About / Ideation + strategy
Connecting the unconventional dots.
I work at the point where instinct becomes direction, connecting lived experience, unexpected perspectives and the people needed to turn a possibility into a useful idea.
Thinking is easy. Seeing it through is the work.
I lead the ideas for founders and leadership teams, then stay to make them real.
Any business. Any sector. One question.
What should this company be built around, and what would that look like in the world?
I do not direct from a distance.
I iterate. I sketch, write, test, throw away and go again, until the concept stands on its own.
One mind, every discipline.
Strategy, brand, words, design, film, digital and print, thought through together rather than handed down a line.
From concept to something you can hold.
A position becomes a name, a name becomes an identity, an identity becomes a campaign, a site, a printed thing in your hand.
Judgement is the value.
Anyone can generate options. The work is choosing the right one and knowing how far to take it.
Bring me the situation. Not the brief.
That is where the conversation starts.
The point of view
The idea needs a different point of view.
Most people advising leadership teams on creative strategy have never had to build the thing they recommended. Most people who can build it are never in the room when the decision is made. I have spent my career in both places, and the advice is better for it.
The route
A route with no straight lines.
I grew up in Zimbabwe. I left school at fifteen and was in business by twenty. Nothing about the route was conventional, and that is precisely what I bring into a boardroom: no house style, no agency playbook and no inherited way of seeing your category.
I have worked for myself for most of my career, which means I have carried the risk of my own ideas rather than only recommending other people’s. The work has covered identity, positioning, campaigns, editorial, packaging, ecommerce, digital products, websites, photography and film.
I have run the projects, met the deadlines, absorbed the costs and watched at close range which ideas survive, and which quietly disappear between the strategy and the launch.
The relationship
Direct, and useful early.
I work with chief executives, founders and leadership teams, the people who own the direction of the business rather than the marketing calendar. Engagements are deliberately small and deliberately senior. You talk to me. You always talk to me.
I am not there to be agreeable. The value of an outside adviser collapses the moment they start telling you what you already believe.
How I work
Four reasons leaders keep me close.
I am one person.
You are always speaking to the person doing the thinking.
I have no agency to feed.
I have no reason to recommend work you do not need.
I have built the work myself.
I can scope an idea and tell you what it will actually become before anyone commits.
I will tell you when an idea is not good enough.
Including my own.
Where the dots have connected
Different sectors. The same need for a clearer idea.
Offshore law across the Cayman Islands and BVI. Luxury property. Food manufacturing, confectionery, hospitality and specialist recruitment in London and the South East. Consumer and community brands built for a global audience.
Start here
Bring the first thought.
The opening conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It is usually enough to know whether there is something here worth pursuing.