About
Reimagining service as software.
18 years experience + AI expertise.
Nathan Nicholls
Growth Marketing Consultant & Founder
Book a free 30 minute discovery call with Nathan. No hard sell.
Book a Call →Our Purpose
ikigai (pronounced ee-kee-gai) is a Japanese concept for finding purpose in work. We chose the name because growth marketing, done properly, sits at the same crossover of skill, market need, and commercial return.
We run marketing the way good teams run software. Strategies are versioned, tested, and improved every cycle. Nothing launches and gets forgotten. Nothing runs on autopilot. The Japanese have a word for this too: kaizen. Small, consistent improvements that stack up over time.
Everything we deliver is measured against the numbers that actually matter: pipeline generated, customer acquisition cost reduced, lifetime value extended. If a piece of work doesn't move one of those, we don't ship it.
In short
ikigai is a growth marketing consultancy built on AI. We work with businesses across financial services, professional services, technology, and e-commerce that want measurable growth, not another slide deck about it.
We cover the full stack: SEO and generative engine optimisation, paid media, web design and development, data and analytics, retention marketing, and AI consulting. Not as isolated services, but as one integrated system where each channel compounds the others.
Every engagement runs on GrowthOS, our AI platform for real-time reporting, automated optimisation, and cross-channel intelligence. It's the infrastructure layer that turns strategy into a feedback loop. The people who build the plan ship the plan, and the software keeps it honest.
Our values
Clarity
Make the complex simple. Every recommendation has a rationale, every budget line has an expected return, and every report tells you what actually happened.
Process First
Fix the workflow before automating it. AI amplifies good process and accelerates bad ones. We get the system right, then let machines run it.
Think First, AI Second
Strategy comes from understanding, not automation. We think through the problem, form a point of view, then use AI to scale the execution. The thinking has to come first or the output is just faster noise.
Small Gains
Every cycle builds on the last. Data from execution feeds the next strategy. After 12 months your growth engine has more training data than your competitors have campaigns.
Ownership
We embed in your team, track the same numbers you do, and take accountability for outcomes. Your KPIs are our KPIs.
Transparency
You see the same GrowthOS dashboard we do. Live data, not monthly reports. Good news and bad news arrive at the same speed. When we use AI, we say so. We will never pass off machine-generated work as human insight.
Process
Every client engagement follows the same four-phase loop. It starts during onboarding with a full diagnostic of your current growth stack, channels, and commercial targets. From there we build a strategy tied to specific outcomes, execute it ourselves, and measure what happened. Each cycle feeds the next. The loop never stops because growth is not a project with a finish line.
Step 1
Discovery
Full-spectrum diagnostic across market position, competitor architecture, and performance telemetry. We instrument your current stack, baseline every metric, and identify the highest-leverage intervention points before writing a single brief.
Step 2
Strategy
We build a growth model: hypothesis-driven roadmap with specific KPIs, channel allocations, and sprint-level milestones. Every recommendation maps to a measurable outcome. Every budget line has an expected return range.
Step 3
Execution
We deploy campaigns, content systems, technical integrations, and landing pages with full QA. Startup speed, because delays cost more than mistakes.
Step 4
Optimisation
We analyse results, run experiments, and adjust. Each cycle feeds the next. After 12 months, your growth engine has more training data than your competitors have campaigns.
Founded by
Nathan Nicholls
Founder & Growth Marketing Consultant
Nathan spent 18 years in agency leadership before founding ikigai. He started on the tools, running SEO, PPC, and analytics campaigns at E-scape Interactive, Jersey's largest digital agency at the time, and built from there. At Switch Digital, he grew a digital marketing team from zero to seven specialists, was promoted to Digital Director overseeing 12 people across marketing, UX, and development, became a shareholder, and led the award-winning rebuild of jersey.com for Visit Jersey.
Over that period he delivered growth strategies for clients spanning financial services (Standard Bank, RBS International, NatWest International, Jersey Finance), legal and professional services (Appleby, JTC, Aztec Group), telecoms (JT Global, Sure), tourism and hospitality (Visit Jersey, Dolan Hotels, Jersey Heritage), government and public sector (Government of Jersey, Digital Jersey, Jersey Business), insurance (Islands Insurance), and technology and e-commerce (Hettich, Lantern, multiple startup app and SaaS products). That breadth, from regulated institutions to fast-moving startups, shaped how he thinks about growth: different risk profiles, same demand for accountability.
That track record in service delivery and client management led to his appointment as Chief Digital Officer, where his brief was to reshape the agency's entire service offering around AI and machine learning. It was that work, building AI into real client workflows rather than just pitching it, that revealed the gap ikigai now fills: most businesses need a growth team that ships strategy and the software to run it.
ikigai is the result. A consultancy where every engagement runs on GrowthOS, the AI platform Nathan built to automate reporting, surface insights, and keep execution tight. He still architects client strategies, still reviews campaign data, and still writes code. Hands-on is the operating model.
Book a free call. We’d love to talk growth.
All engagements start with a free 30 minute discovery call before proceeding to more formal diagnostics of the business, marketing initiatives and growth targets.
