// QUESTIONS WE HEAR
Answered at length and left visible on the page rather than hidden behind a click — partly so you can skim it, partly because collapsed content is read less reliably by the AI systems this site argues about.
DECIDING WHETHER YOU NEED THIS
When your campaigns are executing well and still underperforming. An agency is built to amplify a message; it isn't built to decide what the message should be. If three people on your leadership team would describe your differentiation three different ways, an agency will faithfully amplify all three, and the market will hear noise. The test is simple: ask your CEO, your head of sales, and your head of marketing to write one sentence explaining why a buyer should choose you. If the sentences don't match, the constraint is upstream of media. Hire the workshop first, then hire the agency to execute against a framework that exists. Running it the other way round means paying agency rates for strategy work agencies rarely do well, and then paying again when the positioning changes.
Marketing problems show up as channel-specific underperformance: one campaign is weak, one landing page converts badly, one channel is expensive. Brand problems show up everywhere at once. Sales cycles get longer without an obvious cause. Win rates drop against competitors you used to beat. New hires take months to explain what you do. Your best case studies are in unrelated industries. AI tools describe you in category-generic terms or don't mention you at all. The clearest signal is internal: if the answer to "what do we stand for" varies by who you ask, no amount of channel optimisation will fix it, because every channel is downstream of that answer.
Most rebrands are identity projects — logo, colour, typography, sometimes a tagline. They change how you look, not what you claim or why anyone should believe it. A rebrand that didn't produce a written Claim Framework with provable Reasons to Believe left the strategic question unanswered while making the company feel like it had been addressed. The diagnostic: can you produce a document that states your Core Claim, three Supporting Claims, and the evidence behind each? If not, you have a visual identity, not a brand strategy. Those are different purchases and the second one is the one that changes revenue.
Service businesses usually need it more. A product can differentiate on features a buyer can inspect. A service is bought on belief before it can be evaluated, which makes the claim you make about yourself a larger share of the purchase decision. Two law firms with identical credentials can charge $300 and $800 an hour. Two contractors with the same licence charge $150 and $400 for the same call. That spread is brand, and it's wider in services than in most product categories. We've run this across professional services, healthcare, industrial software, medical devices, retail, and consumer.
SCOPE, TIME, AND PEOPLE
The people who actually make positioning decisions — typically the CEO or founder, head of marketing, head of sales, and head of product. Four to six people in the facilitated worksessions. Broader stakeholder input comes through structured interviews outside the sessions, so you're not putting fifteen people in a room and calling it consensus. In the Done With You tier, expect roughly 8 to 12 hours per participant across the engagement: one-hour interviews, worksessions of two to four hours each, and review rounds. Done For You scales up for complex organisations. Do It Yourself is self-paced. The binding constraint is almost never total hours — it's getting the same four people in the same room three or four times.
Team size, whether you deploy an internal alignment survey, the number of internal interviews, whether we include external buyer or partner interviews, and how much additional research you want — competitive scan, category analysis, customer discovery. More depth on any dimension adds time. One Brand Truth Workshop covers one audience, one market, and produces one Claim Framework; that boundary is what keeps it productized. Organisations that need multiple audiences or business units scope as multiple workshops, priced and scheduled separately, rather than stretching one engagement until it stops being a product.
One named Claim Framework: your Core Claim, three Supporting Claims, and three Reasons to Believe per claim, each TOP-tested for Truth, Ownability, and Provability. Alongside it, a defined Strategic Sweet Spot, a written Brand Foundation covering purpose, values, personality, and voice, and messaging guidance for deployment across sales, marketing, content, and the AI-readable surfaces buyers now research through. Plus full workshop documentation — the interview synthesis, the competitive map, the decisions made and why. The documentation matters more than people expect: it's what lets a new CMO in two years understand why the position is what it is instead of relitigating it.
Every phase ends with a documented decision and an approval before the engagement advances, so disagreement surfaces at a phase boundary rather than at final delivery. We won't finalise a Claim Framework until the decision-makers in the room can explain it, support it, and apply it without coaching. If you disagree mid-engagement we recalibrate before moving forward. The failure mode worth avoiding isn't disagreement — it's polite agreement in the room followed by quiet non-adoption afterward, which is what happens when a facilitator optimises for a smooth session instead of a decision people actually hold.
MONEY, OWNERSHIP, AND WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Three configurations. Do It Yourself is $4,500 for two months of access and gives you the templates, recorded walkthroughs, and example frameworks. Done With You is $13,500 over 90 days and adds facilitated worksessions, the internal alignment survey, coaching for your facilitator, and review of every artifact. Done For You starts at $25,500 and means we conduct the interviews, build the competitive map from primary research, write the frameworks, and produce campaign briefs. All fixed scope. Payment is 50% at start and 50% at midway, with milestone approvals at every phase. Multi-audience engagements are scoped as multiple workshops rather than absorbed into one price.
You own everything we produce for you — the Claim Framework, the messaging, every workshop artifact. Confidentiality is the default. The frameworks published on this site are shared only with explicit client permission, and several clients have declined, which is why the gallery shows seven rather than everything we've run. Publishing is never a condition of the engagement.
No, and that boundary is deliberate. The workshop produces the strategic framework and messaging guidance your team or your agency uses to implement. Deeper implementation support — agency briefing, launch review, content strategy handoff, ongoing coaching — is available as an add-on and is scoped into Done For You engagements when it's needed. Bundling implementation into the base price would either inflate it for teams who already have execution capacity or set an implementation scope we can't hold to a fixed timeline.
The honest test isn't budget, it's whether you have someone internally who can run a strategy conversation and be believed by their own colleagues. If you have a strategist and a facilitator on staff, take Do It Yourself — you need the system, not the person. If you have smart people who disagree with each other, take Done With You, because the value is an outside voice with no stake in internal politics. If you have multiple stakeholders, multiple markets, or a board watching, take Done For You, because you want someone accountable for the answer rather than just the process. A twenty-minute call usually settles it, including telling you when you don't need us.
AI VISIBILITY
It's the necessary condition, not the sufficient one. AI systems build recommendations from patterns across everything they can read about you — your site, your customers, analysts, podcasts, LinkedIn, news. When those signals are consistent, the model describes you confidently and names you. When they're fragmented or contradictory, it hedges, describes the category instead of naming anyone, or names a competitor. A Claim Framework is what makes consistency possible, because it gives every surface the same thing to say. But the framework alone doesn't get read — it has to be deployed across those surfaces, structured so machines can parse it, and corroborated by sources other than you. The workshop produces the signal. Distribution and technical implementation carry it.
No, though they overlap by roughly eighty percent and good SEO is foundational to good AI visibility. Traditional SEO optimises a page to rank for a query. AI retrieval assembles an answer from passages across many sources and weights coherence and corroboration between them. That changes what matters: self-contained passages rather than keyword-dense pages, elaborate and complete answers rather than short ones, structured data, entity consistency across your website and Google Business Profile and LinkedIn and every directory you appear in. The brands losing in AI mostly don't have bad SEO. They never built the expansion pack, and the expansion pack requires a defined claim to be consistent about.
Schema makes you machine-readable. It doesn't make you worth recommending. Marking up a page that says the same generic things your competitors say produces a well-structured description of a company indistinguishable from four others. Retrieval systems then have no basis to prefer you, so they default to whoever has more corroboration elsewhere — usually the largest player. Technical work is the floor: crawler access, semantic HTML, structured data, entity consistency. It clears the way for signal without creating any. The differentiated claim has to exist first, or you've made noise easier to parse.
Twenty minutes. We'll scope it honestly, including telling you if you don't need us.