After hitting rock bottom, Sallyanne was able to turn it around and start making money in her business thanks to the help of Digital Boost's small business mentoring.
In the aftermath of the Pandemic, Sallyanne's beauty school was struggling financially and she was "in a really dark place", struggling to keep it going after working so hard to keep her business afloat.
She tried everything, turning to family and friends and anyone who might be able to help her keep the business going - but nothing was quite working.
In her own words, "there was no light at the end of the tunnel" and it was a "horrendous time" for her and her mental health ❤️🩹
Finding NatWest unlocked mentoring for Sallyanne
Sallyanne was "clutching at anything and everything" and one day whilst Googling to try and find some support, she stumbled across a link to a NatWest Business account and started exploring NatWest's free resources for small businesses.
NatWest champions small businesses and supports Digital Boost in providing free support to SMEs. After exploring the NatWest resources, Sallyanne discovered Digital Boost's free small business mentoring platform.
Having tried nearly everything to keep her business afloat, she thought she had nothing to lose by giving Digital Boost a try 🚀
A match made in Heaven
Once Sallyanne joined Digital Boost's community, she was matched with an amazing small business mentor, Karen, who Sallyanne calls her "guardian angel" 😇
At the end of the hour Sallyanne spent with Karen, she felt like there was finally a "glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel" she'd been stuck in ✨
Sallyanne realised "there are people out there who can help me" - she just needed to find the right people!
Mentoring made progress inevitable for Sallyanne
After that first life-changing call, Sallyanne has thrown herself into mentoring, having many sessions with Digital Boost experts and really going all-in to turn her business around.
With Karen's support, Sallyanne identified she needed to get her business visible in order to start driving sales, so we matched her with Sam from OneLinkMedia, another of the incredible volunteers on our platform who provides search engine optimisation mentoring and support. In just six weeks, with Sam's guidance, Sallyanne was able to start climbing the SEO ranks and within a few months, she was generating sales from organic searches!
Since we interviewed Sallyanne, she's gone from strength to strength and has made even more progress! We're so proud of Sallyanne and the journey she's been on with us and we're excited to keep supporting her through our mentoring programme 🎉
If you're in that dark place, don't suffer alone ❤️ We have incredible mentors who can support you and your small business, entirely free of charge!
A woman on a mission to reduce plastic waste and make periods fun for women around the world 💚
Having had a hugely successful career in the wine industry that saw Nicola working around the world, when she returned with her family to the UK, she knew she was ready for a new challenge but wasn’t sure what that business would look like.
After taking part in a number of local beach cleanups during the Covid-19 lockdowns, Nicola Buswell saw first-hand the huge amounts of plastic waste menstrual products cause. After learning about the 200,000 tonnes of plastic period waste that ends up in landfill each year, Nicola knew she’d found her cause, and set about researching everything she could about sustainable menstrual options.
Coming from a career in the wine industry, Nicola had a good amount of business knowledge but was looking for some extra support to build her business from the ground up and get some accountability whilst doing it.
Joining Digital Boost
Having joined the Digital Boost family through our partnership with Meta, Nicola credits Diigtal Boost and the programme with bringing her business into the digital market. She said Digital Boost “pushed me nicely out of my comfort zone into where I needed to be”.
Having only started Power of Pants in 2020, Nicola says through the help of Digital Boost mentors she feels less overwhelmed and has a clear vision of what her business is and who her target audience is! Having the accountability of our mentors and an exclusive Mentoring Day with Visa’s European team has helped Nicola to reconnect with her “why” and she’s ready to keep pushing her business forward and bringing her fabulous sustainable period pants to the world! 💚
You can find Power of Pants here or over on Instagram.
Hear from Nicola
Here's Nicola talking about how the programme and Digital Boost mentoring gave her the accountability and digital skills she needed to take her business to the next level:
P.S. For every 10 pairs sold, Nicola donates one to charity to help fight period poverty. Read more here.
Can we help you with your business challenges? We've got thousands of business mentors ready to help!
Krishna, founder of Mistry Lighting was creating innovative lighting design for restaurants when she lost her job due to Covid-19. She turned her passion for lighting and sustainability into a business, helping people create beautiful schemes for their homes. A Digital Boost mentor from BT helped Krishna create an Instagram following and get her business off the ground.
Krishna, an architectural lighting designer, wanted to pursue a career in theatre set design when she graduated ten years ago, but due to the recession jobs were hard to come by. Her sister encouraged her to try lighting design and within three months she landed a job at a lighting manufacturer, who taught her everything she needed to know about the fundamentals of design and how lighting works.
