A communications director,
sitting at your table.

How the retainer works

The flagship engagement is Fractional Communications Director. You get a senior partner acting as your outsourced communications director, with our wider team behind them, on a retained basis. It suits growing and scaleup-stage organisations across fintech, financial services and NGOs, at the point where communications have outgrown whoever is holding them together, whether that is a business ready to grow or an NGO that is rich in mission and short on senior communications time.

A retainer is a minimum six-month contract for a reason, not a sales tactic. The first month is mostly listening. The value compounds: the longer someone senior holds your communications, the better the judgement gets, because they stop guessing about your business and start knowing it. A three-week project never reaches that point.

The retainer is a fixed monthly fee for an agreed scope of senior attention, not a meter running on hours. Fees start at £5,000 a month. You are buying judgement and continuity, so you are never weighing up whether a phone call is worth the invoice. Within that fee sits the strategic thinking and the getting it done: the counsel that decides what matters, and the people who deliver it.

We are honest about fit before we start. If a one-off project or a cheaper option would serve you better, we will say so and point you elsewhere.

What the first 90 days look like

The opening quarter is where a retainer either earns trust or wastes it. Ours is deliberately front-loaded with listening, then moves quickly into work you can see.

In the first month we get inside the business. We sit in on leadership meetings, talk to the people who actually speak to your customers or supporters and read what you already have: the website, the sales decks, the funding bids, the social accounts, the last campaign that did or did not work. The point is to understand the commercial pressures and the things that can and cannot be said, not to produce a report for its own sake.

By the end of the second month you have a communications strategy that fits on a few pages and is built to be used, not filed. It sets the positioning, the messaging that everyone can repeat, the channels worth your effort, and how we will know it is working. We walk your team through it and change it where they are right.

The third month is when the work starts showing up where customers meet you. We tend to fix the consistency problems first, because they are usually the cheapest wins: the website, the sales team and the newsletter finally telling the same story. Then we move on to whatever moves the numbers most, whether that is acquisition, retention or simply sounding like one organisation again.

A rough shape of the first 90 days:

• Month one: get inside the business, audit what exists, agree the goals that matter.
• Month two: a short, working communications strategy your team has seen and signed up to.
• Month three: the first consistency fixes live, and the first campaign or change in market.

This is a shape, not a script. An NGO heading into its appeal season and a scaleup chasing a slow sales quarter need different things first, and we start where the pressure is.

What a communications director on retainer actually does

Once the relationship settles, the value is not a monthly deliverable. It is having someone senior who already knows your business and is on hand when the questions come up, which is most weeks.

In a typical week your communications director might pressure-test the wording of an announcement before it goes out, kill a piece of spend that is not earning its keep, brief a designer or a writer on the next thing, and check that the new starter in sales is saying the same thing as the website. The smaller decisions, the ones that quietly pull a brand out of shape if nobody senior is watching, get caught early.

Then there is the work you do not see in the moment but feel over a year. The brand stays consistent everywhere it appears. The spending gets reviewed against what it is actually returning. The plan shifts as the business grows or the market does. We report monthly on what we did and what it returned, and we sit down properly each quarter to look at whether the strategy still fits.

You are not managing us, and you are not waiting on a queue behind bigger accounts. Because we keep the client list short on purpose, the senior person who wrote your strategy is the same one answering on a Tuesday. There are no layers of account management between you and the people doing the work.

When we are the right fit,
and when we are not

We say we are honest about fit. Here is the test we apply, so you can run it before you ever talk to us.

A retainer makes sense if

• Your communications have outgrown whoever is holding them together, and nobody senior owns them.
• You want someone to set the strategy and stay long enough to see it delivered.
• There is enough happening each month to keep a senior person genuinely useful.
• You can commit to six months, because judgement compounds and a quarter is not long enough to show it.

It does not if

• You need one piece of work done well, once. A project might fit, a retainer will not, and we will tell you which.
• You are looking for the cheapest way to get marketing done. Senior attention is the product, and it is priced like it.
• You want to hand communications over and look away. This works because we sit at your table, and that needs you at the table too.

Not sure which side you fall on? That is what the first conversation is for, and it costs half an hour.