ABOUT NICI
Separating what feels true from what is actually true.
Most businesses that come to me aren't in crisis. Revenue is moving. The team is busy. From the outside, everything looks fine. But something feels harder than it should.
A proposition that no longer lands the way it once did. A sales process that worked at £1m but struggles at £5m. Operational workarounds that have quietly become the operating model. A founder who has become the glue holding everything together - and knows it. Or an early-stage business with a genuinely compelling offer that can't get traction - not because the product is wrong, but because it's being pitched to the wrong audience.
The challenge is rarely effort.
It's seeing clearly what is actually happening and what needs to change.
Where that perspective comes from
I didn't study business beyond A-levels. At thirteen I landed my first Saturday job in a village pub in the Yorkshire Dales and stayed for seven years, pulling pints, waiting tables, working every Christmas and bank holiday until I was twenty. I grew up quickly there. I learned how to read a room, diffuse conflict and understand what people actually wanted, often before they'd said it.
While my friends headed to university, I signed a three-year lease in Ilkley and opened a boutique selling unique designer knitwear. I drew the designs, built a network of retired knitters across Yorkshire and sourced yarn from France, Italy and Spain. I built a customer base across Yorkshire and Humberside and later won export funding to supply a small chain in the US.
When the lease ended, I went corporate for the next fifteen years. New business sales at Bupa taught me how to sell into circumstances I didn't control. Business development and strategic projects at Arval taught me how large organisations actually think.
Then sales leadership of the National Accounts team at Staples, twelve direct reports and a £100m portfolio, the point at which commercial economics and tender submissions stopped being theory and became instinct.
The Building Years
I was part of the founding team at Intelligent Data Systems, where we developed the first electronic link to bring driving licence verification data directly from the DVLA, a vital risk mitigation service for corporate fleets, proving duty of care for employees driving on company business. It became a recurring revenue model with 45% market share, serving major private and public sector clients across the UK. We exited to a major PLC after six years, with a founder-only cap table.
I spent three years on the founding team of an AI-driven digital learning platform, built to bridge the knowledge gap that opens up when training isn't reinforced. By the time I stepped away, we were well into the go-to-market phase and had commercial traction in the private corporate space.
A new opportunity had come along, one that was entirely my own, and I wanted to build something for myself. I found an empty flagship site, a collapsed café chain and a concept I knew had something. I spent eighteen months negotiating the lease on my own terms and got the keys. We opened on the 5th of December 2020. Twenty-seven days later, lockdown again. No grants, no furlough, most of our staff gone overnight. I still extracted every director's loan that first year, and when the numbers for a second site didn't stack up, I sold. Six-figure exit, done in three months.
For a long time afterwards, I didn't feel like I'd won. But the decision to sell was right, and I know exactly what it took to build a seven-figure business on a 72% gross margin through all of that.
That discipline, separating what feels true from what is actually true, is at the heart of everything I do now.
I've spent years watching good businesses struggle with problems they couldn't see clearly from the inside. Not because the product was wrong or the founder wasn't capable, but because something underneath the surface had shifted and nobody had named it yet.
A business with a crack running through its foundations - not visible from the road, not causing immediate damage, but there. Growing slowly. Getting harder to ignore.
That's what I built The Commercial Truth to do. To look at what's actually there.
Founders make business-critical decisions every day with information that's incomplete.
I help you separate what feels true from what actually is, before you decide.
Beyond my own businesses
My perspective isn't built solely from the businesses I've worked for or founded. I'm also an angel investor with Lifted Ventures, backing early-stage founders with capital and commercial thinking, and a Fellow of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs (FIOEE), a recognition of sustained, hands-on experience building and supporting enterprise.
I'm active across founder, advisory and investment communities throughout Yorkshire and beyond.
That gives me constant visibility into the challenges founders are navigating right now, which keeps my thinking current and often creates connections that benefit the businesses I work with directly.
What Others Say
Fiona Pengelly, Director, Strutt & Parker
"Nici was a client but has now become a trusted and respected friend. She has an innate loyalty, strong integrity and an acute eye for detail. She is true to her word and that builds on the bedrock of who she is."
Hannah Atkinson, Business Principal, RH Mortgage and Financial Solutions
"What sets Nici apart is that she understands
the real pressure of running a business, not just commercially, but the decisions you have to make with incomplete information and not enough time. She gets to the heart of what's actually happening faster than most."
Founder, Steph Hayes Studio – Yorkshire Abstract Artist
"Nici gave me the commercial foundations, brand positioning and online presence I needed to break into entirely new markets. Everything
I know about running this as a business, I've learned from her."
Miles, Operations Director - B2B/D2C Food Sales
"We knew who our competitors were, but Nici showed us exactly how to sell against them. The deep competitor analysis she produced has become an absolute weapon for our sales function."