In the first six weeks of a branding engagement, the leadership team needs to commit roughly twenty hours collectively. That breaks down into approximately three workshops of three to four hours each, plus time between workshops to reflect on what came up and form views before the next session. For most leadership teams, that's two to three hours per week — a meaningful commitment, but a manageable one.
A few important clarifications: the twenty hours is collective, not individual. If two or three decision-makers are in each workshop, the individual load is lighter. Workshops can happen on weekends if weekday calendars are difficult. And the hours outside workshops aren't passive — they're the time when the most important thinking happens, when what surfaced in the session gets processed and returned to the next conversation as actual positions rather than first reactions.
What doesn't work is disappearing for two weeks between sessions. Branding projects lose momentum when leadership is unavailable, and momentum is the most important project resource. The agency can pace itself around a delayed decision, but it can't manufacture the decision.
The participants should be the people who own the decisions — typically two to four senior leaders who can actually commit the company, not just pass comments. That's it.
