Fourteen steps, scored against the SOPs and now also against 32 of Fladlien's own webinar decks, 5,381 slides of material that actually sold. The headline has not changed and the evidence for it is now much harder. The teaching is not the problem. The close is.
Three things matter more than any individual score.
Sequence beats effort is a real paradigm rather than a slogan. It reframes the problem so that hiring you becomes the obvious conclusion rather than the sales pitch. Most decks never find one. Do not let anybody dilute it, and move it later so it lands closer to the ask.
Naming four competitor pitches as worthless, then naming three problems your own framework does not solve, before any pitch, buys more trust than any claim you could make about yourselves. Keep it even when it feels like it is costing you.
5.7 → 8.0 → 7.9 → 8.4 → 8.5 → 8.75 → 8.82 → 8.93. The dip to 7.9 was not the deck getting worse, it was the ruler getting sharper. Up to that point I was scoring against what the framework says. Then I measured against what Fladlien does, across 32 of his own decks, and three things surfaced that no reading of the SOPs would have caught: the pitch started far later than his ever do, the booking route was not carried through the close, and the close was made once rather than repeated. All three have since been fixed, which is most of the climb back.
Scored against US Webinar | SOURCE - V3 as it stands, not a local copy. All 40 pillar slides carry teaching copy, the price block runs 7 of 7 on the Step 11 elements, the booking route is real (source.studiohawk.com on 48% of slides plus four scannable QR codes), and Risk is the first step to reach 10, on the back of real Google review screenshots proving the turn-away claim.
Slide 162 still carries [ N ] and [ DAY, DATE ]: the capacity cap and the closing date. Scarcity cannot score above 7.5 until they exist, and those two slides cannot be presented at all. Everything else on this page is a judgement call rather than a blocker.
I graded Transition a 9 last pass on the claim that the pitch opened at 52%. That measurement was wrong: it was detecting the booking URL in the persistent footer, which sits on 84 slides, rather than offer language in the body. Measured properly the sustained pitch block starts at 85% against a proven median of 73%. The two soft mid-deck closes at 59% and 77% are real and they do help, but the main block is still late. Transition drops to 8.
The Mirror has moved from slide 9 to slide 2. It opens cold, with no agenda, bio or housekeeping in front of it, and the housekeeping is now spoken over the top of the six minutes while the room is heads-down. That took Hook from 7 to 9 and it was the standing number one item on this page for four passes. Speaker notes across all 169 annotated slides were also normalised onto one format at the same time, so the deck can be handed to somebody else to present.
Scores are post-revision, after four passes and 22 new slides. Where a score moved, the delta shows what those passes bought. Items tagged MEASURED AGAINST THE SWIPE FILE are new this pass and come from the 32 decks rather than from the written SOPs.
The hook now opens the session cold. Was the biggest easy win in the deck.
Still the strongest section, and now personal.
The biggest section finally promises something.
Every pillar teaches, lands on an outcome, and one lands on a future.
Was the weakest step. Now the strongest in the deck.
The best structural decision in the deck.
The biggest gap in the deck for five passes, now closed.
The strongest step relative to the swipe file, by a distance.
Well built. I previously scored the timing on a bad measurement.
Carried the whole way, made more than once, and now actionable.
All seven elements, and the numbers are now real.
A real stack, a real bonus, and the PDF now exists.
Named, correctly placed, and now evidenced by third parties.
Real, and now visible. One number outstanding.
Ordered by return on effort, not by size. The first two are worth more than the rest combined, and neither takes long.
| What | Why it matters | Effort | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Set the five placeholder fields Step 11 / 14 | The price range on 168, the retail figure for the audit on 167, the capacity cap and closing date on 172, and QR codes on 155, 179 and 180. Four slides cannot be presented at all until these exist, and they are the four the whole close rests on. | Trivial, blocks four slides |
| 2 | Add a progress indicator to the pillar slides Step 7 | 47 pillar slides in a 180 slide deck and nothing shows how far through the roadmap the room is. Now that the section actually teaches, this is the largest remaining structural weakness in day two. A template change, not a writing job. | Template change |
| 3 | Put a number on the bonus stack Step 12 | Nothing in the stack carries a value, so nothing has a size. The SOP is blunt that this is what makes a stack feel like a stack rather than a list. You already name the diagnostic as paid work on slide 167, so the anchor exists and is simply not applied to the other three items. | Four lines |
| 4 | Give every bonus a reason why Step 12 | The Step 12 SOP attaches a justification to each individual bonus and treats it as what makes generosity believable instead of suspicious. None of the four has one. | Four lines |
| 5 | Handhold the booking Step 10 | Still nothing shows what booking actually looks like. Show the scheduler, say who they will see, say how long it takes. People avoid actions where they might look stupid, and this is the last unhandled friction in the close. | One slide |
| 6 | Use the turn-away reviews as proof Step 13 | More five star reviews praise being told not to buy than praise any result. It is the most persuasive asset you own, it corroborates the most distinctive thing in your close, and it is still nowhere in 180 slides. | One slide |
| 7 | Add blind bullets Step 3 | The lowest-scoring step. There is no here-is-what-you-will-discover slide withholding a mechanism, so almost nothing is held open across the two days. The day-one close, the order is tomorrow, proves you can do this well; there is just only one of them. | Two slides |
| 8 | Caption the four image-only slides Step 7 | Slides 83, 111, 112 and 131 have no text and no speaker notes. Anyone presenting from the notes would hit them blind. I cannot write them because I cannot see what is on them. | Needs you |
| 9 | Fill or cut slide 77 Step 7 | It reads "Link to press release here:" with nothing after it, live in body copy on the Kadi release slide. | One line |
| 10 | Restate the paradigm at the ask Step 6 | Sequence beats effort now appears once, on the gym analogy at slide 18, and never again. It is the idea the whole argument rests on and it should be the last thing said before the offer. | One line |
| 11 | Repeat one close verbatim, twice more Step 10 | Your most-repeated slide appears twice against a proven median of four. You now have the booking slide shown twice; showing it a third and fourth time is the specific RGT mechanic and costs nothing to try. | Reordering only |
| 12 | Offer the easy angle Step 4 | The deck argues, correctly, that this is hard. It never offers the small-result-soon path, so a room that believes you may still conclude it is beyond them. | One slide |
Two caveats worth stating plainly, because they bound everything above.
Everything here is an assessment of a deck. Pacing, tone, how long you hold a pause, whether you keep closing after the slides run out: none of it is visible in a file, and the source framework is emphatic that the last of those matters more than most slide changes. Score the run, not the deck.
Forty-six pillar slides came through with no body content in the .pptx, though seventy-one other slides carried images fine. If the live version has content the export does not, some scores here are harsher than they deserve, particularly Mechanisms and Excite. Worth resolving before anyone acts on the low scores.