We don't pitch.

The agency pitch deck is the dumbest 90 minutes in modern marketing.

A team of strangers spends two weeks reverse-engineering a brief from a company they have not started working for, builds a slide deck full of “audacious ideas” they will never get to execute, and presents to a room of people who already decided three weeks ago which agency they wanted to hire. The work that actually happens once the contract is signed looks nothing like the deck.

We stopped pitching three years ago. The math is straightforward. A pitch costs an agency between $20,000 and $80,000 in real labor and opportunity cost. The win rate is somewhere around 1 in 6 if you are good. So you are paying $120,000 to $480,000 for every win. You recoup that in retainer over twelve months and call it a victory.

The clients who hire on a pitch are also the clients who fire on a pitch. You won them on a presentation. They will leave when the next presentation is more exciting than the work. The work is rarely as exciting as the pitch. The pitch is a sales document. The work is a Tuesday in February.

We replaced the pitch with three things.

A real conversation about what the business needs and what we would actually do, not what we would dramatize on a slide. A small piece of paid work — a landing page test, a paid-social audit, a single campaign — that the prospect can evaluate the way they would evaluate any other vendor: by results. A reference call with the last three clients we worked with, including the one who left.

It is slower at the top of the funnel. It compounds. Every client who came in this way has stayed longer than the average industry retainer. Every one of them came back with a second project. Half of them sent the next client.

The agencies that still pitch are not wrong. They are running a different business. They are running a sales business that produces marketing as a byproduct. We are running a marketing business that does not produce sales theater. Different game.

We don’t pitch.

We work.