For a long time the thinking was free. Nine or ten days on interviews, positioning and a naming route, presented in a room, then absorbed into the identity fee if the client said yes. It looked like generosity and behaved like a sales cost. So we shaved it. Fewer conversations, a single workshop, a thinner argument — there is a limit to how much unpaid work a six-person studio can carry through a quarter, and we kept finding it.

Fourteen days, invoiced separately

Eighteen months ago we split the engagement in two. Phase one is a fixed fee of around £14,000, payable whether or not any design follows, and it ends with a written position, the three routes we rejected, and the reasoning for both. The client owns that document outright. Two have since taken it to another studio, which is their right and stings less than it used to. Being paid changed how we behave in the room: slower to agree, willing to spend a full day on a question that previously got twenty minutes.

The awkward part is that some clients left. Four enquiries in the first six months ended at the price of phase one, and two of those said plainly that they had assumed the thinking came free with the artwork. We earned less that year. Of the fourteen strategy engagements since, ten went on to identity work, one is still sitting with the document, and three concluded they did not need us — which we count as the thing working rather than failing.