What is Fortune’s Path?
A New Kind of Consultancy
By putting virtue at the center of its work, Fortune’s Path provides more than just quantifiable results to its clients.
By Joe Noser
When Tom Noser founded Fortune’s Path in April 2018, he wanted to provide a different kind of consultancy. Rather than focusing exclusively on generating short-term, quantifiable benefits for clients, he wanted to create something that would leave more of a lasting impact. That’s why his company operates with one goal in mind: giving clients the deliverables they want in a way that also makes them better.
To put it another way, Tom wants to make his clients more virtuous.
Fortune’s Path is a management consulting firm that works with health tech and service companies to solve their product management, sales, communications, and marketing challenges.
“We’re going to collaborate with you to produce measurable results, and also give you a new sense of freedom and happiness about your work.”
Tom has spent more than thirty years in product management and product marketing. He’s also a capable teacher and mentor – he has a Master’s in Education from Vanderbilt University.
But Tom is more than his résumé. He’s a father of three and a product of three decades of recovery. An inquisitive thinker – he especially enjoys the works of French philosopher Michel de Montaigne – his core identities shape his approach to business.
“I doubt there’s another person in America with 30-plus years of recovery and 20-plus years of product management experience.”
Michel de Montaigne, inspiration for the name Fortune’s Path and the Fortune’s Path motto “Find your genius.”
Isaac Wuest, principal product manager at Tidelift in Nashville, received coaching and mentorship from Tom when he was a young product manager. The experience taught Isaac lessons that he regularly uses in his work today.
“There were dozens of times where Tom helped coach and mentor me about how business incentives, interests, and structure were impacting a given product initiative,” Isaac says. “These dynamics are often opaque to early product managers. Learning to see and interrogate them has served my career at least as much as my core ‘product value’ competencies.”
“Tom is the type of leader and mentor you wish everyone had access to. With his thoughtful insights and ethical approach, every PM I know would stand to gain value from working with Fortunes Path.”
Isaac Wuest , friend of Fortune’s Path and principal product manager at Tidlift.com
According to Fortune’s Path customers, focusing on virtue has lead to significant benefits, not all of which are immediately tangible.
One such customer is Michael Sheridan, the former President of Quovant, a spending management, advanced analytics, and legal bill review company that was purchased by Mitratech in 2022. When Michael turned to Fortune’s Path to help get Quovant back to its core mission, he came away impressed with more than just Tom’s ability to get the job done.
“Tom explains things well and thoroughly, and he’s patient with people,” Michael says. “He’s got a curiosity and encourages the curiosity with others. There’s fun and humor brought to the work with him.”
Michael Sheridan is great admirer of our co-founder Margaret the Pug, but not of having his picture on the internet.
“I don’t try to quantify a new sense of freedom or happiness; those are pretty self-evident. The stuff to quantify are the measurable results. That gets us into a good conversation about what you’re measuring and what variables affect those things.”
“My favorite part is helping people gain confidence and happiness in their lives – being of service to them and helping them rediscover the value that was already there, and if they didn’t have value there, helping them create new value. That’s value in their company, value in their life. It’s producing results with someone to where they feel proud of what they’ve done.”
Of course, Tom is not all that makes up Fortune’s Path. Anna Grimes, his wife and partner, came onboard in April 2023 in a part-time role after spending four-and-a-half years at Golden Spiral Marketing, a business-to-business marketing company in Nashville that works primarily with health tech companies.
“Often, we’re brought in because the organization has reached a crossroads – something is frozen, something is not working,” Anna says. “That’s where I think we do the best work. We can come in and do some coaching to help them un;ock value, or even figure out bigger fish to go after. But a lot of times it’s creating structure and systems where none existed. That’s where we can help our clients; that’s where our value comes in.”
To create systems that previously didn’t exist, a company must move past its own priors. But Tom says that can be difficult to accomplish, because companies are not comprised of rational beings.
“Lots of organizations have unexamined assumptions,” Tom says. “They believe something is true or will have a positive impact, and they don’t investigate that belief very much. They take action on that belief and they may or may not measure the results of that action or try to understand if the action they’re taking has a meaningful impact on the result they’re trying to achieve. All of that stuff gets to both structural and emotional problems with the business.”
Anna also recognizes this problem. She thinks that by being inquisitive and impartial, Fortune’s Path can put a mirror up to its clients and show them issues they may not be able to see on their own.”
“Generally, (companies) have an idea of what’s wrong, but the more we talk to them, the more there might be some other issues that emerge, or others that need to be resolved before we can get to the one they’ve diagnosed,” Anna said. “That’s where that listening comes in, so we can say ‘you can’t solve that problem until you solve this other problem.’”
While Fortune’s Path’s bread and butter is making the internal processes of a business better, it’s also more than capable of helping a company market itself externally. That ability is demonstrated by the recent work it’s done for an insurance brokerage firm the company recently took on as a new client.
In a bid to head off the consolidation trend that’s overtaken the insurance market, the client is trying to attract quality talent to shore up its recapitalization efforts. In order to do that, it must show the insurance business is neither boring nor arcane. Through engaging posts on LinkedIn and a strategy to highlight the benefits it offers its employees, Fortune’s Path is helping it to find its way.
“Their marketing is driven by us,” Anna said. “It’s social media – organic only, not paid. It’s awards and honors that we can submit entries for. It’s press releases as needed. It’s media relations. We handle all of it.”
The clients and the deliverables may vary, but one thing is certain: Tom and Anna will always keep their principles at the center of the work that’s done at Fortune’s Path.
“I want our clients to come away from working with us thinking, ‘man, that was f-ing great. We got better, we felt better, and that was really worth the money in a big way. A lot of our fear went away and we feel a much stronger commitment to what’s important. We know what we’re about; we’ve rediscovered our primary purpose.”
“Generally, companies have an idea of what’s wrong. But the more we talk to them, the more we find there might be some other issues that emerge, or others that need to be resolved before they can get to the one they’ve diagnosed. That’s where listening comes in.”
— Anna Grimes, Director, Fortune’s Path