Contact / 01
Brooklyn · Lisbon
A 30-minute working session
Book a discovery call with a founding partner.
Not a form. Not a sales rep. A direct, structured conversation with one of the three partners who will, if we proceed, lead the engagement themselves.
02
The Agenda
Four moves in thirty minutes.
The call is structured, not improvised. You will know, before we get on, exactly where the thirty minutes go and what you walk away with — whether or not we end up working together.
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00:00 – 06:00
Context.
You walk us through the company — where it sits, where it is going, and what triggered the timing on this conversation. We listen. We take notes. We do not pitch.
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06:00 – 14:00
Positioning read.
The partner shares an unscripted read of how the category currently sees you — drawn from public signals, competitor framing, and the seven-lens audit we have run on adjacent companies.
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14:00 – 24:00
Working session.
We surface the two or three strategic moves that, in our experience, move the needle for a company at your stage. You decide which are worth exploring.
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24:00 – 30:00
Fit, scope, and next step.
If there is a fit, we outline a scoped first phase — typically an eight- to fourteen-week engagement with fixed pricing — and hand you a one-page brief before you leave the call.
03
Engagement Frame
A fixed process, with real teeth.
Esmirada operates on a fixed-engagement model. The window is eight to fourteen weeks — never shorter, because the work compounds and the asset system has to ship with the strategy, not after it. The team that pitches the work is the team that does the work: one of the three founding partners leads every engagement, supported by a small bench of senior practitioners. No staffing pyramid, no offshore production, no junior handoff at the strategy-to-execution seam.
Pricing is fixed at engagement start and tied to scope, not hours. If the strategy memo we deliver in the first fourteen days does not change how your leadership team sees the market, we refund the engagement in full. The guarantee is not marketed; it has been invoked four times across 184 engagements, and each time the relationship continued into a second phase.
04 — By the Numbers
A track record that survives the small print.
Every figure on this strip can be sourced from the studio's annual State of Positioning report. Download the 2024 edition below.
05
Logistics
The five questions worth answering before you book.
- Who, exactly, will be on the call?
- One of the three founding partners — every time. We do not gate calls behind a sales development rep, an account manager, or a junior associate. If the partner you met on the call leads the engagement, you will see their name on the deliverable cover page eight weeks later.
- How should I prepare?
- Bring the deck you most often use to introduce the company and the names of two competitors you respect. That is enough. We will ask follow-ups in the language of positioning — but we do not require a finished brief, a budget document, or a procurement questionnaire before the first conversation.
- What happens if it is not a fit?
- We tell you on the call, plainly. Roughly a third of discovery calls end with a referral to a studio better suited to the stage, the budget, or the discipline. We keep a small list of those studios and we are happy to make the introduction.
- Is NDA material safe?
- Yes. We will counter-sign your standard NDA before any non-public information is shared. If you prefer, the partner will walk you through a one-page data handling protocol on the call. The studio has cleared NDA reviews with three of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies in 2024 alone.
- What does it cost?
- Engagements range from $48,000 (a six-week positioning sprint) to $640,000 (a full identity system paired with a category-entry strategy), with an average project value of $142,000. Specifics depend on scope and are outlined on the call. There is no charge for the discovery conversation itself.
06
A Slower Door