Samantha’s all sorted with a match made in Cumbria

When Samantha Vyner-Brooks enrolled for a Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency Business Start-Up course in July 2000, she was single and planning to set up a floristry business. Just a year or so later she had married Crispin, whom she met on the course, and Samantha has now established a new business creating order out of chaos for busy people.

“I had a legal background in and around Manchester in the 1990s,” explained Samantha, “but I was keen to move back to South Lakeland . I did a full-time floral design course at Myerscough College near Preston in parallel with completing the CREA Business Start-Up course. As it turned out, the timing and the business idea weren't quite right but self-employment still appealed and that has been bubbling underneath ever since, through marriage to Crispin, the birth of our son and now the creation of allsorted.biz.”

Samantha admits to a passion for paperwork and she seems to have a knack for turning mess and muddle into order and efficiency. She offers a range of services from creating personal or business filing systems and sorting out bills and invoices to blitzing home storage problems.

“I want to enable people who are drowning under paperwork to feel more in control and those who are feeling overwhelmed to tackle things and get them sorted out in a way that they can then maintain in future,” said Samantha. “And if that proves to be too much, then they can book me to make a regular visit to keep things under control.”

Samantha attended the CREA Business Start-Up course again earlier this year as a refresher and she has had one-to-one advice from one of the CREA Business Advisers, David Thornley.

She's also been honing her skills on extended family members and friends. “My father-in-law now has a filing system that isn't based on “depth in the pile” and I helped a friend to tackle the daunting paperwork around putting a power of attorney in place and other aspects of her mother's move into residential care. We've been working on a visual identity that says something about what I do and, working with Tim Ingle at Juice Design in Milthrop near Sedbergh, I now have an allsorted.biz bee flying to the ordered honeycomb where everything has its place.”

The new business launched on 31 March 2008 and Samantha's bee logo and allsorted.biz website address are now featured on her new bright yellow car as she has used a contact made through the Lakeland Businesswomen's Network, Anne Clark at Sun Signs in Kendal, to put her bee on the bonnet!

CREA currently has funding from the NWDA and ERDF to continue its Business Start-Up support in Eden and South Lakes . Lynne Fox is the Business Support and Planning Manager based in Kendal: “Our approach has always been to develop a relationship with people who are thinking of starting up or those in the early days of their business. We try to offer a flexible package of benefits to reflect different business needs and this has included workshops, practical start-up courses and events as well as one-to-one business advice and, when funding allows, access to start-up grants.”

CREA is currently offering pre-start-up business counselling and workshops for new businesses and will be holding the next new Business Start-Up course in July.

For further information, please contact

Sally Seed
Stoneleigh Communications
01539 624732


Lynne Fox
Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency
01539 726624