The principals
are the product.

Chris Faust founded Fastlane in 2006 and now serves as Founder & CEO of the firm he repositioned in 2026 as the first Brand Intelligence Firm. His thesis is straightforward: in an AI-saturated market, brand stewardship — not execution — is the only defensible product an agency can sell.

Before Fastlane, Chris founded Breakthrough Communications, a marketing and PR boutique he led to acquisition by PFS. He served as Head of Communications at Lincoln Financial Distributors, VP of Marketing at InterWorld, and was the first Partner at Merritt Group. He began his career at Burson-Marsteller, then the world's leading reputation firm.

He holds a B.A. in Mass Communications from the University of Delaware. He sits on The Operators, Strategic Growth Council, Trusted Advisors Council, M&A Council, Forbes Agency Council, AMA Executive Circle, and IABC-NJ — bringing two decades of category-shaping advisory to high-growth businesses making positioning decisions worth getting right.

Eduardo Pires is Creative Director at Fastlane, and the architect of its AI Brand Governance practice. He doesn't begin with design. He begins with judgment. Most companies, he argues, don't have a design problem — they have a clarity problem. That is where his work begins.

Over twenty years he has shaped B2B and B2C identities for global businesses including BASF, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, Cibovita, Max Mara, and Dolce & Gabbana, collaborating with some of the world's most renowned graphic designers along the way. Inside Fastlane, that craft now translates into voice models, prompt libraries, and the editorial governance layer every AI tool a client uses must operate within.

He holds three titles inside the firm — brand steward, visual curator, long-term partner. Someone has to say no so the yes matters. That is the role most teams are missing, and the discipline he was built to lead.

Javian Pereira runs operations, client relationships, and marketing strategy at Fastlane. His job sits at the intersection of three things most firms keep separate — the operational layer, the AI layer, and the taste layer.

The operational layer first. Brand Intelligence is a stewardship product, not a deliverable. That means clients are in a permanent relationship with the firm's principals — and someone has to make sure the strategy actually ships, the conviction calendar actually lands, and the briefings actually happen. Strategy is the easy part. Making it real on a Tuesday is where the problem-solving happens.

The AI layer next. Javian is a daily, native user of the tools the rest of the market is still afraid of. He uses them to compress timelines, audit drafts, govern voice, and free the principals to do the thinking only they can do. AI doesn't replace judgment — it exposes it. The taste layer follows the same discipline: strategy without taste produces clever brands nobody respects. He curates, and he pushes back. Both are part of the job.