Brand Runway, common questions.

Brand Runway is a thirty-business-day engagement that takes your positioning and turns it into ready-to-publish work. It runs in two phases. Phase A defines your position: who you are for, what makes you distinct, the lane you should hold. Phase B builds the content that carries it: five long-form articles, five carousels, five short-form posts, fifteen supporting pieces, a Growth Report, and a six-month roadmap. Everything arrives as files you can publish, not slides you have to translate.

The audit diagnoses. Brand Runway builds. The Foundation and Accelerator audits tell you where your brand stands and what to change, ranked by commercial impact. Brand Runway takes a position, the one the audit produced, or one you already hold, and produces the assets that put it to work in the market. Diagnosis is one kind of work; build is another. Brand Runway is the build.

A content agency produces volume on an ongoing retainer, usually against a brief you supply. Brand Runway is fixed-scope and fixed-term: thirty business days, a defined set of deliverables, no retainer, no rolling commitment. It also starts a layer deeper. Before any content is written, Phase A defines the position the content is built to express. Most agencies start at the content and assume the position is already settled. Brand Runway settles it first, then builds.

No. It is a one-time, fixed-scope engagement with a clear start and a clear end. Thirty business days from the day we receive your completed intake. At the end you have every deliverable and a six-month roadmap you can run yourself. We do not roll you onto a monthly retainer, and we do not sell ongoing content production. If you want to run another engagement later, you come back as a new one.

Because the engagement gives you a runway: a defined position, the assets to carry it, and a plan for the six months that follow. You leave with momentum and a direction, not just a folder of files. The name reflects what the engagement is built to produce, the conditions for takeoff, rather than a single deliverable.

Established practices that have done the work but not yet built the visibility. Coaches, consultants, real estate practitioners, and professional service firms with at least twelve months of trading, a clear sense of what they do well, and a market that cannot yet see it clearly. Most clients are founder-led, where the founder is the primary face of the work.

When the practice has matured past its current brand and you have a transition in front of you: a new program, higher rates, a launch, a book, a move from one-to-one to group. Brand Runway suits the moment when you know roughly what you should be saying and publishing, but lack the time, the structure, or the editorial direction to ship it.

New practices still finding their footing. Founders who want someone else to invent their position from scratch with no underlying substance to draw on. Businesses where the founder is not the primary face of the work. And anyone looking for an ongoing content retainer, which is not what this is. Where Brand Runway is not the right fit, we say so.

No. Brand Runway includes its own positioning work in Phase A, so you do not need a prior audit to start. That said, many clients do the audit first, implement what they can, and then commission Brand Runway when they have decided on a direction to commit to. Both paths work. If you already know your position well, you can come straight to Brand Runway.

Often, yes, if the content is not tied to a sharp position. Producing more material does not help if the underlying position is unclear; it just produces more of the same flat language your category already uses. Brand Runway defines the position first, then builds content that expresses it specifically. The value is in the alignment between position and output, not the volume of output alone.

Two phases of work. Phase A delivers six positioning documents: a Niche and Category Report, a Competitor Analysis, a Language and Search Analysis, an Audience Report, a Visual Identity Snapshot, and a one-page Positioning Recommendation. Phase B delivers the build: five long-form articles, five carousels, five short-form posts, fifteen supporting pieces, a Growth Report with ten specific plays, and a six-month roadmap. Everything is yours to keep, edit, and reuse.

Phase A is the positioning analysis, days one to ten. Six focused reports, all pointed at one question: where in your category should this business sit, and why. It looks at where your market is moving, how the eight to ten businesses you are most compared with sound and price, the phrases your buyers actually use, who your buyer is and where they look, and how you present against the field. It ends in a one-page Positioning Recommendation, the document the entire build is then based on.

Phase B is the build, days eleven to thirty. Once you approve the position, we produce the assets that put it to work: five long-form articles of 800 to 1,000 words each in your approved voice, five carousels with image direction and copy sized for LinkedIn and Instagram, five short-form posts of 200 to 300 words ready to publish, and fifteen supporting pieces (hooks, openers, subject lines, post prompts). It closes with a Growth Report and a six-month roadmap structured month by month.

A document naming ten specific plays to extend your reach and unlock new revenue, paired with a six-month roadmap that sequences them month by month, by theme and outcome. It is the part of the engagement that answers "what do I do once the thirty days are over?" The roadmap is built for you to run without us.

Yes. The intake captures your voice and language before any writing begins, and Phase A includes a language analysis that maps the phrases you and your buyers actually use. The Phase B assets are drafted in your approved voice, not a generic house style. You review the position before the build starts, which is the point at which the voice and direction are locked in.

To keep the scope tight and the price fixed: no website build or rewrite, no design execution beyond carousel concepts (we deliver visual direction, not production-ready design files), no content production after day thirty, no live coaching or workshop sessions during delivery, and no social media management or scheduled posting. We sometimes recommend specialists for work beyond the engagement, but that happens separately, after Brand Runway ends.

Thirty business days, split into two phases. Phase A (positioning) runs days one to ten. Phase B (the build) runs days eleven to thirty. The clock starts when we receive your completed intake document, not on the day you pay, so the timeline is driven by your readiness rather than our administration.

A structured intake at the start (a four-part questionnaire most clients complete in 35 to 45 minutes), a review and approval of the position on day ten, and feedback on the Phase B drafts as they are delivered. Beyond that, the work happens on our side. You are not expected to be in daily contact, and there are no standing calls during delivery.

