Get to the good stuff faster.
Groundwork for Professionals helps marketers, designers, strategists, copywriters, consultants, and agencies get better inputs from their clients before the real work begins.
Give your clients a thoughtful, guided process to work through what they're trying to create, who needs to care, what success looks like, and how they want to bring it to life.
You get a better brief. They get clearer thinking. Everyone starts further ahead.
Better work starts with better inputs.
You know the feeling.
A client hires you for a website, brand, campaign, launch, event, or strategy project.
You ask what they want.
They send you three Pinterest links, tell you they want it to feel "elevated but approachable," list everyone as their target audience, and hand you a document full of tactics without a clear idea of what any of it is supposed to accomplish.
So you spend the first few hours of the engagement doing something you've gotten very good at:
Pulling the actual brief out of your client.
Groundwork is designed to help with that.
Give your clients better questions.
Groundwork is a guided strategic visualization exercise that helps people get the ideas, assumptions, ambitions, preferences, and expectations in their heads out where everyone can see them.
Instead of asking clients to fill out another intake form, Groundwork asks them to imagine what they're actually trying to create.
- What does success look like?
- Who needs to care?
- What do you want people to think, feel, or do?
- What would make this unmistakably yours?
- What are you willing to invest?
- What are you not trying to build?
By the time they come back to you, you have something much more useful than a collection of answers.
You have Groundwork.
Before the kickoff, send Groundwork.
- 01
You send the link.
Invite your client to complete Groundwork before your first strategy session, creative kickoff, or project brief.
- 02
They do the thinking.
In about 30 minutes, 18 guided questions help them articulate what they're trying to create and imagine what success could actually look like.
- 03
You get the Groundwork.
Their thinking is organized into a clear record you can review before you begin.
- 04
You start further ahead.
Use their Groundwork to guide your strategy, ask better follow-up questions, identify gaps, challenge assumptions, and build a stronger brief.
The deliverable
A strategic record of their best thinking.
When your client finishes, Groundwork organizes their thinking into a brief: four pillars, from what winning looks like to what should happen next.
One document you can read in minutes, bring to your first session, and build your own brief from.
Groundwork Brief
Project: Ridgeline Counseling
Sample
Not a real client
01 · The Project
Launch a new service within an established private practice — marketing's job is to reach the right people without unsettling the practice she already runs.
02 · The Experience
What the first encounter should feel like: a practice page that explains the service in plain language, a first call that feels like her, and a clear sense of what the work actually involves.
03 · The Signals
Who needs to notice, beyond clients: the therapists and physicians who already refer out to her, and where to show up — her site, directory listings, and the referral network she's built by reputation.
04 · The Proof
In the first quarter: referral calls from neighboring practices, inquiries that arrive already using the service's name, and steady enrollment without discounting the existing practice.
Your next moves
- 1.Write the service description — and what a first call sounds like — before any outreach.
- 2.Personally introduce the new service to the therapists and colleagues who already refer to her.
- 3.Update the practice's directory listings so the service is findable by name.
- 4.After the first quarter, note where inquiries actually came from — and thank the referrers.
Less extraction. More strategy.
Groundwork isn't designed to replace your process.
It's designed to make your process better.
Spend less time asking clients what they mean by "make it pop."
Spend less time discovering halfway through the project that the client had a completely different picture in their head.
Spend less time turning vague ideas into usable inputs.
And spend more of your time doing the thing your client actually hired you to do:
Make the thing come to life.
Built for the work before the work.
Use Groundwork before:
- Brand strategy
- Surface ambitions, audiences, differentiation, references, and expectations before positioning begins.
- Websites & rebrands
- Understand what the new presence actually needs to accomplish before anyone starts designing pages.
- Campaigns & launches
- Get specific about the outcome, audience, experience, message, and definition of success.
- Creative briefs
- Turn a client's ideas into richer raw material for designers, writers, strategists, and creative teams.
- Events & experiences
- Move beyond logistics to understand what people should actually experience, remember, and do.
- Consulting engagements
- Arrive at your first working session already knowing where the interesting questions are.
Your process. Better Groundwork.
Groundwork for Professionals is being developed for people who regularly help other people turn ideas into something real. Professional accounts may include:
Groundwork Pro
Send Groundwork to clients, manage responses, and use their results as part of your existing process.
Groundwork Studio
Create a client-facing Groundwork experience with your own branding, introduction, and presentation.
Groundwork Custom
Build Groundwork into your methodology with customized questions, reports, workflows, and strategic applications.
Behind the curtain.
Wondering who’s behind Groundwork? That’s me, Bex. I spent more than a decade behind the scenes in Hollywood shaping campaigns, partnerships and ideas designed to make people pay attention, from giant billboards on Sunset Blvd. and Times Square to ongoing coverage in the city’s most-read publications.
That work taught me how to find the story, sharpen the positioning and figure out what actually needs to happen next. Today, through Bex Productions, I bring that same instinct to founders, experts and organizations ready to invest in their brand and marketing.
I created Groundwork after seeing how often people were investing serious time and money in websites, logos, campaigns, and creative partners before they’d really interrogated the ideas underneath them. They were building the house before checking the foundation. And I kept thinking: Surely there’s a more interesting way to do this.
Groundwork is my answer. It uses guided imagination and strategic reflection to get the vision out of your head and onto the page, where we can examine it, challenge it, and turn it into something useful. Part creative exploration. Part strategic interrogation. All in service of helping you make more thoughtful decisions about what comes next.
The goal is simple: protect your time, your budget, and your reputation by doing the thinking that matters before making the investments that count.
If you’re about to put your money where your mouth is, it’s time to do the Groundwork.
What would you do with better client inputs?
Groundwork for Professionals is currently in development, and I'm looking for a small group of marketers, designers, strategists, consultants, and agency leaders to help shape it.
If you’ve ever wished your clients could arrive at kickoff having thought more deeply about what they actually want, I'd especially like to hear from you.
Groundwork
Imagine before you invest.
Better questions. Better inputs. Better work.