Why we stopped offering a free presentation makeover

For ten years we offered new clients a free three-slide presentation makeover. We’ve decided to stop. It’s a decision we’d been weighing for a while. Here’s the thinking.

Ten years is a long time to do anything, and the makeover wasn’t just a marketing tactic. For a long while it was a genuine expression of how we liked to work: show, don’t tell. Give someone a taste of the craft and trust the work to speak for itself.

And it worked. It gave us some wonderful relationships: people who took a chance on a free service, saw what we could do, and went on to work with us for years across branding, websites, video and animation. Not one-off projects, but long partnerships, the kind where a client becomes a collaborator and briefs get shorter because the trust is already there. We’re grateful for every one of them.

So why stop?

Because the offer was pigeon-holing us. Not with the clients who came on board: they took the makeover, saw what else we could do, and went on to work with us across the lot. The trouble was everyone we hadn’t met yet. Presentations were one thing we were good at: visible, easy to hand over, low-risk to try. That made them the obvious thing to give away, but they were never the whole story. The work we’re proudest of lives in brand identities built from the ground up, websites that actually reflect a business, and animation that makes complex things feel clear. The free makeover, though, was the loudest thing we said about ourselves. So to anyone who only knew us by it, presentations became the first thing they knew about us. And often the only thing they thought we did.

There’s a bigger question underneath it, too: what’s the right way to earn a new client’s trust? A free deliverable is a transaction: someone gets something for nothing, decides if they liked it, and maybe goes further. It’s a perfectly reasonable model. But it was never where our best work came from. That’s always come from proper conversations, from understanding what someone is actually trying to achieve, from being trusted with the real brief rather than the surface one.

So we’d rather earn trust a different way: by showing the work itself. The thinking behind the decisions, the process from brief to output, the projects we’re proud of and the things we’ve learned from the ones that stretched us. Quality speaks for itself, but it speaks best with context around it.

That’s the shift. No more free makeovers. Instead, more from us about who we are and how we work.

We won’t pretend there’s no risk in it. Offering something free is easy. Putting your real work and thinking out into the world, and trusting that the right people will respond, is harder. There’s no guaranteed hook. But after ten years, we’d rather show you the full picture of what we do than win you over with a freebie that only shows a corner of it.

It’s a leap. But after ten years, it’s one we’re glad to be making.