How we run a fixed-scope brand engagement (timeline, deliverables, kill-switches)

Most brand agencies sell time. We sell finished work. After ten years of running both models, this is the one we’ll defend in public.

Here’s how a fixed-scope engagement actually runs, what the timeline looks like, and the kill-switches that make “fixed price” honest instead of a trap.

★ Why fixed scope (not hourly)

Hourly billing aligns the agency with hours, not outcomes. The longer the project takes, the more the agency makes. The team isn’t malicious — they’re just responding to the incentives. The result is the standard brand-agency story: scope creep, three rounds of “let’s explore one more direction”, and an invoice that’s 1.6x the estimate.

Fixed scope flips the incentive. We’re paid the same whether the engagement takes six weeks or twelve. So we ship in six. The client gets a known number on the cheque and a known date on the calendar. We get our weekends back.

The argument against fixed scope, from agencies that don’t run it: “every brand is different, you can’t quote without discovery”. True, which is why we have a discovery phase — it just sits inside the engagement, not before it. Week 1 is the discovery, and Week 1 is where the first kill-switch sits.

★ The 8-week timeline

For a full Visual Identity engagement (most common engagement we sell). A focused identity is 2-3 weeks compressed; a Rebrand is 8-12 weeks expanded. Same shape, different surface count.

Week 1 — Discovery

Founder interviews (2-3 calls). Competitive scan of the 5-10 closest brands in the category. Audit of any existing brand surfaces (marketing site, in-product, deck). Output: a written brief that captures what the brand has to do, who it’s for, and what the visual system must encode (not “modern, bold, clean” — concrete things like “credible to enterprise procurement but not corporate”).

End of week 1: first kill-switch. Client can walk away with the brief, the competitive scan, and a 50% refund of the deposit. No questions, no pushback, no convince-the-decision-maker call. We’ve had two clients walk in ten years. We refunded both same-day. Both later sent us prospects.

Week 2 — Direction

Two brand directions. Each has: wordmark + lockup, type pairing, palette, motion principles, and one application surface (usually the marketing-site hero or the in-product header) so the founder compares directions in real context, not on a moodboard slide.

The team picks one or asks for revisions to both. Not eight options — two. Eight options is a moodboard exercise; it produces Frankenstein brands when the team picks elements from three of them.

End of week 2: second kill-switch. Engagement becomes non-refundable, but the directions + Week 1 deliverables are the client’s to keep. If the relationship turns out to be wrong (rare, but happens), the client takes the work elsewhere with the source files.

Weeks 3-5 — System

The picked direction expands into the full system. Every token (colour, type, spacing, radius, shadow). Every application template (site sections, deck masters, social formats, OG cards, in-product accents). Every state (default, hover, focus, disabled). Brandbook drafted in parallel — the document that captures every rule.

This is the longest phase and the one founders skip when they buy cheap. The work isn’t glamorous. Curve adjustment on the wordmark to handle 16px display. Optical alignment of the colour palette in dark mode. Type-pairing fallback chain for systems where the primary font fails to load. None of these are visible in isolation. All of them are visible when missing.

Weeks 6-8 — Rollout

Applications get authored or handed off to engineering. The Figma file is structured for engineering pickup — variables, components, breakpoints, edge-case states. A 30-minute handoff video is recorded covering rationale and edge-case usage. The brandbook ships.

If a rebrand is in scope, this is also where the rollout schedule runs: surface-by-surface swap of every place the old brand lives, on a published timeline so the team can coordinate marketing / engineering / sales.

End of week 8: engagement closes. Final invoice. The brand is in the wild.

After week 8

We charge for additions to scope only if the client wants them — net-new applications, surface additions, voice-and-vocabulary updates after the first quarter. We do NOT charge for revisions to work we delivered. If something doesn’t fit, we fix it as part of the original engagement.

The relationship usually goes warm after week 8 — most clients come back six to twelve months later for a second engagement (Webflow build, mobile expansion, sales-deck refresh).

★ What’s actually delivered

The thing every brand brief asks for, plus the things every brand brief forgets to ask for.

Identity layer:

• Primary wordmark + 2-4 lockups (horizontal, stacked, monogram, monochrome variants).

• Type pairing (display + body) with weight scale and documented fallback chain.

• Colour system: primary, secondary, accent, neutrals, semantic states (success / warning / error / info), all as named tokens.

• Motion language: durations, easings, when animation triggers.

Application layer:

• Marketing-site section templates (hero, feature row, pricing table, footer, CTA strip).

