What it actually costs when a brand isn't working
Good brand work isn't priced by the hour or the deliverable - it's priced by the size of the problem it's solving. A rebrand for a founder who needs clarity before a raise is a different job to a system that lets a ten-person team ship consistently without a bottleneck at the top. Here's how the investment breaks down, and the thinking behind it.
Speaker / Founder / Entrepreneur
There's no universal price for brand work, because there's no universal problem. A founder who needs a clear story before a fundraising round is solving a different problem than one whose team has outgrown what a single person can approve by hand. The three options below reflect that - they're not tiers of quality, they're different scopes of problem.
What decides which one fits isn't budget, it's stage. Early-stage founders usually need clarity first - a sharp point of view and the identity to carry it, before anything gets built at scale. Growing teams usually need the opposite problem solved: not more ideas, but the systems that let existing ideas hold together without a bottleneck at the top.
The cost of skipping this step rarely shows up straight away. It shows up eight months later, in a pitch deck that contradicts the website, or a new hire who has to guess at tone because nothing was ever written down. By the time that gets expensive, it's usually costing more to untangle than it would have to get right at the start.
Every engagement starts the same way, regardless of scope: understanding what's actually not working before proposing what to build. That's not a sales step - it's usually where half the real problem gets found. The rest of the process, and the price attached to it, follows from what that conversation turns up.
None of this ends at a handoff. Identity work and brand systems only pay off if a team actually uses them under pressure - mid-launch, mid-hire, mid-deadline - not just in the calm of a workshop. So the working relationship usually runs longer than the deliverable suggests: fewer big reveals, more staying close enough to catch the moment something starts drifting off-brand before it ships.
The way to know it's working isn't a satisfaction score at the end. It's whether, a year later, decisions are still getting made the way we agreed they should - by people who weren't in the original room. If a new hire can open the guidelines and make the right call without asking, the system did its job.
None of this is priced to be the cheapest option in the market. It's priced for the version of the work that actually gets used - by a team, after I'm no longer in the room.
Client Testimonials
A few nice words from the people I've worked with.
I almost talked myself out of it — the number felt big for a business our size. A year on, it's the clearest return I've seen from any spend we've made: pricing, packaging, even how we hire, all sit on the same foundation now instead of getting reinvented every time.
She pushed back on the brief in the first meeting, which is exactly what I needed. If she'd just built what I originally asked for, we'd have shipped something forgettable.
The brand work held up as we tripled headcount, which is the actual test. Most of what we paid other agencies for over the years didn't survive our first hire — this did.
Pricing
Plan Option 1
$5,000
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Plan Option 2
$8,000
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Plan Option 3
$10,000
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FAQs
Every tier includes the same starting point — a working session to understand where the business actually is, not just what the brand looks like — then scales in how deep we go: from a focused system for one part of the business, up to a full rebuild across strategy, identity, and the operational pieces that hold it together. You're not paying more for more logos. You're paying for how much of the business the system needs to cover.
Most engagements run six to ten weeks, depending on the tier and how much still needs deciding before we can build anything. The slower part is never the design — it's getting clear on the decisions underneath it. I'd rather take an extra week there than hand you something polished that's solving the wrong problem.
Yes. Projects are split across milestones — typically at kickoff, midpoint, and delivery — so you're paying alongside the work, not for a promise upfront. If your timing needs something different, tell me before we start and we'll structure it around that.
That's what the first conversation is for. I turn down projects where I don't think I can move the business forward, and I'd rather tell you that on a call than three weeks into a contract. If we start and it becomes clear partway through that it's not working, we talk about it directly rather than quietly running out the clock.
You leave with a system that doesn't need me to keep working — that's the point of it. Some clients bring me back for a defined piece of follow-on work as they grow into the next stage; nobody's on a retainer they didn't ask for.