ABOUT
I'm Marnie.
And I've spent a very long time learning how businesses actually work.
Not the polished version you see in business books. The real version.
The version with customers waiting for answers, suppliers changing things without warning, websites deciding not to cooperate, spreadsheets breeding overnight, products that need uploading, words that refuse to write themselves and a to-do list that was already too long yesterday.
I've been building, running, fixing and figuring things out in businesses for more than 25 years.
Small Shop SOS is what happened when I finally put all of that experience in one place.
THIS DIDN'T START WITH SMALL SHOP SOS
I've been on the other side of the desk.
Before I started helping other businesses with this stuff, I spent years doing it for my own. Chateaux Bling, Doggies Delights, Snickie Snackie Snoo and Neon Rage all came with their own customers, suppliers, stock, products, websites, marketplaces, content, orders, admin and the inevitable moments when something that worked perfectly yesterday suddenly decided it had other plans.
BellKeeperInk began with writing and publishing, which gave me another useful education in making something, shaping it properly and putting it into the world.
Those years did not produce a shiny list of business buzzwords. They produced practical commercial judgement. I've dealt with the front end customers see and the considerable amount of work happening behind it.
Running businesses taught me something useful: most problems do not arrive neatly labelled. A website problem can actually be a copy problem. A product problem can be buried in the data. A branding job can expose a customer-journey problem nobody had noticed.
That's why I don't work particularly well in boxes.
WHY CREATIVE DIGITAL MECHANIC?
So what exactly is a Creative Digital Mechanic?
It started as the simplest way I could think of to describe what I actually do.
I make things. I take things apart. I work out why they aren't behaving themselves. I rebuild them. I organise the messy bits. And quite often I end up fixing something completely different from the thing we originally thought was broken.
Sometimes that's a brand. Sometimes it's a website. Sometimes it's a catalogue containing thousands of products. Sometimes it's a sentence that has been rewritten seventeen times and somehow got worse every time.
The tools change depending on the job. The approach doesn't.
Understand the problem. Work out what needs doing. Get it sorted properly.
I design it.
Build it.
Fix it. Sort it. ♡
That is not another clever slogan. It is the most honest short version of what I do.
WRITER FIRST
And then there are the words.
I've been writing for considerably longer than I've been calling it a service.
There are six completed books behind me, three of them published, another currently being written, and more poetry, product copy, website copy, captions, descriptions and assorted collections of words than I could sensibly count.
Writing taught me to pay attention to voice. A business should sound like itself, just as an author should. That's something I carry into every piece of copy I work on.
BEHIND THE SCENES
I'm also quite happy behind the scenes.
I like the bit most people never see. The website structure. The product data. The repository. The spreadsheet. The integration. The setting buried three menus deep that turns out to be responsible for the whole bloody problem.
I've taught myself new platforms and technologies throughout my working life because businesses rarely have the decency to keep using the same tools forever.
I don't need to know everything. I need to know how to work things out.
HOW I ACTUALLY WORK
I like straightforward.
Tell me what's happening. Tell me what you need. Give me the deadline and the access I genuinely need to do the job.
I'll ask questions when questions are useful, explain things without hiding behind jargon and tell you if I think there's a better way to approach something.
I don't believe making something sound complicated makes the person doing it look clever. I'd rather make the complicated thing feel manageable.
WHO SMALL SHOP SOS IS FOR
Small business doesn't mean small workload.
One of the reasons Small Shop SOS exists is because smaller businesses rarely have a design department, web team, copywriter, ecommerce manager, administrator and technical person sitting in different rooms waiting for something to do.
Usually there's one person — or a very small team — trying to cover all of it. I know what that feels like because I've done it.
Small Shop SOS gives you another capable pair of hands without pretending you suddenly need an entire agency.
KIND WORDS
Other people have trusted me with their business too.
“Really amazing work - so pleased - thank you :)”
“I endorse Marnie for data entry, virtual assistant, social media management, Etsy administration, content management system development, e-commerce management, inventory management, stock control, web content, website content management and Shopify.”
ANYWAY, ENOUGH ABOUT ME
What are you trying to sort?
If you've got a project, a problem, an idea, a half-finished something or a digital mess you would quite like to stop thinking about, tell me about it.