Executive ghostwriter for CEOs and senior leaders

A founder can say almost anything. You can't, and that's the whole difficulty.

You've got a comms team with a view. Possibly legal. Certainly a board, or a CEO above you, or an investor relations calendar that constrains what can be said and when.

Most executive writing dies inside that constraint. It gets drafted by someone sensible, reviewed by someone cautious, approved by someone who wasn't in the original conversation, and what publishes is technically accurate and completely inert.

The constraint isn't the problem. Writing as though the constraint is the only thing that matters is the problem.

What you can still say

More than you think, and less than a founder.

You can't pre-announce. You can't contradict the company line. You can't talk about the acquisition, the restructure, or the number before it's public.

You can say what you believe about how your industry works. You can say what you've watched go wrong across twenty years and four organisations. You can disagree, in public, with a piece of received wisdom everyone in your sector repeats and nobody examines.

None of that requires a single confidential fact. Most people assume the interesting material is the confidential material. It almost never is — the confidential material is usually just numbers, and numbers age badly.

The corporate voice tax

There's a specific register senior people slip into the moment they're writing rather than speaking. Longer sentences. Passive constructions. Hedges stacked on hedges until the claim disappears.

You don't talk like that. In a meeting you're direct, occasionally blunt, and considerably funnier.

The gap between how you talk and how you write is the entire job. We close it by not letting you write — you talk, we write, and what comes back sounds like the meeting version rather than the memo version.

Working alongside comms

We don't replace your communications team and we don't compete with them.

Their job is the company's voice. Ours is yours. Those are different jobs that get confused constantly, usually to the detriment of yours.

In practice: your comms lead sees anything that touches company matters before it goes out. We'd rather they did. An executive feed that's been through a sensible review is still miles better than one that never existed because everyone was nervous.

What we won't do is let the review process sand the argument off. If the piece survives review with nothing left to disagree with, it wasn't worth publishing and we'll say so.

What this is actually for

Executives usually come to this for one of three reasons, and the third is the honest one.

The company wants senior visibility, and you've been volunteered.

You're eighteen months from wanting a different role, and you'd rather the market already knew who you were.

Or you've spent thirty years accumulating a view of how this industry actually works, and it's started bothering you that none of it exists anywhere outside your own head.

All three are fine reasons. The third produces the best writing.

How it works

An hour a week with Peter. No brief and no homework — you talk about what you're seeing, we ask the questions that get underneath it.

Naghmeh edits everything before it reaches you. Nothing publishes without your approval, and nothing goes near your comms team that you haven't seen first.

Everything is under NDA. We don't publish client names, and we won't ask to use yours — ever.

The Writing Partnership starts at £3,500 a month. Three months minimum, then month to month.