Knowledge hurdles, lack of time or confidence & a to do list longer than 2024?
Then you need an extra pair of hands with the know-how.
Hi! I’m Emily, the Founder of The Business Widget - thanks so much for stopping by!
We are a VA powered Marketing and Operations Agency with a brilliant team of people whose passion is helping business owners to grow by taking the virtual business reigns and allowing them the time and headspace to get back to doing the parts of the business they love.
We are a mix of specialists in marketing and operations. Getting our creative kicks from creating content from a place of purpose including email campaigns, social media content, lead magnets and blogs. Strategic marketing can feel ‘salesy’ but if you are looking to serve people, support and connect with people then they need to know about you and how you can help them! We thrive on getting businesses organised, streamlined and stopping businesses from being a drain on their owner’s time.
You can get to know me by following me on LinkedIn and Instagram so do come and say hello!
But don’t take my word for it - scroll down to read some testimonials from our past and present clients.
Here’s what some of our clients have to say:
Lift As You Climb
Jane Gibbon, Co-Founder of Lift As You Climb and Chief People Officer at London Business School. LAYC supports women across all backgrounds and industries to network and rise.
“It is an absolute pleasure to work with Emily. She provides a wide spectrum of services for our organisation from marketing to project management and many things in between Emily supports with our women's networking and mentoring community: everything for our marketing activity including writing a strategy, creating content, analysing and taking action from the insights she generates. She also project manages our mentoring platform, works with the software team on improvements to our offering, finds experts to create content, generating applications for new members. Additionally she provides event organisation for our network and Advisory Board Administration. Emily is proactive, positive, and readily takes things on, anticipating our needs. Her knowledge base has surprised and delighted me and our organisation. We would highly recommend her to anyone looking for marketing and operations support for your business to lighten the load.”
Playfilled Ltd
Pauline McNulty, Co-Founder of Playfilled Ltd. Playfilled is a people consultancy helping organisations transform and thrive by embedding purposeful play in their culture.
“Emily has been instrumental in helping us establish our marketing and operational processes. As as a startup, we needed someone who was willing and able to support on a wide-range of tasks from creating marketing outputs using our content to researching CRM tools / workshop props to collating expenses. So if you need someone who is responsive and caring to get your business going, or keep a small business ticking over, hire Emily to help!”
Rebuildagram
Kirsty Raper is the Founder of Rebuildagram a Instagram Marketing Agency for Home and Garden Accounts
"Emily helped me so much when I was tearing my hair out trying to do 4 different jobs at the same time and was doing most of them pretty badly! She not only picked up what I needed help with super quickly, but provided brilliant solutions that would have taken me weeks to figure out! Totally recommend!”
Helen Massy
Helen is a specialist medical and health content writer and editor
“I've been working with Emily for a few months now and she is incredibly skilled. Emily and her team have helped my to implement new strategies and operating systems with ease. She is is efficient, knowledgeable, highly professional and a real support to my business.”
The Body Happy Org
Molly Forbes is a author, campaigner, journalist and founder and Executive Director of The Body Happy Organisation CIC
"Emily is a delight to work with - professional, knowledgeable and passionate about delivering. She's become an integral part of the business and without her many things simply wouldn't happen. Emily's calm, conscientious and capable delivery mean I trust her implicitly with every task given - and because of her amazing all-round skills her role within the team has grown and varied in scope as she's able to hit the ground running with every project she's commissioned to complete. I can't rate Emily's work highly enough!"
Hannah Hubbleday
Graphic Designer for business branding and rental property branding.
“Emily is brilliant, super efficient, highly motivated…give Emily a task and it gets done straight away along with the other tasks you’d not got round to briefing on. She’s always learning and any task that she doesn’t know how to do she quietly goes away and finds out how to solve the issue. I couldn’t run my business without her, she’s allowed me time to focus on what I’m good at and helped me grow my business. On top of all that she’s lovely and great fun to work with.”
The Pineapple Lounge
Researchers, strategists, innovators, and futurists who fuse ideas, insights and intuition to design strategies that put you at the epicentre of family life.
“The TPL newsletter team have worked with Emily on our newsletter for 18 months now. What a pleasure it has been! She has been an invaluable support - from facilitating and contributing to our brainstorming sessions, providing us with inspiration, tackling design challenges with creativity and pzazz, all the while keeping us on track with her meticulous organisation. We very much look forward to continuing this partnership together.”
The Playful Den
Emma Worrollo is a kid-culture expert, play specialist, entrepreneur, influencer and coach.
“Emily has been an integral part of enabling me to juggle multiple roles and businesses. She is pro active and multi skilled which is invaluable for passing on a variety of tasks and problems that need solving. From social media tasks, diary management and more complex strategy planning - there is nothing she can't figure out and has a positive can do attitude which is also uplifting, realistic and reassuring. I am in awe of how she seems to be able to switch focus and be one step ahead, she is exactly the dynamite required to get a business off the ground and then keep the wheels turning and not falling off! I would highly recommend her services.”
Therapy Stars
Sian Boffey is the owner of Therapy Stars - a Wrexham based children’s physio clinic
“Emily has been an amazing addition to our team as our VA and marketing manager. Her expertise and advice has been invaluable. She’s a pleasure to work with. I receive clear plans and reports so that we both know what our goals are and how we will achieve them. Could not recommend more!”
Dr Angharad Rudkin
Clinical Psychologist, Author and Consultant.
"I had no clue how to set up a social media account, let alone manage it. With her enviable knowledge and expertise, Emily has patiently guided me into the social media world. She quickly understood what was needed for me and my business, and put these ideas into actions efficiently and effectively. I don't know what I'd do without her!"
VA? OBM? Marketing? Admin?
— What are you?
As a VA working with small businesses we think it’s important to find an all-rounder to have on your team because you have to become an all-rounder yourself when you start your own business. That’s why we are all a mix of our two passions - marketing and operations and we all excel in different things which is why we make a great combination to have at your disposal.
Here are some terms that we use regularly to help people understand what we do:
VA = Virtual Assistant.
Depending on the individual’s experience, skills and client base depends on what the VA can do. It used to be a largely admin and PA type role but the bigger the industry grew the more VAs up-skilled and started adding marketing and general life admin to their remit.
OBM = Online Business Manager.
This describes me the best but a lot of people don’t know what this means. As I have lots of experience in managing online businesses from every aspect.
Marketing Manager = is not an admin or sales role.
Sticking up some posts on social media is not what we do. We create a strategy which includes data from your current channels, website, competitors and our own recommendations. We test, analyse, tweak and then test again. Marketing is a mix of science (data) and creativity (creating assets and ideas) so it should be treated like that - not just a bit of admin.
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