• Sales-deck masters (10 slides, ready to populate).

• Social formats: LinkedIn carousel, LinkedIn post, IG story, X header.

• OG card template (one per page-type).

• In-product accents (button styles, alert states, empty states — not the full UI system, but the brand-touching pieces).

Documentation layer:

• Brandbook (PDF + Figma), capturing every rule, every example, every “do not”.

• Engineering-handoff Figma file with components and Variables, structured for pickup.

• 30-minute walkthrough video covering rationale and edge-case usage.

• Tone-of-voice one-pager with vocabulary list (use / do not use).

Rollout pack (Rebrand tier only):

• Audit of existing surfaces.

• Rollout schedule (which surface swaps when).

• Customer-facing comms draft (“what’s changing and why”).

• Internal-team training notes (support, sales).

★ The kill-switches (and why they matter)

Three kill-switches sit in the contract, in writing, not “if it doesn’t work out we’ll figure it out”:

Week 1 — full out. 50% deposit returned, deliverables to date are the client’s. The risk this manages: the team thought they wanted a brand engagement, discovery surfaces that they actually need a positioning sprint or a UX overhaul. We tell them. They go do that instead.

Week 2 — soft out. Non-refundable, deliverables stay with client. The risk this manages: working relationship doesn’t click. Personality mismatch, communication-cadence mismatch, taste mismatch. Better to admit it at week 2 than power through to a brand the founder will rebrand in 12 months.

Week 4 — continuation only. No exit. By week 4 we’re deep in the system and the team is making decisions that depend on continuity. We tell prospects this in the contract — if you wanted to walk, the time was earlier.

The kill-switches aren’t generous. They’re protective for both sides. Clients who fire studios mid-engagement are usually clients who weren’t ready to commission the work; we’d rather they walk in week 1 than at week 6 with an unfinished system.

★ When fixed scope doesn’t fit

Honest: two engagement types where we recommend hourly instead.

Ongoing brand maintenance. If the client wants a brand designer on retainer for ad-hoc work (new campaign assets, deck refreshes, social templates each quarter), that’s hourly or a small monthly retainer. We don’t sell it ourselves — we recommend a small handful of solo designers who do.

Discovery-only engagement. If the client wants the strategy work without the visual system (just a brand brief, no design output), that’s hourly because the scope is genuinely unknowable until we see the inputs. Rare ask.

For everything else — identity, rebrand, multi-surface programme — fixed scope is the model.

★ Pricing transparency

Published, same numbers every visitor sees, on the pricing page. Visual Identity $6k-$18k, UI/UX Design $8k-$30k, Web Design $5k-$25k, Mobile App Design $10k-$40k, Motion Design $3k-$12k, SaaS Rebrand $25k-$50k, Enterprise/Multi-Surface $50k+.

The lower bound on each tier is the price we quote when the audit confirms a clean scope. The upper bound is what the most expensive engagement in that tier shipped at in the last 12 months. We don’t quote outside the range — if your project doesn’t fit, we’ll tell you which tier does (or whether you need a different studio).

The number on the cheque is the same number on the contract. No “Phase 2: Discovery” upsell. No change orders unless you add net-new scope. The cost of running the studio honestly is that we sometimes turn down work that doesn’t fit; the cost of running it dishonestly would be every prospect we close — so the trade-off is easy.

★ The starting point

If your brand work is open as a quarterly project — book a 30-min consult and we’ll figure out which tier fits in the first ten minutes.

If you’re not sure whether you need brand work at all, send a URL for a 15-minute Loom audit — we’ll tell you whether the brand is the right place to spend money, or whether the leak is somewhere else.

If you’re still researching how brand engagements run, the About page covers the team and the way we work. No fluff.

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Repurposing notes

LinkedIn carousel (7 slides): 1. Hook: “We sell finished brand work. Not hours.” 2. Why fixed scope (incentive alignment). 3. The 8-week timeline (visual). 4. What’s delivered (identity / applications / docs). 5. Kill-switch at week 1 (50% out). 6. Kill-switch at week 2 (soft out). 7. CTA.

X / Twitter thread (8 tweets): 1. Most brand agencies sell time. We sell finished work. Here’s the 8-week timeline, the deliverable list, and the kill-switches that make “fixed price” honest. 2-5. One phase per tweet. 6-7. The kill-switches. 8. Link.

Newsletter: lead with the kill-switch frame — most agencies don’t have one, founders don’t realise they should ask for one. The contrarian angle that earns the open.