Method · 9 December 2025
Reading a competitor deck without copying it
Rival decks are traps. They are full of rented words — ecosystems, journeys, platforms — that feel like intelligence when you paste them into your own narrative. The useful object is not the adjective. It is the implied loser: who would be a bad customer for them, and therefore a possible customer for you.
Print the deck. Strike every sentence that could appear on three other sites. What remains is usually a pricing hint, a channel boast, or a regulated credential. Those residues are the seat. Write them as a single unkind sentence: “They win when the buyer wants X and will tolerate Y.” Your job is to become the firm that wins when the buyer will not tolerate Y.
Do not mirror their slide count. Do not adopt their colour. If they lead with a world map, ask whether they actually staff those dots. Inflated geography is a category tell; it often means the domestic story is thin. Australian buyers notice when a map is theatre.
In the Intensive we run this as a timed drill. Participants get forty minutes and a red pen. The output is a six-line memo, not a counter-deck. Counter-decks are how you inherit the rival’s structure. Memos are how you keep your own.