Your proposition is complicated, and people aren’t getting it

You know what you do and why it matters. Getting anyone else there takes twenty minutes and a whiteboard – and you don’t get twenty minutes or a whiteboard.

So the website hedges. The sales deck lists features. Three people describe the business three different ways, and none of them is wrong, which is the problem.

What it’s costing you

Investors ask the same question twice. Sales calls start with ten minutes of explaining. New hires take months to describe the business in their own words. And every time someone hears a different version, the business sounds smaller than it is.

Who this is for

• Startups approaching launch, where the story has to convince investors, first customers, and early hires – three audiences who want three different things
• Teams launching a new product, where the science is sound but the explanation isn’t. Yet
• Founders whose business has outgrown the language it launched with, and who keep meaning to fix the website
• Organisations mid-pivot, where the strategy has moved, and the story is still describing the old company
• Comms leaders who’ve inherited messaging nobody can remember, including the person who wrote it

What I do

• Positioning and messaging
• Brand strategy, guidelines, and tone of voice
• Mission, vision and values that hold up when someone asks you to prove it
• Website strategy and copy, from architecture to every word
• Sales decks and investor materials
• In-product writing where every word has to be accurate, compliant, and kind at the same time – onboarding, guidance, results, the difficult screens

How we get there

We start with a conversation. Then I interview the people who already know: founders, staff, customers – sometimes the ones who left. The answer is usually already in the room, phrased badly by four different people.

Some of this work has been for regulated products, where the words themselves are part of what gets approved. Writing that survives clinical, legal, and accessibility review while still sounding like a person is a discipline in itself. Once you get this right, everything else gets easier.

What this looks like in practice

ieso Digital Health. Positioning their first digital product helped secure $56m in investment and led to three more contracts: interim head of marketing; editorial direction on the second product; comms lead for a platform overhaul.

Aspuna Group. Created brand guidelines and wrote the whole website for a social-impact commodities business helping smallholder farmers in Africa move up the value chain. Made complex economics clear for investors, development agencies, and farming communities. Now a non-executive director.

SmithsonHill. A CIPR award-winning agritech whitepaper, launched at the House of Commons.

See the work →

‘Nicki built the communications backbone that held it together… Staff onboarding dropped from four months to three weeks… the work led by Nicki resulted in a staggering 98% completion score. 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

‘Retaining Nicki as our communications partner was a wise move… This has led to us winning new contracts with non-governmental and governmental organisations in the global west and sub-Saharan Africa. She is strategic, creative and someone who you can absolutely trust to help you nail your messaging and make sure it holds true.’ Maria-Yassin Jah, Co-founder, Aspuna

Started with an AI draft? Bring it. We’ll find what’s missing.