Five stages. No surprises

A long conversation, a written brief and a contract. We ask about the business rather than the design. Revenue mix, margins, what your best customers have in common, what you have already tried.

This is also where we decide whether to take the project. If you need a website instead of a rebrand, or your budget would do more good spent on product photography, we will say so and you will owe us nothing.

Competitor landscape, audience, positioning. We look at what every other business in your category is claiming and find the thing none of them can credibly say.

Everything downstream depends on this stage, so we will not compress it. Skipping strategy to save a fortnight usually costs four months in revisions.

Turning the agreed strategy into something you can see. Two routes, each argued back to the positioning. Not five options with no rationale, which is a way of making the client do the deciding.

Two rounds of feedback per stage, consolidated into one voice. Feedback by committee is the most reliable way to produce a worse brand, and we would rather agree that now than discover it in week four.

Getting it live and making sure it is implemented correctly across every platform and supplier. We speak to your printer, your sign maker and your developer ourselves. A specification handed over without supervision comes back wrong most of the time.

We check the dull things too. Favicon, WhatsApp Business profile, Google Business listing, invoice template, email signature. Your customers see these more than anything else and nobody budgets for them.

Once it is live we come back and look at what happened. What gets used, what gets ignored, what suppliers got wrong, and where the system is being broken by the people using it every day.

Reporting comes after launch. That sounds obvious and it is routinely done the other way round.