“Legacy of Leaders” is an inspiring TV show featuring interviews with successful entrepreneurs and leaders around the world. The show focuses on business leadership, motivation, and success stories, with the goal of sparking inspiration and igniting success in the audience. Today our hosts, John Chappelear spoke with Grace Deyo.
Grace Deyo
Owner and Founder of True Center Strategy
Website Address: https://www.thetruecenterstrategy.com
Short company description:
True Center Strategy exists because most founders eventually hit the same wall: the strategy is sound, the team is capable, and nothing is moving, because the founder still needs to be in every decision. Most small businesses start from a passion or skill, but at some point in their growth, they outgrow their founder’s personal capacity. That tipping point is where True Center Strategy helps founders get what is in their head into a system their team can run by, so they can focus on growing and scaling their business.
Tell me a time you failed forward and what you learned from the experience
When I first launched what’s now True Center Strategy, I hid behind build mode for 3 months. If I never told anyone it existed, I couldn’t fail at it. But staying quiet was never going to get me a single client, so eventually I launched anyway, with a 12-page website and multiple product paths, trying to serve everyone who might need help. The problem was I wasn’t speaking to anyone specific enough to recognize themselves in it. Since then, I’ve dialed the message down to one outcome for one kind of founder. Now everyone I meet falls into one of two categories: either they’re that person, or they know someone who is. That filter changed everything about how I build relationships and talk about the work.
What are your biggest obstacles and barriers to success?
Right now, I’m the new kid on the block. Running a consulting firm after a corporate career demands a completely different skill set and most of what makes a business owner succeed isn’t visible until you’re the one doing it, marketing, branding, the actual art of a sales conversation, even describing your offer in one simple sentence. It’s easy to start 10 ideas at once and end up with a graveyard of unfinished projects instead of one thing built all the way through. It’s a steep climb. Finding the right networks and support systems has made the real difference, having people who catch my blind spots before they cost me time.
What is the proudest moment of your leadership career?
I’m proud of a moment where I noticed real discontent running through my peers, the kind everyone felt but no one named. Instead of letting it sit, I launched an initiative to address it. It got picked up and expanded across the enterprise and eventually led to a reorganization of a 500-person line of business. There’s still more work to do, change like that never finishes in one pass, but I’m proud that I put action behind what I believed needed to change, not only how the work got done, but how people felt doing it.
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