Journal Working together
We stopped pitching in 2021
We lost two jobs that year. We kept the studio.
A free pitch asks a studio to design the answer before it has heard the question. You get something that looks finished and has not been tested on anything. We did it for seven years, and the pitches we won were rarely the projects we did best.
In 2021 we stopped. That year we lost two jobs we wanted, one of them a hotel group we would have enjoyed working for. We also got back about forty days of the studio's time, which we spent on the work of clients who were already paying us.
What we do instead
We show similar work and talk through how it went, including what went wrong. We introduce the people who would do the job. Then we write a plan: what we would do in each phase, how long it takes and what it costs. You can hire us for the first phase alone and decide after that.
Most clients do. Nobody has asked us for a free pitch twice.