Zoltán Kosa, Creative Director

“Now I get it. That’s why you exist.”

That’s the reaction I work for. I figure out how your value reads to the people you’re reaching, then build everything that carries it.

The money is decided. The message isn’t.

You already know what you have out there isn’t landing.

The date is set and the budget is approved, so the work starts with the only answer in the room, the words you already have. The site, the deck and the campaign get built on those, and they hold up right until the person you were trying to reach reads them and moves on.

Nothing gets built on a guess.

That is what the Sprint is for. Before anything is made, it gets settled: who you are, what you actually do, and why the people you are trying to reach should care.

It is also what keeps a project from going in circles. Once that is decided, the site, the deck and the campaign can all be built to say one thing, instead of each one arriving at its own version of it.

If you want the build started now and the wording sorted out along the way, I am not the right person for it.

The pitfalls show up while they are still cheap.

A creative director makes the call. A strategist writes the strategy. A designer or a developer finds out later what the call actually costs. I have done all three jobs for 25 years, so they are not three jobs here.

It means I don’t ask for things that can’t be made, and that the expensive problem gets caught in the decision rather than in the build. I bring in hands for the build. The decisions stay mine.

If you want to check me out properly before a call, that is what About is for.

Look at what got decided, not at what got made.

Powered Storage / Maat Holdings

Decided: one name over the whole yard was the wrong unit. It became a brand per offer, off a shared design library, so each one reads as its own business and as part of the same company. The ones that came later branched off what already existed instead of starting again.

Crystalcore

Decided with the owner: the brokers who could never afford a custom site were not a discount problem, they were a different product. A template system went in alongside the custom line, and brokers bought it in numbers no one could have drawn by hand. It made the custom work easier to sell, not harder.

Schropp

Decided: stop sharing language with the companies that could not back the claim up. Their product was real and the category’s vocabulary had already been spent, so the argument moved into the register of engineering and every claim carried its proof. A single message then covered several distinct product categories.

Anyone in your company can say what you do without checking with you.

The Sprint ends in a document. Not a report about your business: the thing everything outward facing gets written from. Who you are, what you do, how that fits the person reading it, and why it is worth the money.

It also puts you next to the companies you come up against, so the difference is stated rather than implied.

Hand it to a salesperson, a copywriter, an agency or the next designer you hire, and they start from a decision instead of from an interpretation.

A stranger reads it and sees a business worth dealing with.

The site, the identity, the deck, whatever the launch actually needs, built against the decision rather than around it. That is the engagement this site is for.

It does three jobs.

It looks like you instead of like where it came from.

It sits in your category as a company that belongs there, next to the ones you get compared with.

And to someone who has never heard of you, it reads as a business worth dealing with.

What that costs is on Engagements.

The Sprint is twenty three hours, committed. Not an estimate.

That is the Sprint: a fixed block of my time set aside for the interviews, the research and the decisions that come out of them, ending in the document above.

It does not quietly grow while it runs, and nothing gets added to it later. If what you need turns out to be bigger than that, it is a different conversation, not a longer bill.

What is in it, and what it costs, are on Engagements.

Thirteen hours a month, set aside in my month.

Not a bucket of hours you draw down. Thirteen hours held for your business every month, in a quiet one and in a launch.

What they are for: keeping the whole thing coherent as the business changes, and building the next product, service or campaign inside the system rather than bolting it on beside it.

Sold in hours, month by month. Details on Engagements.

The reasoning happens on the call, not in a proposal.

You tell me what is on the calendar and what you already have. I ask the questions I would ask in the first week of work, and you hear how I would approach it while we are still talking.

Half an hour. If it isn’t a fit, I’ll say so on the call.