Ownership & CEO changes

Nothing has a more profound effect on your direction, culture, and brand than a change in ownership or leadership. Not surprisingly, they often coincide.

  • Ownership changes

    • New ownership (private sale, private equity, or IPO) can be the result of years of hard work. It can also come in the form of rescue. Whatever the case, it’s a game changer. Your cultural thermostat is likely fluctuating between excitement, manageable nerves, and crippling anxiety.

  • CEO/founder transitions

    • Your visionary founder has moved on, and you’re feeling their absence. Or, another inflection point has triggered a change in leadership. Either way, a change at the top has or will have, a cascading effect on your business.

  • Mergers & acquisitions

    • Few transitions have the impact of two companies becoming one. It’s a marriage and presents similar challenges, but on a corporate scale. Merging or managing differing cultures, beliefs, and behaviors won’t happen overnight, or automatically.

Sound familiar?

It’s an exciting time in your company’s story. You have new ownership or leadership. Maybe both. It’s possible your founders have moved on, along with their conviction and vision. You have new capital and increased pressures to match. Urgency has never been greater. The company’s truths are in flux, and your team is naturally experiencing corporate anxiety. Your culture, brand, and initiatives are in a holding pattern, which isn’t surprising because your vision, purpose, and expectations are fuzzy. You’re awaiting critical hires. You might have a bad case of merger madness, with clashing cultures and misalignment. Friction could be present between your new and old guards.

We can help.

We work with private equity partners, CEOs, and leadership teams to navigate change, build solid foundations, and sleep soundly. After working with Parliament, you can expect:

  • Alignment & clarity

    • Your team will know exactly what you’re setting out to achieve, why it matters, and how they should behave.

    • Departments will be working from the same playbooks. Brand, product, operations, and financial decisions will align.

    • You’ll have one source of the truth. No more ambiguous directives. No more distracting sidequests. No more half-dead zombie PowerPoint strategies.

  • Speed & autonomy

    • With company-wide alignment and clarity, your team will make better decisions in less time. Debate and collaboration will be focused on areas that used to get kicked down the road.

  • Right culture

    • You will share a conviction about the qualities your staff must possess and the behaviors you will not compromise on.

    • The right people will be attracted to your business, and the wrong people will be repelled. You’ll have the framework to develop hiring techniques that identify the best cultural fits.

    • B.S. values—the ones everybody knows aren’t real—will be replaced by aspirational values. Your team will have a shared understanding of what is inherently true in your organization, and what you hope to be true in the future.

  • Excitement & confidence

    • Your team will develop or re-capture a strong belief in the company and themselves. Optimism and positivity will increase. Anxiety and cynicism will decrease.

  • Stronger & better-executed brand

    • You will have a shared understanding of your audience, their beliefs, and what emotionally drives them to purchase.

    • Your brand will align with and extend your purpose, vision, and culture. It will reflect the quality of your products and your team’s hard work.

  • Strategic, creative partner

    • Your internal creative team will have the tools to consistently execute your brand. Additionally, Parliament can serve as an extension of your team for creative services or executions that fall outside of your expertise.

What we bring to the table.

Parliament combines creative and branding services with foundational business strategy. We’ve tailored our approach to support companies experiencing significant change—what we call critical inflection points. It’s an approach that goes deep. It isn’t superficial, and we don’t do short-term fixes. This is what you can expect from us:

  • Transitional experience, expertise & perspective

    • By definition, inflection points aren’t the norm. So naturally, they’re hard to navigate without experience. Our focus gives us continuous exposure to transition. We’re always learning more about what works and what doesn’t. It allows us to effectively identify patterns, intuit pain points, and prescribe treatments.

  • Eyes on the big picture

    • From the get-go, we’ll be thinking about brand and business. Opportunities and challenges. Past, present, and future. Together, we’ll turn it all into one cohesive portrait that resonates with your team and your customers.

  • Curiosity and enthusiasm

    • We’ll bring a fresh set of eyes and a lot of energy to your transition. We’ll show up with questions, not answers. We’ve found that most of the time, the truth is somewhere in the org; it’s just fuzzy and spread thin—like a dream you can’t quite remember. We aren’t going to turn you into something you aren’t, but we will bring out the best version of yourself.

  • Pursuit of the truth

    • We’re going to do some digging. Down to the bedrock. That’s where we’ll set your new foundation, and everything we do—and you do—should be built on that foundation.

    • BTW, we’re comfortable blending universal, relative, and future truths. You aren’t the priesthood, and we aren’t installing a religion. We’re defining a shared reality that is foundationally accurate, helpful, and actionable. That’s what pursuit of the truth means to us.

  • Accountability & candor

    • We’re comfortable with chaos. The nature of transition—of an inflection point—is flux. We’ll sit in the mess and work through it with you. Of course, our goal is to help you get to the other side, but we won’t rush the process. It takes what it takes.

    • The toughest questions—the ones that keep getting sidestepped—will get answered. We will all practice candor, challenge assumptions, and embrace criticism. Kool-Aid will not be served. This is the path.

  • Emotional support

    • Companies are made of people, and people have emotions! Going through change can be thrilling and exhausting. We frequently hear that our process feels like therapy, which makes sense. You’re working through issues, and solving deep, meaningful problems. We’ll push when appropriate, and provide encouragement throughout.

  • Confidentiality

    • Our clients have secrets—internally and externally. In fact, it’s common for CEOs and private equity partners to share sensitive details with our principals that their staff—and ours—aren’t privy to. This arrangement allows our engagements to be directed and protected.

How it works.

Our offerings are organized into three phases: foundational frameworks, brand systems, and creative services. Within each phase, we offer a range of services.

01

Foundational frameworks

We’ll begin our relationship by working directly with your CEO and leadership team. Objective: unified, directional clarity for your entire business. An in-person workshop—ideally at your place—is the perfect way to kick it off, and from there, we’ll Zoom weekly to review, debate, and discuss progress. And, yes, we know you needed this work done yesterday. We’ll work diligently, but we’re going to prioritize long-term impact and give the process the time it needs. We’ve seen it take anywhere from 5-22 weeks, but 12.6 weeks is the median.

    Related services

  • Alignment
  • Positioning
  • Architecture
02

Brand systems

For some organizations, a crisp, well-articulated foundational strategy meets their needs. But typically, we also define, update, or evolve their visual identity and messaging systems. When appropriate, we offer internal creative teams templates and training to ensure consistency and executional standards are met.

    Related services

  • Naming
  • Identity
  • Messaging
  • Standards
03

Creative services

With foundational strategies and brand systems in place, we can support your internal resources or own creative executions from kick-off through launch.

    Related services

  • Campaigns
  • Design
  • Copywriting
  • Photography
  • Motion
  • Illustration

Let’s talk