The one offer

Your whole category, scored. Then the decision.

Three weeks. $15,000, fixed, paid at the start. You end up knowing which position is open, what to assert instead, and what to stop saying tomorrow.

What you get

A scored category

Every direct and adjacent competitor graded on which position they lead with, which Level they're pitched at, where they sit on the Assertion Band, and how far their language travels. Not opinion — a scoring sheet you can hand to anyone and they'll get the same answer.

An Upstream score for you and for everyone you compete with

One number per company: how many hand-offs their message survives on the way up a buyer's org chart. It's the most portable finding in the report, and it's the one your CEO will repeat.

The open position, named

Which of the three is unoccupied in your category, why it's open, and who is closest to taking it from you.

What you should assert instead

Specific sentences, not themes. Claims that are true, defensible, and unavailable to the four companies nearest you.

The kill list

The language currently on your site doing no work, with the reason for each. This usually moves fastest internally, because nobody has to be convinced to stop.

A 90-minute working session

You and whoever has to agree — CEO, head of sales, whoever will ask the hard question later. We go through the findings live and you leave having made the decision, not having scheduled another meeting about it.

What you don't get

I don't write the copy.

You'll have the decisions — what to assert, what to kill, and in what order. Your team writes it. Or your agency does. Or we talk about who should.

This is deliberate. The moment I'm writing pages, I stop being the person who tells you which direction is right and start being the person who needs the direction settled so I can bill. Those are different jobs and you should be buying the first one.

How it runs

Week oneI build the category sample and score it. Thirty minutes with you at the start, nothing else from your team.
Week twoYour side — site, decks, outbound, whatever sales is actually sending. Four or five documents and one short call with a salesperson. That's the whole ask on your people.
Week threeFindings written and delivered, then the working session.

Three weeks from the day you say go.

Investment

$15,000. Fixed. Paid at the start.

The fee doesn't move based on how many competitors turn out to be in the sample or how long the sessions run. You know the number before you commit and it's the same number at the end.

The questions you're going to get asked

"Why hasn't our team done this?"

Because the production work barely fits the time. Every deliverable has a date and research doesn't, so research is what gets cut — every quarter, at every company, including the ones doing this well. Your team isn't missing the skill. They're missing the only part of the job with no deadline attached to it.

"Why not have the agency do it?"

Ask them to score the category against a model and name what you should stop saying. Most will come back with a brand platform and a timeline, because that's what they sell. The reason this arrives in three weeks is that I'm not staffing the work that comes after it.

"How do we know this transfers to our industry?"

Hundreds of companies have been through this diagnostic. The pattern doesn't change by industry, because it isn't about industry — it's about how many kinds of buyer you have and whether you've found the thread between them.

"What if we disagree with the finding?"

Then you'll disagree with a scored sheet instead of a vendor's opinion, and you'll know exactly which competitor you're betting against. That's a better argument to have than the one you'd have without it.

"Isn't this just a positioning project?"

No. Repositioning is nine months, an agency, and a fight with sales about whether any of it worked. This is a decision about which of three positions you lead with. Same product, same buyers, same capabilities — different first move.

Starting

Email with a start date. You'll get a one-page agreement and a list of five documents. Nothing else moves on your side until week two.

dean@wayecreative.com

If you'd rather see the instrument first, score your own homepage. Three minutes, and it costs nothing.