About Show & Tell
Most businesses are carrying a better story than they know how to tell. Show & Tell exists to find it, shape it, and put it to work — in every room, every proposal, and every conversation that matters.
Raised by clients using Show & Tell work
Years of story strategy
experience
Clients across three continents
Presentations built and delivered
Where this started
Show & Tell was born from a specific frustration. Early in his career, Mafaz was doing what most people do — inheriting the same presentation templates his predecessors had used, updating the numbers, and hoping for the best. Results were inconsistent. Discounts were inevitable. And yet something didn’t add up.
The question that started everything: how is it that a great speaker can hold a room, but that same speaker with a presentation can put people to sleep? The answer, it turned out, wasn’t about design. It wasn’t even about the speaker. It was about the story — or the absence of one.
The Realisation
Most businesses don’t treat presentations as a communication tool. They treat them as an information dissemination channel.
What changed
Bringing the principles of effective communication — audience awareness, objective-driven content, and the transformational arc — into the way businesses tell their story.
What that means in practice
Design is the last step, never the first. Every engagement starts with the story — who it’s for, what they need to feel, and what has to change in their mind by the end.
What we believe
Most businesses are sitting on a better story than they know how to tell. The work — the delivery, the relationships, the results — is almost always stronger than the version of it being communicated. That gap is what Show & Tell closes.
How we think
These aren’t values on a wall. They’re the operating principles behind every conversation, every engagement, and every piece of work Show & Tell produces.
The questions that surface what the story actually needs to be — not what the client thinks it is. We ask what needs to change. That’s where the real work starts.
Polish on a weak story doesn’t fix anything — it just makes the problem more expensive. Design is always the last step.
Pitches fail because they’re built around the seller’s world, not the buyer’s. We build every story from the audience’s perspective first — their problem, their stakes, their decision. The best pitch rooms feel like a conversation.
Before the first conversation
The discovery call isn’t a briefing session — it’s a working conversation. We ask the questions. You bring the honest answers. If you have existing materials, send them across beforehand so we can arrive with observations rather than starting from scratch.
These are the four things that make the first conversation — and everything that follows — more productive.
The honest situation
Not the polished pitch version. What’s actually going on — what’s working, what isn’t, what you’ve already tried and why it didn’t land. We’ve heard most of it before.
The Specific Moment
What are you building toward? A raise, an enterprise pitch, a board presentation, a market entry. The more specific, the better the output. “We need better communications” is a starting point. “We’re pitching a $5M Series A in eight weeks” is a brief.
The Existing Material
Whatever exists — even if you’re embarrassed by it. Especially if you’re embarrassed by it. The gap between what you have and what you need is exactly what we’re looking for.
The person behind the work
Show & Tell leads all client work at the senior level. Every engagement — from the first discovery conversation through to final delivery — is led by Mafaz Ifharm. Not handed to a junior team after the pitch is won. Not managed through layers of account management. The thinking you experience in the first call is the thinking that goes into the work.
Mafaz has spent ten years working directly with founders, CEOs, and senior operators at some of the most consequential moments in their businesses — investor raises, enterprise pitches, board presentations, and market entries. The pattern he’s seen in that time is consistent: the businesses that struggle to grow are rarely the ones with the weakest products. They’re the ones whose story isn’t working hard enough.
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I have worked with Mafaz and his team for 6+ years across several companies that I am operating and advising. Projects have ranged from 2-page sales sheets, design templates, website content, and full investor presentations for raising capital.
Tom Diamond — Operator & Advisor · US · Multiple companies over six years
How we work
Show & Tell is deliberately small. A small number of clients at any one time means every engagement gets the full weight of senior thinking — not a fraction of it. That’s not a limitation of scale. It’s a choice about quality.
A genuinely global practice
Based in Colombo, operating globally. Clients across six countries have found that working across time zones adds a practical benefit: ideas developed during their day arrive as finished thinking the next morning. Not because we work overnight — but because the hours that work for them work for us. That seamlessness is a function of how we operate, not a selling point we lead with.
USA
UK
UAE
India
Singapore
Australia
Sri Lanka
How we work
We work directly with the decision-maker
Not marketing teams. Not committees. The founder, the CEO, the person who owns the outcome when the story lands or doesn’t. That’s who we do our best work with — and where the most important conversations happen.
We tell you what we actually think
If your story needs rebuilding rather than polishing, we’ll say so. If the problem is structural, not cosmetic, you’ll hear it in the first conversation. Comfortable answers don’t close deals — and we’re not in the business of giving them.
We measure success by what happens in the room
Not by how good the deck looks. The only metric that matters is whether the story did its job — whether the investor leaned in, whether the enterprise client said yes, whether the board approved what you needed them to approve. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to.
We work with a small number of clients at a time
By design. Because quality of thinking requires depth of attention. If you’re not the right fit — wrong timing, wrong stage, wrong scope — we’ll tell you honestly and point you somewhere more useful. That’s not a risk. It’s why our average client relationship runs six years.
Every engagement begins with a 30-minute conversation — no pitch, no proposal, no obligation. We’ll ask about your business and what you’re trying to achieve. If we’re the right fit, we’ll say so. If we’re not, we’ll say that too.
30 minutes · No obligation · We’ll tell you if we can’t help
