What to Prepare Before Starting a Branding Project
You do not need to have everything figured out before a rebrand starts. But a few things, if you have them ready at kickoff, will make the entire process faster and sharper. Here is what to prepare, what can wait, and what tends to slow projects down.
You Do Not Need to Arrive With All the Answers
A common concern founders have before starting a rebrand is that they do not know enough yet. They have not fully worked out their positioning. They are not sure what visual direction they want. They do not know exactly who their target audience is.
That is fine. That uncertainty is partly what the discovery phase exists to resolve. The strategy sessions, the customer interviews, the competitor research, all of that is designed to surface clarity you do not yet have. We guide you through it.
What we do need from you, though, is honest engagement with the process and a few practical things in place before work begins. The projects that move fastest and produce the sharpest results are the ones where the client arrives prepared on the practical side, even if the strategic side is still developing.
What You Need at Kickoff
A signed contract and advance payment.
No work begins before both are in place. This is not a formality. It is what officially starts the project and confirms that both sides are committed. Once the advance is confirmed, we set the kickoff date and the project clock begins.
The completed discovery form, within two business days.
On day one, we send you a structured questionnaire covering your business, your competitors, your customers, your brand history, and your goals. It is detailed and it asks questions you may not have been asked before. We ask you to complete it within two business days because your answers shape the direction of the entire strategy phase. The sooner we have it, the sooner we can begin the research and preparation for strategy sessions.
Client contacts for customer interviews.
Depending on scope, we will speak to between five and twenty of your existing clients. We call them directly and spend ten to fifteen minutes understanding what they remember about your brand and what they value about your business. We run these interviews ourselves. What we need from you is a list of contacts who have worked with you and would be willing to take a short call. The list does not need to be polished or formatted. A name and a phone number is enough. These are research conversations, not sales calls, and most clients are happy to participate when asked by the business they work with.
All existing brand assets.
Your current logo files, even if you dislike them. Any brand guidelines, even if they are informal or incomplete. Examples of current marketing materials, your website, your business card, your proposals, your social media profiles. We review all of these as part of understanding where the brand currently stands and what, if anything, is worth preserving. [The Complete Branding Process, Step by Step] explains how this review feeds into the strategy phase.
What Helps But Can Wait
There are things that sharpen the process if you have them, but which we can work without if you do not.
A clear sense of who your best clients are and what they have in common. If you can describe the two or three clients who represent exactly the kind of work you want more of, that is useful input for the positioning work. If you cannot yet, the customer interviews often surface it.
Competitor names and links to their websites. If you know who you are competing against, send us the names. If not, we will identify them through our own research.
Visual references. Brands you admire, in your industry or not, that give us a sense of the direction you are drawn toward. These are inputs, not mandates. We use them to calibrate direction, not to copy them.
A settled decision-making structure. Who has the final say on the brand? If it is you as the founder, be available. If there are other stakeholders whose input matters, agree on how their feedback will be gathered and weighted before the project begins. This is one of the most practical things you can do before kickoff. [How We Decide If We’re the Right Fit for Each Other] covers why founder involvement matters so much to how a project runs.
What Slows Projects Down
Knowing what extends timelines is as useful as knowing what helps. Three patterns come up repeatedly.
Unavailable decision-makers.
If the person who needs to sign off on the brand strategy is travelling for three weeks after kickoff, or is in a period where they cannot attend strategy sessions, the project timeline extends accordingly. Build the project around your actual availability, not your ideal availability. We would rather start two weeks later with a present decision-maker than start immediately and stall in the middle.
Scattered or missing files.
If your current logo only exists as a low-resolution image embedded in an old PowerPoint, retrieving a usable version takes time. If your brand history is spread across multiple email threads and old hard drives, gathering it takes time. Spend an hour before kickoff consolidating what you have. It saves multiples of that time during the project.
Unresolved internal disagreements.
If there are two partners or directors with competing visions for where the brand should go, that conversation needs to happen before we start, not during the stylescape presentation. We can facilitate a direction conversation, but we cannot resolve a fundamental internal disagreement about the business on your behalf. Arriving with a shared view of where the brand needs to go is one of the most useful things you can do before kickoff. [What Happens on Our Discovery Call?] covers how we use the pre-project conversation to surface these questions early.
We Guide You Through the Rest
You do not need to arrive with polished answers to every strategic question. You need to arrive willing to engage honestly with the questions when they come.
The discovery form, the customer interviews, the strategy sessions, these are all structured to draw out what you need even if you have not articulated it before. Founders regularly come to strategy sessions with half-formed instincts about their brand and leave with a clear direction. That is the point of the process.
The practical preparation above simply removes the friction that slows the project down before the real work even begins.
When you fill in the Inquiry form, you are already starting. It takes three minutes and gives us the context we need to make the first conversation genuinely useful.
Related Articles
- How Long Does a Rebrand Take?
- What to Prepare Before Starting a Branding Project
- What Do You Actually Get for Your Rebranding Investment?