She moved on to work on major projects like Tottenham Stadium in London, a metro station in Riyadh and she has created atmospheric schemes for over 25 Nando’s restaurants, embracing their ethos on sustainability.
But restaurants aren’t opening due to Covid-19 and Krishna was made redundant last September. So, she took a chance and created a business of her own, Mistry Lighting, with a focus on domestic projects - because people are renovating. Competing with thousands of interior design and lighting companies, she has drawn heavily on her network and ethical ethos, seeking help to grow sales and attract a social media following.
A family friend sent her a link to Digital Boost, who provide unlimited mentorships via partners including Google, DCMS and BT. She had four mentoring calls, becoming more focused on an area of need as she went along.
Her connection with a mentor from BT was especially helpful. She guided Krishna on how to make Instagram work, the best use of hashtags, creating quality content, and analytics. Mistry Lighting now has over a thousand followers, including influencers, and a website is in development.
Krishna is the kind of person who can’t enter a room without looking up. She works with daylight to understand how much artificial light is needed. She is passionate about effects of light on mood, productivity, health, and well-being, especially in office and school spaces when we return. She is always learning and pushing technical and design boundaries, working with local artisans who create light out of recycled materials.
She said:
“Digital Boost has been brilliant. No-one around me has experience of building a business but now I want to help others to do it too.
I will be back to learn about branding and product development. If I become very successful, perhaps one day I can also be a mentor for Digital Boost!”
Every home is different and what you choose to put on your walls can give an intimate insight into your life and personality.
But if you choose to decorate your home with original art, the buying process can be intimidating. The art market is mysterious and unregulated. According to Liezel and Kitty, it’s the only industry where you can be made to feel like an idiot just for asking the price!
Founded in 2011 by Liezel with her husband Jon, the business is on a mission to democratise art, making it fair and available to everyone. She met Kitty in 2014 when they were both new mums living in the same apartment block in London. Truly the power of an accidental connection.
The two now co-curate an international and highly personal art collective featuring hand-picked artists. Both believe in the power of honest and transparent communication, whether it is with their artists, their clients, or each other.
Turning traditional male-dominated representation on its head, 70% of the artists supported are female. Clients are predominantly female too, and Kitty advises them to shop with their heart, their head, and their eyes, not purely for investment. Make an emotional connection and then imagine where the piece would sit in their homes. “Our dream clients”, she says, “are people who simply love art. We are bringing together artists and clients who wouldn’t otherwise connect.”
Liezel and Kitty had found a voice on Instagram, standing up for fair play for artists, but art is an irregular and highly considered purchase. So, they focused on attracting more people to the website, to browse and return when the time is right to buy. To increase their reach, Liezel and Kitty decide to invest in making the website more intuitive and self-sustaining through search engine optimisation (SEO). They needed insights they could use, having learned from experience that as a small business you couldn’t afford to make too many mistakes. That’s why they came to Digital Boost.
Digital Boost, who provide free business mentoring plus workshops and personalised resources for SMEs, were advertised in the weekly newsletter of Somerset House, where Subject Matter Art have their workspace. They connected with a mentor from Apple, clearly an art-lover, who gave them an invaluable lowdown on SEO strategy, with suggestions that were followed up by email. Another from Visa worked through very practical action points on the same topic. Between the two, they had a very clear direction, and a solid starting point. Kitty and Liezel then hired a specialist freelancer to make it work. Thanks to the Digital Boost mentors, they had shortcut a whole host of confusing online blogs, had confidence in their approach, and understood how to read success or failure in their SEO strategy.
Their immediate focus is to get SEO working to attract more website views, newsletter signups and Instagram followers. They already have plans to return to Digital Boost, to further improve their SEO expertise and then tackle the user journey, planning to connect with a UX expert.
Kitty reflects: “I have already recommended Digital Boost to a business group I mentor. My advice would be to be clear on exactly what you need to know and check that the mentor you connect with can help with that.”
Sarah set up Leeni's, an online store that stocks a curated collection of premium kidswear brands, in April 2021 after she had her daughter. 'I realised how hard it is to find good quality kids' clothes with unique and quirky designs and made from organic materials so I started to search until I found a number of great independent brands that tick all the right boxes but they were mostly overseas. And that's when the idea sparked in my head to bring those beautiful brands closer to families here in the UK.'
