Writing with impact
and influence

Writing is research.

What makes written content come alive is not simply fancy phrasing — that’s just eyeball glitter. When you experience great writing, you can feel the hours of background work that went into it: the desk research, the carefully chosen inputs, the briefings, sources and interviews. The craft lies in pulling that material together, like a drawstring, into one seamless story.

We know because it’s in our bones. Quantitative and qualitative research is where we all started decades ago — studying how organisations work through interviews, surveys and analysis; learning how to ask questions that get beyond rehearsed answers, and how to turn disparate responses into narrative. It’s why all our writing is proudly research-based.

And our formal research work continues to this day. We conduct private polls and surveys for clients and publish regular external studies of leadership, reputation, corporate affairs and public policy.

Since 2020, award submissions have become a rapidly growing part of our business, with outstanding results: 83% of our written entries have seen clients’ work shortlisted in major awards like the EMEA SABREs, PRWeek Globals and Cannes Lions — and 71% have won outright. Often competing against hundreds of entries, that’s an incredible hit rate.

We think it’s how we approach the challenge.

Our goal is not just to understand why your story is great but why it deserves to win against all the other inspirational stories on the juror’s pile. To break through, your entry has to be a sweeping epic full of drama, a formal business case study, and a numbers-rich debrief — all in one story. It needs a narrative arc that catches attention on an initial skim, subtle angles that reward scrutiny at shortlist, and carefully sown seeds of evidence, at just the right moments, to give judges a reason to argue for it in the final jury discussion. All that in just 800 words, while also meeting the programme’s submission structure and judging criteria!

It’s some of the most difficult writing we do. But we believe — and our clients would agree — that we’ve got quite good at it.

Going through a rebrand? New vision? Transformation? It usually means the same thing: a new leader with a new direction.

We help organisations change the narrative by writing one: the story of who you are, where you’re going and why. Created as a prose narrative — the tone is up to you, from business-formal to blockbuster – it becomes your single source of truth at the outset: something to give brand agencies responding to the RFP, executives developing departmental changes, comms teams creating launch content, or employees trying to understand the front-line changes they’re beginning to see.

Why do it as storytelling? Our clients tell us it shortcuts months of early stall: the pitches that miss a crucial nuance, or the divisional strategies that follow the letter but lose the spirit. The new strategy’s true meaning lives between the bullet points. There are facts and targets, but also motives, convictions, difficult choices, past experiences and dramatic environmental shifts. Narrative brings them together in one coherent, textured account of what’s changing and why.

Ghostwriting makes this a particularly close collaboration. The piece carries your name, so its voice must be authentically yours. Through interviews, we capture not just your phrasing but your tone — how you break down ideas, how you use humour, and how you emphasise what matters most.

And since your beliefs will now go public, they must be challenged: We ask hard questions to road-test the reasoning, helping you say precisely what you mean with enough conviction to persuade someone who doesn’t already agree. An op-ed asks a busy reader to spend a few minutes inside your argument. There has to be something worth finding there.

Our work ranges from think pieces for corporate leaders in national media to persuasive op-eds for Ukrainian civil-society leaders in international newspapers ahead of key UN votes — arguments written for a specific audience, at a moment when reaching it mattered.

A speech has to work at the speed of listening. The audience can’t reread a complicated sentence or turn back a page to recover the thread. Every idea has to arrive clearly, in an order that makes sense, with enough rhythm and variety to keep people listening. And it has to sound natural in the mouth of the person delivering it.

We work with you to find the argument, the turns of phrase that make it yours, and then the experiences that give it substance. A candid admission, a joke or a personal detail can often do more than a paragraph of polished corporate language. The skill is finding the right balance for you — then giving you words you can stand behind, as well as stand up and say.

Our experience includes helping senior leaders explain reorganisations, set out new strategies and speak to people facing uncertainty. All involve the same process: understanding what the audience needs to hear from you, what you want them to take away, then finding the narrative bridge between the two.

This is not your standard writing training — all that well-worn advice about writing in the active voice or using the rule of three. Designed specifically for busy comms professionals, this interactive seminar gets your team away from their keyboards for an hour to re-engage with the craft itself. The goal? That they think before they next begin typing anything, whether it’s an annual report or an email.

Writing is full of decisions we rarely stop to examine. Why begin with that fact? Why use that word? Why does one sentence carry you effortlessly into the next, while another stops you dead? We open up that machinery, drawing on journalism, literature, music, psychology, neurology – and corporate comms research – to explore how words hold attention.

Then we put those ideas to work in a professional context: finding the argument in an unwieldy executive interview; giving an abstract article on corporate change something a reader can grab onto; reading a press release aloud to hear where it falters.

We think of it as “a yoga retreat for the writing mind” — a chance to step back for one hour to remember what makes writing really work.

A strategy that makes perfect sense in the boardroom typically becomes less clear as it travels through the organisation. People encounter it through a manager’s briefing, a change to their role, rumours of a reorganisation — and when these contradict, confuse or cause alarm, everything stalls. Our internal comms consultancy starts with that gap: between what leaders intend and what people understand, believe and do.

We bring experience on all sides. We’ve spent a quarter of a century researching how the best organisations communicate, and we’ve held senior comms roles in multinationals, putting that knowledge into practice. We’ve advised ExCos, developed global strategies and helped organisations navigate inspiring transformations and difficult reorganisations.

It has only strengthened our belief that internal communications begins and ends with joining the dots for employees; with creating a clear line of sight from what they do every day to where the company wants to go — tasks for which our decades in research and audience-led content equip us particularly well.

Away from work, we’re creative writers too.

• Josie produces a blog and writes poetry – check out her page.

• Kieron’s writes psychological thrillers under the pen name J.J. Castro. Before You Wake Up will be available in online stores from December 2026

At heart, we’re incurable word nerds. So in our spare time, we also construct crosswords and other word puzzles for national publications, including The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Drop us an email and we’ll happily send you one for free — or if you want one for your publication, let us know!