You can’t see your own story from the inside. That’s my job.
Narrative strategy, ghostwriting, and positioning for leaders and organisations with something important to say
30+ years · 6 published books · Microsoft · BT · Waterstones · Cambridge Judge Business School
Struggling with a complex idea?
Let’s turn it into a story that makes people believe, care, and act.
You’ve got something important to say. You just can’t quite see the story. You’d love for someone to find, test, and shape that story into something memorable. Something that sounds like you at your best. Something that moves your audience to act.
Pick a problem
Got expertise trapped inside your head?
Let’s turn it into thought leadership: case studies, whitepapers, presentations, blogs, and books people actually want to read.
Need to make a complicated proposition make sense?
Let’s find the narrative that ties your brand, website, and sales deck together, so customers, investors, and your team get it.
Doing remarkable work nobody’s heard about?
Let’s find the proof and turn it into impact reports, case studies, and stories funders and boards can act on.
The bit where I prove it
Books
Six published. Two in development.
Seven experts, from entrepreneurs to business psychologists and a health activist, with hard-won thinking stuck in their heads. Six books that got it onto the page and into readers’ hands. Next up: a growth mindset book with Anand Chulani, whose work spans IPL cricket and Forest Whitaker’s Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative.
ieso Digital Health
$56m investment secured.
Positioning their first digital product helped secure the $56m. Then interim head of marketing, editorial direction on the second product, and comms for a platform overhaul: onboarding fell from four months to three weeks, training completion rose from 47% to 98%. When their innovation chief became a CEO elsewhere, she brought me with her.
Microsoft
Hired to research. Retained to write.
It started with a values-in-action report: 30 one-minute stories showing how the company lived its societal values. That led to a retained role as their internal newshound, finding the stories buried across the UK business. One of those projects became a book of 19 partner success stories, launched at their Worldwide Partner Conference.
Every one started as a single project. None stayed that way.
‘…well able to translate our random ramblings, and some pretty complex concepts into accessible, reader-friendly language… She is also a highly effective and natural storyteller.’
Dr Paul Brewerton, Co-founder, Strengthscope, and co-author of Stretch: Optimize Your Strengths
‘Nicki built the communications backbone that held it together… Digital transformation projects often fail because nobody explains what’s happening in language people can actually use. This one didn’t.’
Beth Aplin, former Head of Transformation, ieso Digital Health
‘We knew and trusted her ability to find golden seeds in the most unlikely places, to plant them in a way which would engage our intended audience. So, we recommissioned her as our internal newshound.’
Bronwyn Kunhardt, former Director of Citizenship, Microsoft UK
What you’re actually hiring
Thirty-plus years in strategic communications. A journalist’s nose for an untold story. A coach’s ear for what’s left unsaid. A poet’s instinct for the words worth keeping. And the judgment to work out what each project needs, which is rarely what the brief says.
That’s what people hire. And why they tend to hire me more than once.
Got something important to say and not sure how to say it?
Outside In
Map the story you’re too close to see.
Four short exercises to find your story, test it, and shape it. Free to download.
I’ll never share your email. No spam, ever.