Leeni's is an online store that stocks a curated collection of premium kidswear brands. 'We encourage comfort, colours, fun prints and unisex designs to avoid labelling kids and to encourage them to express themselves freely. All the brands we work with only use organic natural materials and ensure sustainability and ethical practices.'
She said her proudest moment was actually turning the idea she had into reality! She also is continuing to learn and grow every day, something that she said Digital Boost has helped with: 'Digital Boost has been a lifesaver, especially in the early days when everything was still new and I wasn't sure if I was doing the right things! Marketing was, and still is, one of my obstacles and every time I feel stuck, I look for a mentor in Digital Boost to answer my questions. Digital Boost made it easy for me to find mentors with the experience or topics I wanted and it was very simple to book a session with them.' We're so happy we've been able to help, Sarah!
Bringing Ossetian pies to the UK from his native Russia was a dream for Soslan Salamov. But potential customers were unaware of this unique food. So, with the free help of Digital Boost and mentors from BT, Bloomberg, Google and other companies, he created a website, a social media presence, and a mobile retail experience to tell his story. “To me it was brilliant to find Digital Boost. It is a great avenue to get to the right people who can give you the knowledge you need to grow your business.”
Salanti Pies is the realisation of a long-standing dream for its founders, Zarina and Soslan Salamov. When they began selling authentic Ossetian Pies, their customers soon realised this was not just delicious food, but an offering of fellowship going back thousands of years. What is lovingly recreated in their Buckinghamshire kitchen is a centrepiece on tables in Ossetia in the southwest of Russia, where the descendants of Persian nomadic tribes live. Steeped in tradition, the pies are served three at a time for celebrations, representing the unity of the sky, the earth, and the underworld. For funerals, one is removed to honour the departed. They are never far from the table when guests come to call.
Soslan had run a successful business consulting on UK education opportunities for twenty-five years. He then decided to create a different type of cultural exchange.
The range of ten pies are made only with locally sourced ingredients – various cheeses, potatoes, cabbage, beetroot leaf, pumpkin, beef mince – bursting from a thin bread pastry. Most are vegetarian, with some vegan options.
However, the family business faced a major challenge: how to raise awareness of Ossetian pies amongst potential customers? Soslan needed to design a logo, build a website, set up contactless payments and plan promotional campaigns. He turned to Buckinghamshire Business First, through whom he learned about Digital Boost.
Digital Boost provides free, unlimited 1:1 business mentoring and expert advice, workshops and digital training from volunteer experts, equipping business owners like Soslan with the knowledge and inspiration they need. IIn multiple sessions with experts from BT, Bloomberg, Microsoft, and others, Soslan explored how to create a digital platform for a new food business. He was impressed by the mentors, their professional approach, and the way they researched his business and showed great personal interest in his success.
An executive from BT suggested Salanti use fully equipped mobile vans to sell and promote Ossetian pies through festivals, farmers markets and fairs. Mentors from WH Creative and Google stepped in with productive sessions on digital promotion and hands-on ways to get the best out of Google Business Profile and the Salanti e-commerce website. An HR expert from Bloomberg helped him approach culinary colleges and bakery schools.
The work is ongoing, as customers need regular reminders of why Ossetian pies are so special. Social channels provide educational tips on how to reheat, keep and serve them, as well as background on how they are made and where they come from.
Soslan says “Ossetian pies are different, they help bring people together as a community."
Pure Punjabi is a mother-daughter business inspired by a third-generation teacher. As a child, Surinder’s mother patiently and persistently taught her the original, traditional family recipes from the heart of the Punjab, North India. During the pandemic, Surinder and her daughter, Safia, pivoted their real Indian food and cultural experience online, with the help of Digital Boost. So, they have virtually been into the kitchens of hundreds of people they now consider friends, co-creating great food using their recipe kits. With a new platform and infectious energy, they’ve recently moved into a bigger production and workshop premises in South Somerset!
Their story starts eleven years ago when Surinder decided to stock her own shop with speciality fine food featuring genuine artisan ingredients. But she couldn’t find a traditional North Indian spice supplier near to her home. She realised this is because traditional culinary methods are passed down through the generations in Indian families.
And then a penny dropped. She had the solution to her own problem, having been taught by her mother from the age of seven to make mouth-watering dishes including Garam Masala and Tandoori Masala. As is the way, she had passed these recipes and methods onto her daughter and sons, such as how to use their own hands as measuring tools.
