Everything, answered.

Often yes, though rarely in the way founders expect. Plateaus at this stage of practice are almost never caused by what is currently visible to you. They are usually caused by positioning drift, channel decline, or pricing inertia, or some combination. The audit is the diagnostic that tells you which.

Typically eighteen to thirty months. Less than twelve months is usually too early. The audit will diagnose problems the practice has not yet earned.

It is a positioning audit (what most people call a brand audit). The distinction from a content audit matters. A content audit tells you what to post next Tuesday. A positioning audit tells you whether the channel was carrying positioning underneath it, and whether the channel was ever the real problem in the first place.

Sometimes. More often we tell them to use it differently for a more specific audience. The recommendations are based on what the evidence supports, not on a general view that one channel is good or bad.

Yes, and it is one of the situations the audit was most clearly built for. The audit will not replace the referral engine. It will tell you what the second engine should look like, and what the business needs to do to start building it.

No. Most of our referral-led clients arrive in the same situation. The audit assesses where the business is now, not where the founder thinks it should be.

If the evidence supports it, yes. If the evidence supports a different change first, we will tell you that instead. We follow the data. The audit produces the rationale you can stand behind, not the answer you wanted.

Yes, anonymized. We profile 8-10 competitors (10-12 in Accelerator) and report on their pricing where it is publicly available, with our assessment of where each sits in the market.

The audit's value to senior practitioners is mostly diagnostic. You know how to act on findings. What you cannot do from inside the practice is see how the market currently reads it. The audit is that view, structured and on paper.

Realistically. Research from The Conference Board found that AI tools can effectively provide up to 90% of career-coaching tasks, with humans needed for the remaining 10%. The senior practitioner's job is to articulate where their work lives in that 10%. The audit is one of the few inputs that helps with that articulation, and Brand Runway is how you put that articulation into the market.

If you're producing content, taking calls, showing up consistently, and your diary looks active but your revenue doesn't reflect the effort, that is almost always a positioning or messaging problem, not a work-ethic problem. The Positioning Audit identifies where you're attracting the wrong attention, confusing the right people, or competing on the wrong dimensions. Many of our clients come to us at exactly this point: busy, competent, underpaid.

Marketing tactics fail for a reason, and the reason is almost never the channel or the frequency. It's that the message underneath hasn't been pinned down clearly enough, so every channel performs equally poorly. The Positioning Audit finds that message. Once it's clear, your existing marketing becomes more effective, not because you did more of it, but because the thing you were saying got sharper. If you'd rather we built the sharpened message into ready-to-publish content for you, that is what Brand Runway does.

Many of the founders and practitioners we work with suspect they're undercharging but can't point to specific reasons why. The Positioning Audit examines your positioning, competitor landscape, client outcomes, and messaging to show you where your pricing sits relative to your actual value, and what would need to be true for a higher rate to land with your audience. Sometimes the answer is 'raise rates now.' Sometimes it's 'sharpen positioning first, then raise rates.' Either way, you'll have evidence, not a guess.

Our engagements are built for established founders and practitioners who sell their own expertise (coaches, consultants, solopreneurs, and small firm partners) earning $30K or more annually, with at least twelve months of trading under their current positioning. If you're earlier than that (still shaping your offer, building your first client base, or figuring out what you do), an audit will be premature. You'd benefit more from foundational coaching, a positioning sprint, or a business fundamentals program suited to your stage. If you're further along than that and your growth has started to feel like friction rather than momentum, that's our audience. If you're unsure, email us at hello@ironwoodbrands.com and tell us where you are. We'll give you an honest view.

Two engagements, one feeding into the other. The Positioning Audit (available as The Foundation or The Accelerator) is the diagnosis: an evidence-based review of how your brand works across eight areas of focus, ranked by impact, so you know what to fix first. Brand Runway is the build: a thirty-business-day engagement that defines your position and produces the content and the six-month plan to carry it. The audit tells you what to do. Brand Runway does it. Most clients who do both start with the audit, then move to Brand Runway; some come straight to Brand Runway, which includes its own positioning phase.

