Every engagement begins by establishing what is actually unresolved. Not what the messaging should say or the brand should feel like, but what the company has and hasn’t decided about the business it is becoming, and whether those decisions are grounded in where it creates disproportionate value.
1What we test
Market. What has changed. Customers, competitors, technology, economics, and where value is moving.
Company. Where disproportionate value actually originates, the leadership thesis, and what the company is choosing to become.
Offer. Whether the product and portfolio express that choice. What the company uniquely offers, to whom, and why it wins.
The identity emerges from the intersection. What we believe about the market, what is particular about this company, and what that requires us to offer and do differently.
2How it runs
Executive interviews. One to one, never in groups. The purpose isn’t to gather opinions but to expose contradictions. Interview a leadership team separately and a different company often appears in each conversation.
The contradiction map. We map where leadership agrees, where it doesn’t, and which unresolved choices matter. Findings are attributed to decisions, not people. Verbatims are anonymized.
The decision session. Leadership faces the actual decision in the form the disagreement revealed. Not “what’s our story?” but “three businesses are being built under one logo. Which one are we?”
The identity. The company leaves with one governed Commercial Identity. The choice, its casualties and its consequences, in a form product, GTM, sales and AI systems can execute from. Messaging comes last, where it belongs.
When it ends, marketing can launch, product can reprioritise, sales can sell, and the AI systems answer from the same source. If all it produced was a deck, it did not work.
3The engagement
The Diagnostic is four weeks and $60,000, fixed. Scope and deliverable agreed in writing before it begins.
What comes next has a shape, and a price, before you sign. The Installation and Stewardship are scoped and priced on the fees page, down to the three shapes an Installation takes.
The Diagnostic stands alone. If the decision is clear, the engagement can end there. If the company wants the choice carried through, the Installation is scoped separately. Stewardship is there when ongoing governance is useful.
And the first step after the decision is the same for every company. In the first ninety days, the identity goes into the systems that speak for the company. The plan, the sales narrative, and the AI knowledge layer. Every Diagnostic ends with that step written. What changes, in what order, owned by whom, whether or not we do the installing.
4The honest boundary
Not every company has a Commercial Identity problem. Some have a pricing problem, a product problem or a distribution problem. The Diagnostic will say so. A process that cannot conclude “you don’t need this” is not a diagnostic. It is a sales pitch.
5Who it’s for
Technology companies at inflection points. Entering a new category or market. Making a major product, GTM or business-model shift. Preparing for investment, M&A or IPO, where twelve to eighteen months before a process is the right time, because a story only holds if the company has had time to become it. Or outgrowing the story that once held the company together.
As companies increasingly encode how they compete into people, plans and AI systems, the cost of incoherence compounds.
Coherence is cheap before you encode it. Expensive after.