Once Safia left university and picked up some business training, she took the products her mum had created to be lab-tested, winning a Gold Star in the Great Taste Awards. Pretty soon, they took their hot food to a local fair and eventually BBC Good Food and Countryfile - and the business grew rapidly. With entrepreneurial zest, they then set up the first pop-up Indian restaurant outside London in their local village hall and layered the taste experience with Indian dance performances. Starters were accompanied by a classical performance; mains with a Bollywood show, and after desserts, the dancers entertained with a lively Punjabi dance and interactive workshop.
News of their fun, authentic Indian food presentation spread, and they were booked for weddings, featuring in The Telegraph and Olive Magazines. Their cookery school enterprise was also going well and attracted corporate interest. They were asked to lead the dining experience for a Global Indian tech company on a roadshow across ten European cities, Safia on location with Surinder supporting from home. In each city, Safia would meet with the head chef and team in some of the best hotels, leading them in the delivery of tasty and authentic dishes, with hundreds of covers every day.
But then Covid-19 hit, and disaster struck. The main hospitality side of their business stopped overnight. That’s when Surinder discovered Digital Boost, who provide free 1:1 business mentoring and expert advice for small businesses. Through tailored conversations with mentors from Google, Secret Escapes, Digithy, Caret IT Solutions, and Ranosys, she worked out a plan over just three weeks. Surinder re-oriented the website to make it easy for customers to continue to enjoy their food in an even more inclusive way.
Sales of their meal kits increased by 1,200% thanks to the support of customers stuck at home, and the digital learning they took on board. This extended to ‘let’s cook together’ evenings on Zoom with fun meal kit cook-alongs, connecting the heart of their homes. Soon enough, valuable corporate contracts emerged as companies sought ways to engage teams working remotely.
Surinder says: “Digital Boost gave us access to a pool of mentors we otherwise would absolutely not have met. Not only did we figure out how to grow our business online, but we were also invited to be profiled by Google and joined a Government panel to encourage other businesses to embrace digital.”
So now, as the world is open again for great memory-making experiences where food is at the heart, Surinder and Safia have a stronger digital presence and foundation on which to grow.
Said Surinder: “There is no doubt that the digital world was the only window we had to connect with customers. I knew I needed that help and, goodness, did Digital Boost make all the difference.”
Lucy, a mum of 2 young boys, was a part-time maths teacher with a passion for baking when she decided to leave her safe and reliable teaching post to launch her brownie business full time just before Covid-19 hit. Her days were spent preparing for, and enjoying the buzz of, bustling food markets and festivals in Netheredge, Sharrowvale, Sheffield City Centre, Fox Valley, and further afield. The stall favourites were the chocolate brownie and lemon drizzle.
However, when stay-at-home orders were issued in March 2020, the business was effectively finished. Or so she feared. There was only one option - to set up an online digital presence, in the form of a website. But with a limited budget, and no technical knowledge, this was daunting.
Fortunately Lucy’s father-in-law Patrick volunteered to help build the site, something he’d never done before. They needed to not only get the aesthetics of the brand right online, but also figure out how to get the site in front of people - not to mention how to send brownies safely through the post!
Patrick and Lucy turned to Digital Boost for free, 1:1 business mentoring and personalised advice sessions with volunteers from a wide range of organisations. They met with volunteer experts in website development, search engine optimisation (SEO), social media, and much more.
“Finding the services of Digital Boost, and the incredibly knowledgeable, friendly and helpful experts, was the saving of the business. I have learnt, and am still learning so much from them."
Lucy’s now back at markets, enjoying being face to face with her customers again (and with an amazing new range of blondies and brownies). However the bulk of the business is now online, with the brand listed on the first page of Google for brownies in Sheffield.
Lucy said: “When Covid began, so did my journey into the digital world. I have learnt so much adapting to the changes and it has completely transformed my business in every way imaginable.”
Patrick said: “I cannot tell you how grateful we are to the many volunteer tutors and experts, who freely give their time and knowledge, understood our plight and went out of their way to offer clear and achievable goals, which eventually led to www.scrumptiousbylucy.com being born. Thank you!”
Health is Wealth is a favourite phrase of Ashleigh, founder of Cook It Up, to describe her healthy food-delivery business serving her local community in Hucknall, Nottingham. A sustainable business started in January 2021, she selects fresh ingredients for her unique dishes and encourages pre-orders to enable time for the flavours to soak in. Her Healthier Options Award and 5* rating from the Food Standards Agency are some of several credits she has gathered in a relatively short period of time.
