I do the work myself.

Where I come from

I started in television news, at CNN. The job there was to take something complicated, often something that had happened forty minutes earlier, and get it onto a screen correctly and in ninety seconds. I have been doing a version of that ever since.

I was the video editor on a two-part hard-news feature that won an Emmy. A story I worked on at CNN went on to win a Gracie Award and an award from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. An edit I cut for The Peninsula, with Carbon, won awards of its own.

Since then: films for the Hong Kong Tourism Board, and years of building tender documents, board decks and change programmes for large corporates across Asia Pacific. Enzwa is where I do that work directly, for people who need a document to work the first time it is read.

How I work

Most briefs arrive as a pile. A data room, half a deck, a transcript, and a date. The work is deciding what the argument actually is and in what order somebody should read it. That decides whether the document works, and it is the part most people skip, because it does not look like progress.

So the first thing you get back is one page: the running order, with the one thing each section has to do. Changing it there costs an email. Changing it after the build costs a week.

What I turn down

Templates with a logo dropped into them. A lightbulb icon next to the word innovation. Telling you something is ready when it needs another day.

And a brief where the honest answer is that you need less than you are asking for. There is usually a smaller job that does the same work. Saying so costs me a fee and keeps a client.

Where I am

Hong Kong. The work is remote and most clients are elsewhere, which suits everyone: on an APAC clock a European or American brief goes in at the end of your day and comes back at the start of the next one.