1. YOU’LL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT.
Think of it this way: if you hired an architect and couldn’t tell her the style of house you wanted, the number of bedrooms, the number of floors, do you expect the architect to be able to draft up your dream house? Absolutely not.
You’re going to feel frustrated because every concept you receive won’t be what you’re envisioning because you’re not yet envisioning anything. You’re going to worry that you’ve wasted your money, especially because you’re almost inevitably going to fall out of scope and exhaust your mockup and revisions, costing you even more than your base estimate. You might ultimately come to resent and mistrust designers because “Why can’t they just figure out what I want?”. But the thing is, you have to know what you want before someone can create it for you.