Ashleigh’s imagination for feel-good, tasty food has been nurtured by her family and inspired by travels abroad. She gathered a following on Instagram for her cooking demos, tips, and advice before finally taking the plunge into her own business. The crafted dishes she serves up incorporate a wonderful burst of flavours, with favourites like Mexican Burrito & sweet plantain, Caribbean Coconut Prawns, and several vegetarian options reflecting the most popular dishes of places she has visited.
She learned her craft by joining home-cooks shopping at their market for spices and herbs and in their kitchen. On a five-month sprint from Mexico to Columbia, she gathered dishes by learning directly from the locals, often over an open fire. She came home to experiment, seek out ingredients and adapt recipes as necessary to share the authentic taste she loves with her customers.
A natural in business, Ashleigh’s venture has the feel of one much more established. One of her Digital Boost Mentors, Mahima Karol, said: “Ashleigh has her own unique style and has found a niche with her customer base. If you suggest something she takes that, actions it, and tracks outcomes. She’s a smart business-woman who will be very successful.”
What’s more, Ashleigh is grateful to benefit from the full support of Ashfield District Council who have put her in touch with key people to connect with for growth. With their help, she recently took over a market stall and offered her new vitamin-packed cookie line and samples of main dishes, which sold out and set off a huge uplift in orders to her website.
Getting a Boost
Ashleigh has created a local following with her food for busy lives, but running a business is a different matter. She applies the core-business skills taken from a career in media production, TV broadcasting, and e-learning, from where she has strong abilities in organisation and accountancy but knew that she needed additional business knowledge and specific help on creating an online and offline presence.
That’s when she discovered the free-of-charge workshops and 1:1 business mentoring sessions offered by Digital Boost. After several conversations with experts from Google, BT, and others, she has forty pages of notes and has already successfully implemented several ideas.
Mahima, a design consultant who has worked extensively with Walt Disney Company and BMW Designworks, has a special interest in Ashleigh’s journey, which she has followed since they first spoke in January. She learned about Digital Boost from the Judge Business School in Cambridge and signed up as a mentor to share her digital design expertise and knowledge.
Amongst other things, Mahima suggested creating a leaflet with a QR code to connect with the Cook It Up website, gave advice on ways to keep customers coming back through calendar events like Mother’s Day and has worked with Ashleigh on branding to visual design, photography and use of video, drawing on her extensive experience in these areas.
Ashleigh said: “I would recommend Digital Boost, whatever stage your business is at. It’s encouraging to hear you are doing things well, but what I wanted were simple, actionable things I could tweak. I have implemented those and had immediate results. It’s always good to get a fresh pair of eyes. With Digital Boost you can learn from people with a wealth of experience, shortcut the process, and avoid common pitfalls.”
Want to get digital experts’ help from Digital Boost?
In March 2020, Harvard Business Review reported that, of the companies surveyed, ninety-per-cent claim to prioritise diversity, but only FOUR per cent consider disability in those initiatives.
John Willis, Founder at Power2Inspire, was so surprised when he read that he decided to find someone to help him mine more data to prove what he knows very well:
That bringing people together through sport promotes inclusion and breaks down barriers to understanding disability.
He found a data expert from Digital Boost, who offer one-hour business mentoring sessions from expert volunteers with a deep knowledge of a huge range of challenges that small businesses face.
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Power2Inspire is unique in its approach to inclusion, connecting university sports-people with special needs schools for PowerHouseGames in adapted sports including golf, tennis, rugby and Boccia (a form of bowls).
The emphasis is on games, not competition, so the rules are adapted to the abilities of the players. If a player has only a left arm, everyone has to use their left arm.
In focusing on true inclusion, all other sorts of barriers come down, including fear and confidence… there are many success stories.
One young man found his accuracy at New Age Kurling made him the top-pick team member for the first time, and another acutely disabled boy overcame his fear and swam in the deep end of the pool because he saw John could do it.
John says: “At the end of our events there’s laughter, camaraderie, a real sense of achievement. I typically find participants have 28% greater awareness of disability afterwards.”
A second call with Digital Boost connected John with Google who are helping him convert data he holds into interesting visual stories, another way he hopes to convince businesses to be open to disability. He has also used the service to validate his fundraising strategy, as a basis for future growth when games can re-commence.
John says: “I would advise people who use Digital Boost to be clear on the project, make it a small definable thing so you get the right input for the outcome you need. Working with them has taken us in new and unexpected directions towards our vision that no-one is left on the bench.”
Want to get digital experts’ help from Digital Boost?