A positioning audit (what most people call a brand audit) is a review of how your brand currently performs across the eight areas of focus that drive growth for established expertise-led businesses. We call ours a positioning audit because positioning is where the highest-leverage findings consistently sit. The output is not an opinion piece. It's a clear picture of where your brand is strong, where it's leaking customers, and what to do next, ranked by priority. If you've been growing by doing more rather than by being sharper, the audit gives you the diagnosis first, so you know what to fix before you invest another month of effort.

Both are tiers of the Positioning Audit. The Foundation is our core audit: a full diagnosis across the eight areas of focus and a prioritized recommendations document. The Accelerator includes everything in The Foundation, plus an implementation roadmap that sequences the recommendations into a phased plan you can execute against, with milestones and dependencies. The Accelerator is for founders who want the plan, not just the diagnosis. If you have a team or an execution partner ready to act on the findings, The Foundation is usually enough. If you'll be executing alone and want structure, The Accelerator is the better fit. If you want the diagnosis and the build done for you, Brand Runway is the engagement that carries the audit into execution.

The Foundation is delivered within 10 business days of us receiving your completed intake materials. The Accelerator is delivered within 14 business days. Brand Runway runs 30 business days, split into a positioning phase (days one to ten) and a build phase (days eleven to thirty). All timelines assume you return the intake materials promptly; if you delay, the clock pauses. Most clients complete the intake within the first week after purchase.

It depends on the engagement. The Positioning Audit is diagnostic: it gives you the findings and, in the Accelerator, the plan, but execution stays with you or your team. We keep the audit independent on purpose, so the diagnosis stays honest and isn't shaped by what we'd later sell you to fix. Brand Runway is the engagement that does build the work: it takes your position and produces the content that carries it (articles, carousels, posts, supporting pieces) plus a Growth Report and a six-month roadmap, in thirty business days. So if you want diagnosis, the audit; if you want the work produced, Brand Runway. For anything we don't offer (website builds, ongoing campaigns), we can sometimes recommend people we trust.

Brand Runway is the build engagement, alongside the diagnostic Positioning Audit. It runs thirty business days 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. It is designed for established practitioners who already know what they do well and want it to be visible to the market.

The Positioning Audit tells 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. Founders who already know their position well come to Brand Runway directly; founders who want diagnosis first take the audit, then Brand Runway. You do not need a prior audit to start Brand Runway, because Phase A includes its own positioning work.

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 (800 to 1,000 words each, in your approved voice), five carousels with image direction and copy, five short-form posts ready to publish, fifteen supporting pieces, a Growth Report naming ten specific plays, and a six-month roadmap structured month by month. Everything is yours to keep, edit, and reuse.

The Foundation is $2,350, delivered in ten business days. The Accelerator is $3,475, delivered in fourteen business days. Both can be paid in full, or in three monthly instalments totalling 15% more than the full-payment price. Brand Runway is priced separately, below.

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: we remove anything that could identify you, you see it before publication and can request changes or withdraw consent, and it is governed by a separate Case-Study Consent Agreement you accept at checkout. The standard price applies if you prefer privacy.

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.

Brand Runway is a focused build, not a full-service marketing engagement. To keep the scope tight and the price fixed, the following are not included: 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. The point is to leave you able to run the next six months yourself.

We price in USD for consistency with our primary audience. If you're viewing from the UK or Europe, the site displays an approximate GBP or EUR equivalent next to the USD price. That's a guide only. The actual charge on your card is in USD, and your card issuer handles the conversion at the prevailing rate.

Instead of paying the full amount at once, you pay in three monthly instalments. The total paid across the three instalments is 15% higher than the full-payment price. This premium covers the cost of spreading the payment. The first charge is on the day you purchase, the second 30 days later, and the third 60 days later. There is no fourth charge; the payment plan automatically ends after the third instalment. Instalment plans are available on the audit and on Brand Runway.

