Our story
Built from a simple belief: progress matters, and so does how you make it.
Across very different kinds of work, we kept seeing the same pattern. People were putting real effort into growth, while the things shaping that growth were often treated separately. Goals in one place. Habits, relationships, wellbeing, ways of working, and wider conditions somewhere else.
People were often already trying hard. The missing piece wasn’t always more effort. Sometimes they needed more clarity, capacity, or support. Sometimes they needed more movement. Often, several things were true at once.
We became increasingly interested in a simple question: what would growth look like if we could see more of the whole picture?
That question became the beginning of Victory & Grace.
The idea at the centre
What if Victory and Grace weren't competing ideas?
We began to see the same tension underneath many of the situations we were working with.
People wanted to make progress, deliver, and achieve. But how they got there mattered too. So did whether that way of working could hold up over time, and what it meant for the people and conditions around them.
That gave us a simple way to think about growth.
Victory
The progress you make towards what you set out to achieve.
Grace
The way you make that progress, and what that way affects.
The best growth builds Victory and Grace together.
The two founders
Different experience. The same question.
We met more than a decade ago and became friends well before we became co-founders. Growth was something we experimented with personally too. We were the kind of friends who could go away together and somehow end up spending hours working through goals, development programmes, ideas, and plans.
We shared a lot in how we thought about people, leadership, organisations, and growth, but enough difference to keep challenging one another.
Vic Crone
Vic has led growth and transformation across private, public, and nonprofit organisations, with extensive executive and governance experience. Her work has repeatedly centred on turning ambition into clear direction, disciplined action, and conditions that help people do good work.
Lillian Grace
Lillian’s work has spanned startups, technology, data, governance, and social impact. She brings a big-picture, systems view to complex work, with a strong focus on helping people see more clearly, make better-informed choices, and turn ambitious ideas into something practical.
From experience to a system
We didn’t want to create more advice. We wanted to make the work easier to do.
When we first created Victory & Grace, we expected it to become a consulting business. About six months in, we stepped back.
We could see the work making a difference, but a model that depended on us being there could only reach so far. We wanted to understand what sat underneath the way we worked, and whether we could turn it into something people could use for themselves.
That began a much longer process of mapping the territory of growth, testing what belonged, challenging what didn’t, and gradually turning the thinking into a practical system.
A way to find a useful focus, understand what matters, do real work, make choices, and keep using what you create.
That’s how Pathfinder, Playbooks, the Hub, and V&G’s practical tools began.
Built to keep improving
Experience gave us the questions. Evidence helps us strengthen the answers.
We didn’t begin with an established theory and turn it into a product. We began with patterns we had seen, questioned, and tested through years of work.
Research then helped us challenge and strengthen what we were building. We draw on relevant evidence and established knowledge rather than assuming our own experience gives us all the answers.
We expect V&G to keep developing as we learn from research, test assumptions, and learn from the people using it.
Built to reach further
We want good growth support to be within reach of far more people.
That’s another reason we chose to build a system rather than a service that depended on our time.
We want people to be able to use V&G when it’s useful, return when things change, and keep building from what they’ve already done.
That principle shapes how we design V&G, including our aim to make useful development accessible without requiring a large development budget or enterprise programme.
Evidence matters to us. So does what works in real life.
Where we're heading
We're building V&G for the long game.
V&G is designed across three connected Pathways: Individual, Team, and Organisation.
We’re beginning with Teams. Individual is coming next, followed by Organisation.
We’ll keep improving the system as we learn from evidence and from the people using it. But the principle at the centre stays the same:
The best growth builds Victory and Grace together.