A friend mentioned his dad runs a local HVAC company. Not as a pitch, not as a hint — just a fact that came up in conversation.
I went home and built a full consulting package for him.
Three hours later: a market positioning doc, a competitor landscape, a scroll-snapping pitch deck built in HTML, a new services page live on my site, and a Google Calendar booking link to close with. The text went out that night. No reply yet.
The part that keeps catching me off guard is the timeline. Putting together a consulting pitch used to be a weekend minimum. Research alone could eat a full day. Then the deck. Then the positioning copy. Then whatever proof of existence you needed — portfolio page, booking flow, case study placeholder.
All of that still happened. I did the research. I made real decisions about positioning. The thinking was mine.
But the assembly — the part where you translate thinking into deliverables — collapsed to almost nothing. I described what I wanted. It built. I redirected. It rebuilt. The feedback loop was fast enough that I never had to context-switch. Everything stayed in one session.
open ~/Presentations/all-american-pitch.htmlThe deck itself is a single HTML file. Scroll-snapping slides, custom editorial typography, terracotta and cream. Not an export from a slide tool — a proper artifact.
What I didn’t build: the relationship. The trust. The moment where someone decides they want to work with you.
That part still takes as long as it takes.
The setup phase is gone. The waiting is still the waiting. I just have a lot more time to sit with it now.
There are a few more pitches I’m thinking about building the same way. I want to know if this pattern holds across different industries and different kinds of clients, or if HVAC was a fluke because the market is straightforward to read.
More to come when I have data.