What does a 30-minute diagnostic call actually cover?

A working conversation with the principal about where your brand is losing leverage — positioning gaps, narrative drift, or category ambiguity. You leave with a candid read on whether a 14-day engagement is the right next step. No pitch deck, no follow-up sequence.

Why 14 days instead of the usual 6–12 week agency cycle?

Because positioning, narrative architecture, and identity-system briefs are decision artifacts, not production artifacts. With a single principal running intake, research, and synthesis, the work compresses to two focused weeks without cutting rigor.

Do you work with companies below $1M in revenue?

Occasionally, when the founder is moving into a category-defining move (wholesale expansion, fundraise, sale prep). Most of the practice is built around operators between $1M and $50M who are transitioning out of founder-led sales.

What does the engagement cost?

Flat-fee engagements start at $9,500 for a core positioning sprint. Multi-system engagements (positioning + identity + narrative) are scoped after the diagnostic call. There are no media-buying markups, no retainers, and no scope-creep clauses.

Independent brand strategy practice · est. 2017

Strategy and identity systems for operators who would rather skip the agency layer.

Name: Kushnaryov
Telephone: +1 (512) 555-0184

Kushnaryov is a one-principal brand strategy practice that builds positioning, narrative, and identity systems used by category leaders — without the layered account-management overhead of a traditional agency. Engagements are led personally from intake to ship, and ship fast: most core strategy work lands in fourteen business days.

— Dimitri Kushnaryov, Principal

Act I — Diagnosis

The gap between founder-led sales and a category position is where most $1M–$50M companies stall.

You closed your first hundred customers on conviction and a good deck. You are past the point where personal credibility and referrals alone can carry the next hundred. The market has more options than it did two years ago, your buyers are more skeptical, and the difference between a vendor and a category leader is no longer a tagline — it is a positioning system that holds up across pricing, hiring, product, and content.

The instinct is to hire an agency. What you usually get is a junior team, a six-to-twelve-week cycle, a deck no one outside the room will read, and a deliverable that lands after the quarter you needed it to land in.

This practice was built for the operator who already knows the problem and wants a senior partner to fix it — not to manage a process. The diagnostic call is a thirty-minute working conversation with the principal. We listen, name the actual constraint, and tell you whether we are the right fit. If we are not, we will tell you that too, and usually point you toward someone who is.

No pitch. No deck. No follow-up sequence.

Act II — Operating numbers

Operating numbers, not portfolio slides.

These are the figures we track internally and report on the practice's annual letter. They are what a serious operator weighs against a logo wall.

180+
B2B brands served between 2019 and 2025, across SaaS, industrials, fintech, professional services, and consumer goods.
14days
Documented standard cycle for a core strategy engagement, from intake call to shipped positioning system.
38%
Average lift in qualified inbound pipeline reported by clients within 90 days of a repositioning.
36
Hard cap on active engagements per year, set deliberately to protect partner-level attention on every account.
92%
Client renewal or referral rate on multi-year engagements, against an industry norm well below that.
14
Countries served, with offices in Austin and Lisbon and a remote-first team of eleven strategists.
7yrs
Average partner tenure on multi-year engagements, versus a 2.3-year norm for independent consulting.
9
Universities that license our proprietary four-layer positioning framework for MBA-level marketing electives.

Act III — The engagement

What happens in the fourteen days.

A core engagement is a four-phase, principal-led cycle. There is no account team, no handoff to a junior strategist, and no week-six status deck. The principal you meet on the diagnostic call is the principal who ships the work.

I

Intake — Day 1

A two-hour working session with the founder and one or two operating partners. We map the actual constraint — pricing power, category definition, sales cycle, hiring narrative — and agree on the single question the engagement must answer. You leave the room with the brief written down, not in our heads.
II

Research — Days 2 to 6

Ten to fifteen customer and buyer interviews, competitive teardowns, and a category audit. Findings are written up daily into a shared working document so you see the strategy forming in real time, not at the end of a black-box research week.
III

Positioning system — Days 7 to 11

The four-layer framework applied to your business: category frame, value proposition, narrative spine, and proof architecture. The output is a positioning system that holds up across pricing pages, sales decks, hiring pages, and content — not a tagline on a slide.
IV

Ship — Days 12 to 14

Final positioning document, messaging architecture, narrative brief, and a one-page operating playbook your team can use on Monday. A recorded walkthrough is delivered alongside, plus a thirty-day window for revisions inside scope.

Flat-fee engagements start at $9,500. No media buying, no hidden retainers, no scope creep. If the brief grows, we agree on the new scope and fee before the work continues.

Act IV — Selected engagements, 2022–2025

Three engagements, redacted to protect the work.

Clients are named only with permission. What follows is the shape of the problem, the system we built, and the change the client reported within the first two quarters. Sector names and figures have been generalized where required by engagement terms.

B2B SaaS · Revenue Operations

2024 · Series B

Repositioning a category-of-one into a category of three.

The company had built a genuinely novel product but was being benchmarked against legacy incumbents whose buyers it could never win. We narrowed the category frame, redefined the competitive set to three credible alternatives, and rewrote the narrative spine around the buyer's actual job-to-be-done. The sales team received a new objection-handling architecture and the founders received a board-ready positioning brief.

Reported a 41% increase in qualified inbound opportunities from target accounts within the first 90 days, and a shorter average sales cycle on enterprise deals.

Industrial · Manufacturing

2023 · Founder-led, $40M

Translating a forty-year technical reputation into a buyer-facing narrative.

The business had deep domain authority with engineers and a near-invisible profile with the procurement and operations buyers who actually signed the contracts. We built a dual-audience narrative, a proof architecture drawn from forty years of operational data, and a content system the marketing team of three could actually execute. Identity work was scoped separately and delivered through a partner studio.

Inbound from named target accounts roughly doubled within two quarters; the sales team reported a measurable shift in the quality of first-call conversations.

Professional Services · Advisory

2022–2024 · Multi-year engagement

A narrative system for a firm that had outgrown its founder's voice.

The firm's growth had moved it past the point where the founder's personal narrative could carry every engagement. We built a positioning system that named the firm's actual method, a partner-level narrative framework each partner could deploy in their own voice, and a refreshed identity expressed through a long-form journal rather than a conventional site. The work has been renewed annually since.

Three of the firm's four new partner-level engagements in the year following repositioning cited the journal and positioning language as a deciding factor.

Colophon

Book a thirty-minute diagnostic call with the principal.

We take a limited number of new engagements each year. The diagnostic call is a working conversation about your positioning constraint — not a discovery call, not a pitch, not a deck review. You will leave the call with at least one decision you did not have before it.

Book a diagnostic call

30 minutes · with Dimitri Kushnaryov · no pitch, no deck.

Thu14 Nov10:00 CT
Fri15 Nov14:30 CT
Tue19 Nov09:00 CT
Wed20 Nov15:00 CT

Or write directly: [email protected] · +1 (512) 555-0184