The work moves in three parts. Each one has to earn the next.
Finding what's actually wrong
You answer five questions.
Then a session, sixty to ninety minutes.
Afterward you get one written page: what's out of sync, what has to change first, and what it's costing you.
Within seventy-two hours, a scope for the work follows.
Nothing gets built before this.
The finding decides what happens next.
Not a proposal written before anyone looked.
Fixing it
Fixed scope. Fixed end date. You can see the end from the beginning.
What gets fixed is whatever the Diagnostic found.
Sometimes that's how the business is described.
Sometimes it's where it sits in the market.
Sometimes it's who the work is actually for.
Sometimes it's the shape of the offer itself.
Sometimes it's the way a client moves through the work.
Sometimes it means rebuilding what people see, and when it does, we direct that and bring in the people who build it.
Each of these arrived with a brief. None of the briefs were right.
A restaurant group came to us after three agencies. Each one had written a full brand strategy. None of it was ever implemented.
They had arrived at every agency with the same brief: rebrand us for the Gen Z market. Nobody asked whether the brief was right.
It wasn't. The business already had a strong following built on something real, and chasing a younger audience meant walking away from it.
At some level everyone could feel it wasn't true. That's why none of the strategies were ever used.
The work started from what the business actually was.
A product brand came to us after six months of steady posting and no traction. They wanted to rebrand.
The content was fine. Good product, real quality, the founder's story was in there.
What wasn't there was any reason to care yet. Every post was working to sell something before anything had been built around it.
We stopped putting the product first. For a stretch, the work was only about the world it belonged to and who someone became by being part of it.
The product came back later. People needed the world before they could want the product.
A fifty-year-old family food manufacturer came to us wanting a campaign. They couldn't understand why their product wasn't moving the way their competitors' did.
The product was better. Family recipe, healthier, fifty years of it. The founder's story was the reason it was what it was, and nobody had ever told it. The business called itself family-owned and stopped there.
On shelves it disappeared. Nothing about it said what was inside was different.
A campaign would have pushed people toward something that still had nothing to say for itself. We started from the story instead and rebuilt from there. Identity, packaging, a seasonal publication with recipes, English and French. The audience shifted from the people who remembered the old country to families who wanted to eat the way that generation ate.
They got the national shelf space. Five years later a conglomerate bought them.
Carrying it forward
The business doesn't stop moving once the foundation holds.
New offers get considered. A market shifts, or opens. Something comes up that doesn't obviously fit what's already there, and someone has to decide whether it belongs, whether it's a new line, or whether it's a different brand altogether.
Those are the same decisions as the ones already made. They just arrive later.
What that looks like depends on the business.
Sometimes it's a monthly call. Where things are, what's coming, what's changed. When something starts to drift, it gets dealt with before it sets.
Sometimes it's closer. A deck comes to me before it goes out. A decision gets talked through before it's made.
It runs a year, usually longer.
This only happens if there's a reason for it. Most of that gets decided at the checkpoint.
What this isn't
We don't take a brief that starts with the deliverable.
Someone who arrives asking for a new website, or a new logo, or a rewrite is asking us to skip the only part that matters.
The strategy decides the design. Never the other way round.