Most firms make you ask twice before you learn what embedded brand strategy costs. The first answer is "it depends." The second, if you push, is a range so wide it tells you nothing. Neither is a business practice. Both are a way of controlling the conversation before you've had it.
Here is the actual structure, and what determines where a given engagement lands in it.
The three tiers, and what each one is actually for
Clarity Sprint — $35K to $55K. A defined, time-boxed engagement to answer one question precisely: what does this brand actually stand for, and can we say it in language that survives contact with a customer. This is not a warm-up to the bigger tiers. For a founder who needs positioning and message clarity and nothing else, this is the whole engagement.
Brand Foundation — $90K to $180K. Strategy plus the systems that carry it: verbal identity, visual identity, the messaging framework a team can actually use without a translator. This is the tier for a company that has outgrown its founding story but hasn't yet built the infrastructure to say who it is now.
Brand Ecosystem — $160K to $330K and up. Full embedded engagement across strategy, verbal and visual identity, and the messaging systems that touch every function — sales, hiring, investor materials, product. This is the tier for a rebrand triggered by a funding round, an acquisition, or a company that has simply become a different business than the one its brand describes.
Why the range inside each tier is real, not padding
The spread isn't hedging. It's company complexity. A twelve-person company and a two-hundred-person company doing the "same" tier are not doing the same amount of work — more stakeholders, more existing material to reconcile, more places a new messaging framework has to actually land. The tier defines the scope of the problem. The number inside it reflects how tangled the company is when we arrive.
What the fee actually buys
Not deliverables. Access. Every engagement runs directly through our founders — Ian Miller on verbal strategy, Angi Miller on visual design and creative direction — not routed through an account team to a production layer you never meet. We embed inside the company in fractional roles, for a defined sprint, which means we hear the language your team actually uses when no one is optimizing it for a stakeholder deck. That's the material a brand gets built from. It's also the reason this model doesn't scale the way an agency does, and why we've kept it that way on purpose.
Who this is for, and who it isn't
Our primary buyer is a founder, CEO, or C-suite leader at a middle market company — ten million to a billion in revenue — who is the brand and knows it, and who has the authority and budget to act on that. Not a marketing director building a case for someone else. The check-signer.
If you need a logo and a color palette, that's a different engagement at a different price, and there are firms built specifically for it. If you need the brand and the business to actually agree with each other — which is a harder, slower, more expensive problem — that's what these numbers are pricing.
The honest version
We help founders and CEOs bring their companies into focus. That's the whole positioning, and it's deliberately not more complicated than that. The cost reflects the fact that focus, at this scale, isn't a deliverable you can template. It's work that has to be done by people who are willing to be inside your company long enough to actually see it.
