This is the framework that’s helped me close hundreds of thousands of dollars in client work.

I didn’t always have the answers. But CORE Discovery has changed that.

Like many of you probably did, I went to art school and got a degree in graphic design. I didn’t learn how to negotiate, or talk strategy with clients.

When I launched my first digital agency in 2001, I knew I wanted it to be different from other agencies at the time. But I had some setbacks in the beginning.

Every area of the business was a learning curve. I had no idea how to incorporate strategy into the creative work. I remember even Googling the word “strategy” on a phone call with one of our first clients.

See, in design school, we were trained to do the making, not the strategy. Each time clients handed us a brief, we’d put something together that fit the specifications. But almost every client would have us run back and forth to the drawing board because what we made “just wasn’t there.”

After many, many loops, it hit me: I didn’t have context into their own strategy.

How could I understand what they wanted and needed? How could I understand their problems just from a piece of paper? Without the right questions or context, I couldn’t.

That was, until, I created CORE Discovery. I started driving the strategy process for clients and getting crystal clear context. I sat down with clients and asked them what problem they were currently facing. Soon enough, the revisions shrank, the relationships grew stronger, and the work got better.

It’s a habit of designers to fall into the aesthetics of things. I know because I’ve done this so many times before.

But now with CORE Discovery, I get clients and stakeholders aligned from the first meeting, I have a clear understanding of their pain points, and I’m able to produce a plan that exceeds their goals.

This framework has become a vital piece of my process, and my hope is that it does the same for you, too.