How to Land a $40K Branding Project: My Process

The $40K project didn’t start with a sophisticated pitch deck or a beautifully designed proposal. It started with a 45-minute discovery call where I asked better questions than the three other studios the client had spoken to. Process wins projects. Here’s the one that’s worked consistently for large branding engagements.

Phase One: The Discovery That Most Designers Rush

The single biggest mistake in branding work is moving to visual exploration before you’ve done the strategic work. Clients who ask you to “just show them some directions” in week one are asking you to skip the step that makes the eventual design defensible. Don’t skip it.

My discovery phase runs one to two weeks and produces a single document: a brand strategy brief. It covers four things: the business problem the brand needs to solve, the audience with enough specificity to be useful, the competitive landscape mapped against two meaningful axes, and the brand territory – a short description of the feeling and position the brand should own.

That last one is the thing most clients haven’t articulated before. When you help them find it, you become a strategic partner, not a visual vendor. That’s the difference between a $5K logo project and a $40K brand engagement.

Phase Two: Exploration That Doesn’t Waste Time

Armed with the strategy brief, I go analogue first. Twenty to thirty rough sketches across three distinct territories – not polished, not digitised, just fast explorations of shapes and systems. The goal is to cover ground quickly and identify which directions have legs before spending any time in Figma.

I share these sketches at what I call a “directions check-in” – a 30-minute call with a phone photo of the sketches. This aligns expectations early so there are no surprises at the formal presentation, and surfaces client instincts before they’re reacting to polished work (polished work is harder to give honest feedback on).

• Three territories, each representing a genuinely different strategic direction – not colour variations of the same idea
• Each territory articulated as a short sentence before any visual is shown
• One preferred direction agreed before digitisation begins

Phase Three: The Presentation That Sells Itself

I present each direction in three layers: strategy (what problem this solves and why), rationale (the specific choices made and why they serve the strategy), and system (how it extends beyond the logo into applications). By the time I show the logo mark, the client already understands what it’s trying to do.

The $40K project was won not because the design was better than the competition’s. It was won because I was the only person in that process who could explain, in business terms, why each visual decision served the client’s commercial goals. Learn to speak that language and your pricing will never be questioned. The process is everything – define the strategy first, explore broadly but quickly, align early and often, and present work as the outcome of thinking, not as a series of aesthetic options.