OUR
PEOPLE

Senior expertise, where it's rare

Strategic business development for design and innovation agencies is a craft, and the people who do it well in this market are few and far between.

Most business development consultancies are built for volume rather than judgement. An engagement succeeds or fails on the seniority of the person behind it – and that kind of seniority takes experience. It takes years inside agencies, in the business development chair, learning how strategic creative work actually gets bought and sold.

OUR FOUNDER

Daylight is built around success.

Nicky has sat in nearly every chair this proposition involves: in-house BD lead, external consultant, and agency growth director. That breadth is the reason Daylight can move fluently between strategy and execution, and between cold outreach, existing-client growth and lapsed-relationship reactivation.

Nicky Rinks

Co-founder / CEO

Nicky has spent 18 years inside design and innovation agencies, including nearly seven years as Head of Business Development at Seymourpowell - one of the UK's most respected design and innovation firms. She went on to lead BD at Native Design (working with the world's leading luxury brands) and at Siberia (technology product and service design), before building her own consultancy practice supporting design agencies for eight years prior to co-founding Daylight. Her specialism is the thing most outreach agencies cannot do: senior-level relationship building across multiple stakeholders, with the strategic insight to shape conversations before a brief exists. She has been on the receiving end of bad outreach for two decades, and on the inside running the kind that works. Nicky is an Expert Advisor to the Design Business Association (DBA), the UK industry body for design effectiveness, and writes regularly on agency business development.

How we work

Nicky leads every client engagement, which means the person who diagnoses your challenges is the same one who runs the outreach, holds the relationships and hands back the pipeline back when the time is right.

Nicky works remotely on schedules that suits each client. The majority of our work spans, UK, Europe, US, MENA and APAC, with deep familiarity across consumer, technology, brand, healthcare and infrastructure sectors.

OUR EXPERIENCE