Stop pitching deck-first

The standard agency pitch process: receive brief, build 40-slide deck, present to room, get feedback, revise, present again, win or lose. This process benefits nobody. It's expensive for the agency, low-signal for the client, and it systematically selects for studios that are good at making decks rather than studios that are good at solving problems.

What goes wrong

A pitch deck prepared before a genuine discovery conversation is a speculation. The agency is guessing at the problem, proposing a solution to the guess, and hoping the guess was close enough to resonate.

The client, meanwhile, is evaluating a presentation rather than a proposal. They're asking: do I like this? rather than: does this solve what we actually need? The feedback they give — "we'd like to see more colour in the concepts" — is rarely the feedback that would actually help.

Both parties leave having spent significant time and arrived at less clarity than they started with.

The opening move that works better

Start with a diagnostic conversation, not a presentation. Forty-five minutes, their team and ours, no deck. The goal: understand whether this is actually a problem we should be solving.

At the end of that conversation, we know three things: what the client thinks the problem is, what we think the problem actually is, and whether those two things are reconcilable in a way that makes a good project.

If they are, we send a one-page proposal. Not a deck. A page: the problem as we understand it, the approach we'd take, the timeline, the cost. If the page is wrong, we find out in one email rather than after three rounds of presentation.

The objection

"Clients expect a deck. We'll look unprepared."

The clients who expect a deck before a conversation have usually been burned by agencies that used the deck as a substitute for understanding. The clients worth working with — the ones who know what they need and are prepared to be a real partner — respond well to a studio that leads with questions rather than answers.