About me

My first career was journalism. Then copywriting at ad agencies. Then marketing for a start-up. Seventeen years that taught me one thing: most companies can't articulate why they exist or what makes them different.

The ideas are usually there, hiding in plain sight. They’re in the founder's head, in scattered decks, in half-finished strategy docs. But undefined, they're just impulses. And impulses don't scale. They don't brief agencies. They don't align teams or build culture. And they don't produce consistent output from A.I.

I started Bateman's in 2018 to solve this for start-ups and scale-ups who understand that brand is their most important growth lever. Working at a start-up had shown me that brand was too often treated as a surface... a logo, a colour palette, a tagline. But the real work was structural: the belief, mission, vision and core story that set the course forward.

Today I work directly with founders to define the few foundations that truly matter. The ones that turn fragmented messages into coherent ones, ideas into stories, and commodities into brands.

The type I use for headlines is Doves, and was chosen for me by Formgiverne. This wonderful video explains how the typeface was lost then found.