Case study · Marques Colston · Enterprise strategy, operating architecture and principal advisory
Building the enterprise around the man responsible for leading it
When Lauren Carter began working with Marques Colston in 2019, Marques Colston Enterprises did not exist. Colston was considering a white-label marketing and website business. The model offered an available route into entrepreneurship, but it had not been built from a clear account of the company he wanted to lead.
At entry, 2019
- Marques Colston Enterprises did not exist
- A white-label marketing and website business
Direction
- A differentiated value proposition and North Star
Enterprise
- Strategic blueprint and plan
- Hiring strategy, recruiting and onboarding
- Revenue-operations expertise
- Operating structure
The more consequential question sat underneath the business idea. Colston was making the transition from professional athlete to entrepreneur while the market continued to understand his greatest value through football. He was also an investor, operator, philanthropist, husband and father, with responsibilities across companies, organizations and family life.
The business had to reflect the person carrying all of that.
Finding the direction before building the company
Lauren could not responsibly develop a roadmap, determine trade-offs or evaluate risk until Colston could articulate what he wanted the next chapter to become.
She brought in brand strategist Jason A. Walker of JWALKER Marketing to lead the deeper brand discovery. Walker drew out Colston's lived experience, convictions and aspirations, then helped translate them into a differentiated value proposition and North Star.
Lauren used that articulation to design the company around it. Their coordinated work connected the human truth Walker surfaced with the business strategy, operating choices and organizational requirements Lauren was responsible for building.
That process produced Marques Colston Enterprises.
Turning the direction into an enterprise
Lauren developed the strategic blueprint and plan, advised on hiring strategy and selection, coordinated recruiting, and built the onboarding process. She brought in revenue-operations expertise, developed the structure through which specialists worked together and connected business choices with the people and processes required to carry them.
The resulting company drew from ideas Colston understood from experience. Its premise included creating separation, translating elite performance beyond sport and helping athletes take a more active role in the enterprises forming around them.
The business had a talent process, clearer communication expectations, defined workflows and a more specific understanding of what it needed to measure.
Colston described what Lauren built in direct terms:
She's built me a Ferrari just in terms of processes, in terms of the way that I need to think about building a scalable business.
- strategy
- tools
- documentation
- roles
- decision logic
- operating structure
The leadership decision that could not be delegated
A principal-led enterprise still requires the principal to occupy the seat only they can hold.
Lauren and the team could build the company, prepare its operating system and coordinate the people around it. Colston still had to decide whether he wanted to lead that version of the business, at the pace and in the public posture it required.
As his personal and professional priorities changed, Colston chose a different pace and direction. The engagement ended with the enterprise architecture built and with greater clarity about the work he wanted to carry forward.
What remained after the engagement
Colston has continued to develop his thinking, capabilities and ventures. Those accomplishments are his.
He is also building from a different starting point than the one Lauren encountered. The tools, documentation and operating foundation she created remained usable after the engagement ended. They gave form to Colston's experience, connected the man, brand and business, and supplied structures he could adapt as his direction developed.
His public work now examines the same questions the engagement had to resolve.
- How does an athlete become an operator rather than a spokesperson?
- How does self-awareness shape strategy?
- How can a principal's brand, business, philanthropy and investments function as one enterprise?
- How does identity become action through systems?
Colston has evolved the foundation. Lauren built it.
The experience behind Man. Brand. Business.
Man is personal. Brand is public. Business is professional.
- Platform
- Personal + public
- Passions
- Personal + professional
- Power
- Public + professional
- Purpose
- All three domains
Work with Colston and other athletes helped Lauren formalize Man. Brand. Business., her framework for the personal, public and professional dimensions of a high-profile life. Her athlete and political work informed its treatment of the connections and boundaries among those domains.
The Colston engagement also demonstrates the larger capability behind Lauren's work. She starts with the person responsible for leading the enterprise, identifies what is distinctive about them, determines what that difference makes possible and builds the strategy and operating structure around it.