Meet the Founders

Clay found the Birkman first.

Twenty-five years ago he built a consulting practice on it, sitting with executives, leadership teams, and people standing at a crossroads, watching one instrument explain what years of management training never could.

Jennifer was at Apple then, in educational sales, a top account executive six years running. She watched people walk out of Clay’s sessions understanding themselves in a way no performance review had ever managed. When she retired from Apple, she knew exactly what she wanted to do next. She got certified, and we built a practice together. That was twenty years ago.

Since then we’ve worked with companies large and small, and with more than 3,000 individuals, one at a time. Our clients have included leaders at Dell, Apple, HP, IBM, Sonos, Cirrus Logic, Semtech, GSD&M, and the City of Austin. Also newlyweds, new managers, retirees, and college students. The scale changes. The work doesn’t: help a person understand their Birkman, then use it for the decisions that matter, professional and personal.

Two things became undeniable across those 3,000 clients. The Birkman is remarkably accurate. And it is genuinely hard to use without a consultant beside you.

People would leave a feedback session seeing themselves clearly, then call months later asking what their results meant for a new boss, a hard decision, a marriage. The answer was sitting in their results the whole time. Getting it out took guidance, and guidance doesn’t scale to every moment life asks a question.

Primrose Guides is our answer to that difficulty.

The Guides don’t use numbers, colors, or graphs. They use plain language to capture who you are, to help you explain yourself to the people who matter, to show you what stress looks like when your needs go unmet, and to help you build a life that is uniquely yours.

We didn’t invent the Birkman Method. Dr. Roger Birkman did, over decades of research, and we’ve spent our careers inside his discipline, including the original cohort that helped develop Birkman’s High-Performing Teams program. Every Guide on this platform is grounded in rigorous interpretation of that instrument. Nothing here simplifies or shortcuts what your data actually says. If anything, we go deeper.

We’ve spent our careers watching capable people struggle, not because they lacked talent or drive, but because they couldn’t see themselves clearly enough to work with who they actually are.

The Birkman Method solves that. It shows you how you actually behave, what you actually need, and what happens when those needs go unmet. It explains why certain environments drain you and others energize you. It makes visible what’s usually invisible.

But insight without application fades.

That’s why Primrose Guides is built the way it is. Not as a one-time report, but as a platform that grows with you, a place to return to when life asks a new question and you want an answer grounded in who you actually are.

The barrier was never capability. It was always translation.

We built Primrose Guides to close that gap.

If you’re a Birkman consultant who found your way here, we see you as a colleague, not a competitor.

Primrose Guides is not a replacement for the consultant relationship. The feedback session is irreplaceable. The human context, the real-time dialogue, the interpretation that only happens in conversation.

If you have your Birkman Signature Report, you’ve already had a feedback session. That’s how the methodology works. Your results are yours. We’re just making them more useful.

What we offer is what happens after. Depth, application, and continued return to results that clients already own.

If you’re curious about the platform or see potential for your own practice, we’d welcome the conversation.