If an instalment payment fails, our payment processor (Stripe) automatically retries the payment over the following days. If the retries succeed, nothing changes. If they all fail, we email you to sort it out. If it stays unresolved, we may pause or end the engagement and the unpaid balance becomes due. We'd rather talk than cancel. If you see a problem coming, email us early and we'll work something out.

The refund policy depends on which engagement you bought.

The Positioning Audit (Foundation and Accelerator): a full refund before we begin work, a 50% refund once work has started but before the audit is delivered, and no refund after delivery, because the service has been fully performed.

Brand Runway: a day-ten refund gate. You receive the full Phase A positioning work by day ten, and if the direction isn't right, you take a full refund and keep the Phase A documents. After you approve the position, the engagement is committed and the build begins.

UK and EEA consumers may have additional statutory rights under distance-selling regulations. See our Terms of Service for the full policy on both engagements.

Payment is through the site, processed by Stripe. Stripe automatically emails you a receipt after each charge. If you need a formal invoice for your records (for example, to claim the engagement as a business expense) email hello@ironwoodbrands.com and we'll send one.

You receive an automatic confirmation email immediately. Within one business day we follow up with the intake materials: a structured brief that asks about your business, customers, current positioning, and what you're trying to achieve. Once you return the completed intake, the delivery timeline starts: 10 business days for The Foundation, 14 for The Accelerator, and 30 for Brand Runway. We may come back with a few clarifying questions during the work itself; otherwise, the next time you hear from us is when the first deliverable is ready (the report for the audit, or the Phase A positioning work on day ten for Brand Runway).

Less than you might expect. For the Positioning Audit, the intake form takes most clients around an hour, there may be one or two brief clarifying exchanges, and the delivery call is 60 to 90 minutes, so two to three hours total. For Brand Runway, the intake is a focused 35 to 45 minutes, you review and approve the position on day ten, and you give feedback on the Phase B drafts as they're delivered. Neither engagement requires standing calls or daily contact; the analytical and build work happens on our side.

We are based in the United Kingdom and work with clients globally. All calls are conducted in English and scheduled across time zones via Calendly. We have clients in the UK, EU, US, Canada, and Australia.

Push back. Our work is a professional view, not a pronouncement. For the Positioning Audit, the delivery call exists in part so you can question findings and we can clarify reasoning; where we genuinely disagree after discussion, we note it in the final document. For Brand Runway, the day-ten gate is the formal version of this: if the recommended position isn't right after discussion, you decline it, take a full refund, and keep the Phase A documents. We would rather end cleanly than build on a position you don't believe in.

What you share with us stays with us. We do not share client names, brands, or engagement details publicly without your written permission. The one exception is where you choose the Brand Runway case-study price, in which case we publish only anonymized material you have reviewed and approved first. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information, and our Terms of Service cover confidentiality formally.

Of course. Email hello@ironwoodbrands.com with whatever you want to understand before committing. We respond to pre-purchase enquiries within one business day in most cases. Every message goes to the same inbox and is read by us.

We intentionally do not run sales calls. The information on the site is designed to let you make the decision without one. If you have read the site and still have questions, email them over and we'll answer in writing. This isn't about avoiding effort. It's because sales calls reward salespeople, and we'd rather our process reward clarity.

We reserve the right to decline an engagement where the fit isn't right (for example, practitioners too early in their business for the audit to be useful, or businesses outside our methodology's scope). If we decline after you've paid, we refund you immediately and explain why. If we think someone else would serve you better, we'll say so and, where we can, recommend them.

hello@ironwoodbrands.com is the single inbox for everything: pre-purchase questions, live client work, refund requests, privacy matters, press. We answer ourselves. There is no automated triage system and there are no ticket numbers.