The companies I work with grew faster than their story. The product evolved, the audience shifted, and the pitch that used to land started sounding wrong – to the team, to candidates, sometimes to the founders themselves. My job is to find what's already true about the business, name it with precision, and build the logic that lets the next phase compound instead of fragment.
Usually around the moment you start noticing the same friction in different places. Your team describes what you do three different ways in the same week. A new hire asks what the company stands for and the answer comes out too long. You're winning the right work but can't quite explain why. A competitor moves into your space and you don't have the language to push back. None of these are crises on their own – they're the signals that the business has gotten ahead of its words. Honestly, if you're asking the question, the answer is probably yes. Strategy work holds up at every stage – pre-launch, two years in, ten years in. Most founders come to brand strategy after years of operating on instinct, which is the right time. Instinct is what gives the strategy something true to name.
Branding is what most people picture – the logo, the colours, the typography, the look and feel of a website. Brand strategy is the layer underneath: the thinking that decides what any of those things should mean in the first place. Who you're for, what you stand for, how you talk, why someone should choose you over the obvious alternative, and what every visual and verbal decision should reinforce. I work only on the strategy layer – I don't design logos or build websites myself. If you need visuals as part of the project, I can onboard a designer for the engagement, or work alongside one already on your team. Either way, I provide clear visual direction for how the strategy should translate into design, so the thinking holds all the way through to what people actually see. Strategy isn't a phase that ends when the design begins. It's the operating layer underneath everything the brand does – what gets built, how it's measured, what gets adjusted, what gets reused.
Pricing depends on the scope, the stage of the business, and how much of the work is research-heavy versus execution-ready. A small positioning engagement for an early-stage founder looks very different from a full strategic foundation for a growing company with a team. Most of my engagements are scoped in conversation, after a short discovery call where we can talk through what you actually need and what's worth investing in at your stage. I'd rather quote you something honest than something generic. If budget is the main thing on your mind, tell me upfront – I'll be straight about whether what you need is something I can do well at the number you have in mind.
The deliverable is a working document that holds the full thinking – the research, the category and competitor analysis, the positioning logic, the perceptual mapping, the EBI analysis and calculations – alongside the practical layer your team uses directly: the language, the phrasing, the decisions, the answers to the questions you've been answering differently for years. How we hand it over depends on you. Some founders take the document and run. Others want a walk-through, a working session, or the strategy built into a system they can operate from week to week – a structured Obsidian vault, a shared workspace, whatever fits how the team already works. We'll decide together what landing the strategy looks like for your team.
Honestly, pre-launch is one of the best times to do this work. You don't have years of accumulated language to untangle, no website copy to defend, no team using three different versions of the pitch. You have a clear product, a real point of view, and the freedom to build the brand alongside the business instead of catching up to it later. The work looks slightly different at this stage – more time on positioning, category, and product logic, less on diagnosing existing assets, but the substance is the same. Strategy gives you a foundation to build on, so every decision after launch (the website, the first hires, the first investor conversation, the first marketing test) reinforces the same idea instead of pulling in three directions. Most founders come to brand strategy after years of operating on instinct. The ones who come early get to skip that phase entirely, and build everything else on a foundation that already holds.
Every business hits one of three strategic problems.
The question is which one you're in.
Every business runs into one of them sooner or later. Brand strategy, shaped to the problem in front of you.
For founders building from zero.
The full strategic core, built from scratch. Category positioning, competitive analysis, product logic, brand personality, and the language to build from.
Learn moreFor brands that have outgrown their original shape.
Audit of current frictions, positioning revision, brand architecture across offers, and a single promise big enough to hold it all together.
Learn moreFor brands ready to scale with intention.
The mechanics of growing on purpose. Distinctive assets, category entry points, mental and physical availability, distribution logic.
Learn moreWhere the thinking comes from,
and why it holds.
I work with evidence-based frameworks from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the same research tradition behind how the world's largest brands think about growth, and apply them to businesses at every stage. Psychology, neuroscience, and genuine curiosity about how people choose, built into every engagement.
The result is strategy that compounds instead of expiring. An operating layer underneath the brand, something the team actually uses.
Work together →Frameworks, observations,
and an argument or two.
The audit asks what's broken. The better question is what was never built. A look at what gets missed when strategy starts from the surface.
Growth science was built on big brand data. Here's how the same principles apply when you don't have a Nielsen budget.
The difference between a brand that feels scattered and one that feels inevitable is almost never the design. It's what lives underneath.
A short brief – your business, your stage, what feels off. Takes five minutes.
No call needed yet.