Presenting Creative Work

Your team are losing work in the room.Win your next £500k+ pitch.

For independent creative and advertising agencies that keep losing pitches they should be winning, Presenting Creative Work is the only pitch coaching that stays embedded with your team until you sign the next £500k+ account.

Talk to Tom Short qualification call. If it is not a fit, I will tell you honestly.

This is not generic pitch coaching

Built on 16 years and 1,200 senior creatives trained at Nike, Apple, Droga5, AKQA, Wolff Olins, Leo Burnett, Microsoft, and the Guardian. Delivered by a former Executive Creative Director who sat in the driving seat at Four Seasons, Heineken, Adidas, PlayStation and Absolut Vodka. Who has lost £3m pitches and learned what made the difference.

Nike came in for one masterclass. It grew into a six-figure two-year programme across their EMEA creative team.

Nike Apple Droga5 AKQA Wolff Olins Leo Burnett Publicis PlayStation Microsoft The Guardian NBC Universal Havas VCCP Pearlfisher Elmwood WPP

Tom Evans

The expensive problem

The pitches you should have won that you did not.

You can name them. The work was strong. The brief was right. The deck was good. The account still went to the agency you are better than.

Most independent UK agencies are only winning around one in four pitches, at tens of thousands per pitch in unrecovered cost. The pattern compounds. The team searches to find confidence between pitches. The senior creatives quietly stop putting themselves forward for the next one. The MD spends another quarter going through what went wrong — knowing the next post-mortem will sound the same.

"The post-mortems keep coming back to the same answer. The work was not the problem. The presentation was."

We should talk if

You are an MD, CEO, Client Services Director, COO, or part of creative leadership and know you are losing £500k+ pitches you should be winning.

Pitch volume is up. Win rate is flat or sliding.
Two or three senior people are carrying every pitch room. The rest of the team cannot present at that level.
The creative team blames client services. Client services blames strategy. Strategy blames the client brief.
The team has done a presentation course before. Nothing about how they pitch has changed.
A new ECD or CSD is in post, or about to be. The pitch culture they have inherited is not the one they would have built.

The real diagnosis

It is not a skill problem.
It is an infrastructure problem.

The instinct is to send the team on another course. Or to hire a pitch consultant for the next big account, who arrives the week before, polishes the deck, and leaves the room before the verdict comes in. Neither fixes it, because neither addresses what is structurally broken.

What is structurally broken is that the agency has never installed a pitch system. Creative builds the work. Strategy frames the argument. Client services owns the process. Three silos doing their job, none of them aligned to what will win the pitch. The chemistry shows up on the day or it does not.

Every pitch is built from scratch because nothing is documented.
Mid-weights are not promoted into pitch roles because they have never been trained to carry them.
The MD becomes the single point of failure on every account that matters.

The agencies winning the most pitches are not the ones with the most respected creatives. They are the ones who installed a pitch system that does not rely on individual brilliance.

The mechanism

This is where I come in.

Presenting Creative Work installs a repeatable pitch system inside your agency, then stays embedded with the team through the pitch your win rate actually depends on. Not a presentation course. Not a pitch consultancy that lands the week before. A 90-day embedded engagement built around a single commitment: we work together until your next pitch is won.

01A one-day senior team masterclass to install the methodology across creative, strategy, and client services.
02Embedded coaching with the pitch team through the build phase of a named account.
03Cross-silo choreography. Creative, strategy, and client services rehearsing as one team, not three.
04A live dress rehearsal with structured feedback before the pitch.
05Post-pitch debrief with the team, with everything documented for the next one.
06A pitch system the team can run on every account that follows, without needing Tom in the room.

The goal is simple. You stop losing pitches you should be winning. And the system stays in the agency long after the engagement ends.

What success looks like

Three things change in the business.

Win rate moves on the accounts that matter.

The accounts in your target tier start landing as yours, not the agency you out-thought on every brief. The conversation in your management meeting changes from new business deficit to new business plan.

The pitch stops resting on three people.

Your mid-weight and senior creatives can carry a pitch room without your CD having to be in every one. Client services and strategy walk in rehearsed together rather than apart.

Every pitch is built on the same foundation.

One methodology. One rehearsal process. One standard. The pitch capability moves from individual to institutional, and the agency starts behaving like the one you set out to build.

The cost of doing nothing

How much is your current win rate actually costing you?

Most independent UK agencies lose three out of four pitches they enter, and spend tens of thousands per pitch to do it. The cost compounds with the size of the account.

£500k–£1m pitches

Every avoidable loss is between £25,000 and £60,000 of unrecovered new business cost, plus a year of revenue. A flat win rate runs into six figures annually.

£1m–£5m pitches

These are the bread and butter of most agencies, and where most lose out to bad presenting, not bad work.

£5m+ global accounts

These come around twice a year if at all. Losing one means waiting two quarters for the next equivalent opportunity.

The question is not whether to invest in pitch capability. It is how much the current win rate is costing the agency every quarter that nothing changes.

What you are actually buying

A higher win rate on the accounts that matter.

A senior team masterclass that installs a shared pitch methodology across creative, strategy, and client services.
Embedded coaching through the build of a named pitch worth £500k or more.
A documented pitch system the agency can run on every account that follows.
A post-pitch debrief that captures what worked, what did not, and what to install for the next one.
A contractual commitment to stay involved until the pitch is won, within a six-month engagement window.

If you do not win, the engagement does not finish. The masterclass and the coaching delivered to that point are billed at the upfront fee. The back-end is not due.

Who this is for

The right fit matters.

This is for you if

You are running an independent UK creative or advertising agency pitching regularly for accounts of £500k or more.
Your win rate on accounts you should be winning is below where you want it to be.

This is not for you if

Your pitches are mostly for projects below £500k. The standalone masterclass is the better entry point, and it is excellent value.
You believe the problem with your win rate is the work itself, not how it is being presented.

If your team is genuinely good and you are still losing pitches you should be winning —

Every quarter that stays true is the largest invoice on the new business plan. You do not need another presentation course. You need someone who has been on the other side of the table for accounts worth millions, who has trained over a thousand senior creatives to fix the moment the work meets the audience, and who will stay with your team until the account is signed.