Hello, I'm Nic

I didn’t start out wanting to work in marketing or communications. I wanted to be a journalist.

What drew me in was the idea of making sense of things — asking questions, noticing patterns, and explaining complex ideas clearly. I built my own website early on, started writing, and learned first-hand how powerful clarity, structure and narrative can be when you’re trying to be understood.

But the real foundation came earlier. When I was 17, my auntie Karen handed me a StrengthsFinder assessment and started asking me questions about how I was wired. She’d spent years leading major change programmes in the NHS, then built her own coaching practice around a simple philosophy: no clarity, no goals; no goals, no change; no change, no growth.

She had no patience for excuses or overthinking. She believed in action — in front-loading the hard work, in moving forward even when you couldn’t see the whole path. She taught me that good leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about staying calm when things get difficult, helping people see what actually matters, and making sure ideas turn into action rather than just talk.

I lost her a few years ago. But the way I work — the emphasis on clarity, on calm under pressure, on actually getting things done — that’s still her influence.

That instinct carried through as my career developed. I found myself in increasingly complex organisations — often where the context was messy, the pressure was high, and there were multiple competing versions of “what’s really going on.” Over time, the work became less about outputs and more about judgement: helping leaders decide what mattered, what didn’t, and how to move forward without losing trust.

What I’ve learned is that complexity rarely needs more noise. It needs calm thinking, honest conversations, and someone who gets the gap between leading and doing — who understands that things are never perfect, but they still have to work.

That’s the work I’m drawn to now.

I like working at times of change, but I also enjoy creating the change when it’s needed.

I ask a lot of questions. I’m nosy about how things actually work — not just the official version, but the real version. Who’s talking to whom, what’s being said in the corridors that isn’t being said in the boardroom, and where the gaps are between what leadership intends and what people actually experience.

From there, I find the narrative. Not a spin line or a set of key messages — the actual story that makes sense of what’s happening and takes people with you. In my experience, most organisations don’t lack strategy. They lack a clear, honest story that connects what they’re doing to why it matters – and why it will matter.

But just as often, my value is in stopping people making things worse. The biggest mistakes I’ve seen in complex or high-pressure situations aren’t inaction — they’re over-reaction. Over-communicating, over-explaining, creating noise that makes you look guilty or uncertain when you’re neither, you’re just too close to what’s happening. Sometimes the most valuable thing a leader can do is to not send the email, not call the meeting, not issue the statement, yet.

Marketing and communications are my tools. Narrative, positioning, stakeholder management — that’s the craft. But the work is really about judgement: knowing what matters, what doesn’t, and helping people act on the difference.