A leadership team of nine, pitching nine different ways

The client — The nine-person leadership team of a Manchester consumer brand, preparing for a major retail listing pitch in which five of them would present in sequence.

The problem — Individually, all nine presented perfectly competently. Together they were incoherent: different structures, different levels of detail, different opening conventions, and — most damagingly — different claims about the same product margins, phrased differently enough that a buyer could reasonably have read them as inconsistent.

What we found — There was no shared standard, because nobody had ever thought one was needed. Each executive had developed their own approach in isolation over a decade. In a five-handed pitch, the handovers were where it showed: each new presenter restarted their own context-setting, which cost roughly four minutes of a thirty-minute slot.

What we did — Two days, online. Day one: every participant presented, was recorded, and got individual written feedback — this is not a lecture, and everybody speaks. Day two: we agreed a single structure, a fixed set of numbers with agreed phrasing, and a handover convention, then rehearsed the five-handed pitch four times end to end.

The result — The pitch was won at the first attempt. The bigger outcome was internal: the structure agreed in that workshop is now the default for the company’s board papers and all-hands, so new hires inherit it rather than inventing their own.