Nick Tay

Nick has taste, and taste is the hard thing to hire for. Skill can be taught. Knowing the difference between work that is fine and work that is genuinely good, and knowing which of the two a brand needs right now, is something else entirely. His real talent is translation. Most companies know what they mean long before they can say it. Nick can listen to a founder talk for an hour, find the thing sitting underneath all of it, and write it back in words they recognise as their own. Not our voice. Theirs. That sounds like a small thing until you watch someone read their own strategy and say, yes, that is exactly it, we just could never put it like that. He moves easily between a government campaign and a restaurant menu without flattening everything into one house style. Each one gets its own register, its own rhythm, its own sense of who is doing the talking. And he is good at the part writers find hardest, which is cutting. He will lose a line he loves if the piece is stronger without it. Most people cannot do that with their own writing, and the ones who can are the ones worth keeping close.