A board doesn’t buy the plan. It buys the person presenting the plan, and then the plan.
Most high-stakes pitches fail in the first ninety seconds, before any of the substance arrives. The opening is spent on context nobody needed, the tension is never named, and the room settles into polite waiting rather than leaning in.
Hero to Horizon fixes the shape. Nine beats, starting with a hero the room can recognise and a scene they can picture, then the pain, then what it costs day to day, who else it affects, and the scale of it. Only then does the reveal arrive, and it lands as an answer to a question the room is already asking.
FRONT, for the ask
Where Hero to Horizon carries the story, FRONT carries the offer: frame the context, reflect the tension, open the possibility, name the offer, take them forward. The last beat is the one people drop. An unnamed next step is how a good pitch becomes a nice conversation that goes nowhere.
The structure is the easy half. The hard half is holding it while someone interrupts you on slide two, which is why we practise the interruption, not just the pitch.