FORGING A LEGACY: The Mission to Build Unconquerable Leaders
What began as a referral for social media marketing quickly became one of the most comprehensive creative endeavors in my portfolio. INVICTUS Legacy Builders, a high-performance business consultancy founded by Green Beret veteran Michael Dailey, focuses on fostering winning cultures through visionary individual and team leadership alongside scalable systems.
After an impactful presentation of my creative portfolio, marketing acumen and past performance, I was invited to join INVICTUS as Creative Director, tasked with building sweat equity through the creation of a scalable, compelling brand identity and marketing strategy.
My efforts directly produced or facilitated a vast breadth of on-brand deliverables from logos and custom fonts to marketing funnels, copy, video production, editing, podcast streaming, and co-hosting.
The Challenge: From Grit to Greatness
1. Establish the Visual Identity: Craft a brand aesthetic embodying the grit and discipline of a Green Beret while appealing to ambitious leaders driven to leave lasting legacies.
2. Map the Customer Journey: Identify ideal client personas and develop marketing strategies tailored to their needs, ensuring a seamless journey from awareness to engagement.
3. Ignite Sales: Create scalable marketing materials and funnels featuring messaging that:
• Identifies client pain points
• Paints a vision of success
• Demonstrates INVICTUS’s solutions
• Reinforces credibility
To define the brand identity, I led a brainstorming session focused on themes of legacy, transformation, grit, and servant leadership. Early concepts, while visually rich, lacked the simplicity needed for scalability.
Seeking a breakthrough, I conceptualized the torch as the brand’s central symbol. A torch represents guidance, vision, and the ability to illuminate the path forward—for oneself and for others. This metaphor aligned perfectly with INVICTUS’s mission to equip leaders with the tools to transform their businesses and inspire their teams.
The torch concept informed key brand elements:
• Tagline: Be Unconquerable
• Motto: Light your torch, lead the way, leave a legacy.
• Trueline: To get to where you want to go, you must find out where you are.
• Only Statement: The only high-performance business consultancy providing strategy, operations, and leadership solutions for impact-focused leaders who value legacy over short-term success.
I designed the INVICTUS logo with a stylized torch, pairing modern monospaced elements with a sense of timeless tradition. To enhance the brand’s visual impact, I created:
1. Custom Typography:
• Etymon: A proprietary font inspired by military stencils and classical refinement, tailored for large-scale applications.
• Forbearer: A simplified variation for smaller applications.
2. Dynamic Brand Assets: Collaborated with an animator to produce visually stunning logo animations and transitions, establishing grandeur and adaptability.
3. Scalable Brand Extensions: Developed identities for INVICTUS’s subsidiary services, including:
• Handlebar Heroes: A corporate workshop centered on team-building through charitable bike-building competitions.
• Unconquerable Academy: An asynchronous learning platform for business performance and leadership.
• Game Changers: A teen leadership curriculum for high school juniors and seniors.
1. Aesthetic Excellence: The brand’s visual and verbal identity has been universally praised, matching the reputation of its founder and resonating deeply with clients and collaborators.
2. Scalability: The solid foundation enabled rapid creation of assets, including:
• Brand extensions for three product lines
• Four landing pages and sales funnels
• Trade show booth materials and print collateral
3. Credibility & Appeal: INVICTUS’s tone and visuals exude authority, grit, and transformation, reinforcing its credibility among its target audience.
Building a startup brand revealed challenges that underscored the importance of clear focus and prioritization:
• Streamline the Offer: A broad scope of services diluted the ability to focus on a single transformative product or experience. Refining the offer would have enabled sharper messaging and audience targeting.
• Strengthen the Funnel: Resources were spread thin across several product extensions rather than concentrated on nurturing prospects through a unified customer journey.
• Build the Team: Scaling would have required dedicated roles and a larger team to support consistent lead generation and sales growth.
These lessons highlighted the need to approach future endeavors with a clear hierarchy of priorities, ensuring the sharpness of execution matches the breadth of vision.
This project reaffirmed that a deliberate, exploratory process is the cornerstone of success. When the brand’s aesthetic and messaging align authentically with its mission, the result is not only impactful but also scalable. INVICTUS Legacy Builders stands as a testament to the power of grit, vision, and collaboration—and the creative strategy that makes it all possible.