Because I didn’t know how to talk in a boardroom.

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A rainy day in Malaysia. 15 years ago.

We were staying in a 5-star hotel, the kind with marble floors, quiet halls, and too many staff at breakfast.

Flown in, first class, just a few days earlier.
Felt like the king of my world.

Outside, the rain had just stopped.
That thick, humid stillness hung in the air.

You could smell it, wet concrete, tropical heat, something electric in the silence.

We were about to pitch a 7-figure idea.
Motion branding, unlike anything they’d seen before
Bold. Loud. Built for global rollout.

And I had no idea I was about to blow it.

Three months of work.
Design. Research. Vision.

We’d impressed them enough to get 15 minutes with the chairman. That’s all they’d give.

In the taxi to their headquarters, my partner turned to me.

“I can’t do it. You talk.”

I nodded.
Too young to hesitate.
Too naive to think about what might go wrong.

We walked into the boardroom.

Polished table. Dark room. Four men already seated.
The chairman entered last.

I stood up.
Heart racing, but steady.
Opened the laptop.
Started walking through the work.

Slides. Research. Layouts. Rollout.
I talked about execution. Craft. Precision.
Everything we had built.

The chairman didn’t say a word.
He just stared.
Stone face. Still. Silent.
Then, without even glancing at his team, he stood up,
thanked us and left the room.

Meeting over.

In the hallway,

the guy who got us in, the one who’d vouched for us, lost it.

“What the f*ck was that?
You presented like a schoolboy.
That was the worst pitch I’ve ever seen.”

And he wasn’t wrong.

I felt it. In my gut. In my skin.
Like that heavy air right before the rain hits again.

We didn’t disappoint because the work wasn’t good.
We disappointed because we didn’t know how to talk about it.

We thought our work was the pitch.
But in rooms like that, they’re not buying what you made.

They’re buying how you think.

They want to know you see something they don’t.
They want to know why they should trust you with seven figures and their reputation.

We didn’t give them any of that.

We still won the project.

But that night over dinner in a Michelin start restaurant, our contact told us that our budget got cut in half.

$500,000. Gone.

Same work. Half the money.

But they lost trust in us.
We didn’t show up like partners.
We showed up like kids talking about creyons.

That made me wonder.
How many times did we leave money on the table,
without even knowing it?
This time it was obvious.
But other times?

That’s when I learned:
Your work gets you in the room.
But how you talk about it decides what you walk away with.

At NOT on sale, we help creative studios stop selling like kids with creyons, and start showing up like real partners.

If you’ve ever left a pitch thinking “I blew it”, 
reply.

We’ll help you.

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