A four-part questionnaire covering your practice snapshot, your audience and category, your voice and language, and any supporting materials you want us to read before we start. Most clients complete it in 35 to 45 minutes, and you can save your progress and return. We send it within four business hours of payment. The engagement begins once it is returned.

Everything in writing, as files you can use directly. Phase A documents arrive together at day ten. Phase B files are delivered as they are completed across days eleven to thirty, rather than held back to the end. By day thirty every deliverable is in your possession. There are no live workshops and no follow-up calls required to interpret what was delivered; the work is built to be self-explanatory.

Yes. The position is reviewed and approved by you on day ten before any build begins, which is the most important feedback point in the engagement. During Phase B, you review drafts as they are delivered and can give feedback within the agreed scope. The structure is designed so that the big directional decision (the position) is settled early, which keeps the build aligned from the start.

Brand Runway is $3,980 for the full engagement. Fixed price, fixed scope, fixed timeline. There is an optional case-study price of $3,480 if you agree to be featured as an anonymized public case study after delivery. The case study is light, you see it before publication and can request changes, and the standard price applies if you prefer privacy.

If you agree to be featured as a public case study after delivery, the price is $3,480 instead of $3,980. The case study is anonymized: we remove anything that could reasonably identify you or your business, and you review the material before anything is published. You can request changes or withdraw consent before publication. It is governed by a separate Case-Study Consent Agreement you accept at checkout. If you would rather keep the engagement private, the standard price applies and nothing is published.

Like the audit, the return depends on whether you use what is delivered. The engagement is built to leave you with a defined position and roughly thirty pieces of publishable work, plus a six-month plan. For most clients the value is in time and direction: the heaviest lifts (defining the position, producing the first wave of content) are done, and the roadmap removes the recurring "what do I publish next" decision. We do not promise specific revenue outcomes; we deliver the assets and the plan.

A writer produces words. Brand Runway produces a position first, then the words that express it, plus a plan for what to do with them. A freelance writer working without a defined position tends to produce competent content that still sounds like everyone else in your category, because the differentiation problem was never solved. The Phase A positioning work is the part that makes the Phase B content specific rather than generic.

Instalment options follow the same structure as our other engagements. The specifics, including how instalments interact with the day-ten refund gate, are set out at checkout and in the Terms of Service. The day-ten refund applies to instalment purchases on an equivalent basis.

You have every deliverable, the Growth Report, and the six-month roadmap. We are available for ad-hoc questions by email for thirty days after delivery, included in the price. After that, the engagement is complete. We do not run retainers, we do not pitch a follow-on, and we do not sell ongoing content production. The point is to leave you able to run the next six months yourself.

No. We produce the assets, ready to publish; you publish them on your own channels. This keeps the engagement fixed-scope and keeps you in control of timing and platform. The six-month roadmap sequences what to publish and when, so you have a plan to follow rather than a folder of files with no order.

Yes. On full payment you receive a perpetual licence to use the Phase A and Phase B deliverables within your business in any way you choose: publish them under your own name, edit them, repurpose them, build on them. The one limit is that you cannot resell or redistribute them to third parties as a standalone product. Full terms are in the Terms of Service.

It gives you the two things visibility requires: a position specific enough that the right buyer recognises themselves in it, and enough published work for them to find when they look. Whether visibility actually grows depends on you running the roadmap and publishing consistently after the thirty days. Brand Runway builds the engine and hands you the plan; the ongoing publishing is yours.

Two practical tests. First, the Positioning Recommendation: put it in front of an honest reader and ask whether it describes you more sharply than what you had before. Second, the roadmap: whether, six months on, you published what it sequenced and whether the right kind of prospects started arriving. The engagement gives you the assets and the plan; the measure is whether the position landed and whether you ran the plan.

On day ten you receive every Phase A deliverable, including the Positioning Recommendation. If the direction is not right for you, the engagement ends and your payment is refunded in full. You keep all six Phase A documents either way. We do not begin the build until you have approved the position. This is structural, not a satisfaction guarantee: if the foundation is wrong, nothing built on top of it will hold. Brand Runway is the only engagement at Ironwood Brands with a refund gate of this kind.

The day-ten gate exists precisely for this. The Positioning Recommendation is backed by the evidence gathered in Phase A, and you can challenge it. If, after discussion, the direction still is not right, you take the full refund and keep the Phase A documents. We would rather end cleanly at day ten than build twenty days of content on a position you do not believe in.

You can produce volume with AI. What AI cannot reliably produce is a defensible position: the specific judgement about where your business should sit, drawn from your actual market and your actual voice. Generic tools tend to produce generic output, which is the exact problem Brand Runway exists to solve. The engagement uses the position as the constraint that makes the content specific to you, rather than interchangeable with everyone else in your category.

Yes. Everything you share, and everything we produce for you, is confidential by default. We do not name clients on this site. If you choose the case-study price, any published material is anonymized and shown to you before publication, and you can withdraw consent before it goes live. If you take the standard price, nothing about your engagement is published.

We will tell you. If the audit is the better starting point, or if your practice is at a stage where neither engagement would pay back yet, we say so rather than sell you the wrong thing. The day-ten gate is also a backstop: even once you have started, you can step out at day ten with a full refund if the position is not right.