About Us

We viewed it and loved it! Hence - in a moment of utter madness/ professional decisiveness, we reckoned that buying a 4,500 square foot, 150 year old sandstone church was a GREAT IDEA for your average couple and their small business!! We spent three months on the buying process and picked up the keys in October 2018.

So did it actually turn out to be a GREAT IDEA?

Well ........... Yes and No…….

The church was certainly a GREAT IDEA to begin with. We filled the hall with our fine fair trade homewares and spent our days packing and distributing our orders across the globe. We loved wandering up the town at lunchtime and having folks popping in and out when they were passing.

It was a great space for the day to day running of our operations - the couriers collected our parcels at the end of the day and everyone knew where to find us. We also held some fabulous pop up events including a charity fundraiser and an open day to let everyone see what these new occupants of the church were up to. We employed three more staff and for 18 months our plans were ticking along just nicely.

Then COVID hit. Online retail boomed but our stock was stuck in India, and when a backlog of container shipments were finally released in one go, the sheer volume forced us out of the church and into larger industrial premises in Heathhall - exactly what we'd wanted to avoid. Then Brexit hit hard. Exporting to the EU was pretty much impossible despite our desperate attempts to find solutions. We lost over 50% of our customer base overnight and we were left with a warehouse full of stock that had nowhere to go. Second Nature Online - the company I'd started in 2008 - was certainly in a predicament. And of course we also now had a church sitting empty with its monthly bills still to pay. Not such a GREAT IDEA now.

We dallied with selling up but it wasn't the climate for it, and basing the business in the church was still our longer term plan. So we rallied. A proposal to turn it into a co-working space was submitted in late 2020 - a GREAT IDEA, written in such detail that I even had the price of a fried egg roll in the business plan.

It was met with approval in all the right places but I just could not take it further. Keeping Second Nature Online afloat - and all of us in a job was a relentless and all consuming task. Global instability, war, increased cost of living, disrupted shipping routes and rising overheads were a constant battle. I also turned into a shrieking menopausal maniac which didn't help with strategic planning......! The co-working plans were placed firmly back on the shelf

Alternative income was much needed so I increased the advisory and training work I had been doing since 2017. I worked with Scottish Development International, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Business Gateway, South of Scotland Enterprise and Local Authorities across the Central Belt. This work was all centred on turning my own experience into hands on, vocational training for other small businesses.

I delivered countless courses - online and in-person - from Dumfries to Shetland, I covered ecommerce including how to sell on Amazon, Ebay, Etsy - I moved into importing and export training and some personal development stuff about building resilience for businesses and business owners. I loved it so much that I also took on volunteer roles such as the government Help 2 Grow Mentoring scheme and some regular slots with Enterprise Nation.

Working with other businesses provided me with enough income to keep Second Nature Online going. It saved my sanity and made me realise that training and advice was a role that I wanted to focus on. And of course, it helped me to keep paying the church bills while we waited for the chance to come back to it.

And on that front, I lamented the feel of the building during those years. Whenever I dropped in to check things, the church felt sad - like it was missing human company - and why wouldn't it? One hundred and fifty years of congregations, celebrations and community, reduced to us using it as a handy place to park or use the bathroom whenever we popped into town.

Well in 2023 it had a chance to shine again! We decided to get married and I had the GREAT IDEA of having our wedding in the church! (It would have been rude not to don't you think?). I moved from Menopausal Maniac to Bridezilla except I was less concerned about how I looked - and more concerned about how the building looked and whether it would cope with 120 people swarming through the doors again.

Over a three month period the church was spruced up and decorated in an 80's theme. Brightly coloured curtains; movie and band posters on the wall; a space invaders and Pacman arcade in the foyer. The doors were repainted in green and gold and our gorgeous building was finally back being its best self - a wonderful place for people to be together. We had the honour of saying "I do" in our own church in the middle of a rare June heatwave. It was a truly magnificent day and perhaps a bit of a rebirth for both me and the building!

In 2024, I was still juggling Second Nature Online and all my training work when an opportunity arose to apply for one of the new Pathways Coach posts with South of Scotland Enterprise. Pathways was an inspirational new programme aimed at supporting women and under represented groups in their own business journeys.

As someone who loves, lives and breathes South of Scotland - and small businesses - it felt like a dream job and I was over the moon when my application was successful. I spent the first round of Pathways as a place based coach in Dumfries and the second round of Pathways as a Growth Coach covering the whole of Dumfries and Galloway.

Pathways was a truly awesome programme. SOSE staff, Pathways coaches and hundreds of small businesses were buzzing with the high energy and camaraderie that comes from starting and growing a business. So many people were amazed to find they were not alone in their aspirations. Communities naturally formed and any opportunity to 'get together' was grasped. Group work became every bit as important as 1:1 coaching so of course it was a GREAT IDEA to get the church whipped back into shape and use it for a couple of Pathways networking sessions.