exits, platform handovers, and within families and households.

Book the Conversation

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

Book the Zoom call. Let's see what happens.