The pitch we almost gave.

§I A ten-slide deck, not given.

In 2024 we spent three weeks preparing a ten-slide pitch deck for a consumer brand we ultimately did not take on. The work was good; the deck was tight; the founder was intelligent. The reason we declined the engagement, at the last moment, was a single question we should have asked in the first meeting. This is a short note about that question.

The question: are you willing to let your brand be unpopular inside your own team for eighteen months? The founder had the market, the product, the capital, and the interest. What she did not have, we came to suspect in the final pre-pitch conversation, was the temperament for the period of internal disagreement that a meaningful repositioning would provoke. She wanted the end state without the interim discomfort. We declined.

§II Why we declined.

Every meaningful brand engagement we run produces, around month three or four, a period of eight to eighteen months during which the founder has to hold an internally unpopular position against her own team — her head of growth, her board, her CFO, sometimes her cofounders. The position is always specific and always, for a while, statistically unsupported. Only the founder can hold it. If she will not, the work dissolves.

We are happy to give the pitch to any founder who will. We are increasingly reluctant to give it to founders who, on closer examination, will not. The pitch, given, is a commitment on our side; if the founder cannot hold the interim period, our commitment cannot be met. Better to decline cleanly than to accept and produce compromised work the founder will, fairly, blame us for later.

Every real brand engagement has an eighteen-month period of internal unpopularity. If you cannot hold it, the best firms in the world cannot help you. — Ned Halloran

§III The question now asked earlier.

We ask the question earlier now, usually in the first meeting. It is awkward. It screens out some founders before any work is done. It also prevents three-week pitch cycles that would otherwise end in a last-minute decline. The founders who answer the question directly, with specific recent examples of unpopular positions they have held internally, become the clients we want. The founders who deflect become, very often, the engagements we would later have regretted.

This is a short note; the lesson is short. A firm's pitch discipline is upstream of its delivery discipline. The questions asked in the first meeting shape the client set six months later. The single most useful question we have added to our first meeting, in the last year, is the one we did not ask of the ten-slide founder. We do not get to pitch as often now. We get to pitch better.