Jon and Natalie are your typical small business owners: Dedicated, creative and extremely passionate about what they do. Like many others, they work from home, allowing them to build flexibility and work-life balance into the core of their business model. The crucial difference? Jon and Natalie are a married couple who run two businesses from the same home, using one business broadband connection.

What makes this even more impressive is the type of business they both run. Jon owns Fate v Future,  a boutique marketing company that works with clients across the globe, and Natalie runs a series of hugely successful online, on-demand cooking classes and experiences. Both businesses demand fast, reliable internet every day, whether that’s to work collaboratively with clients, or support a live-stream broadcast. When added together, this seems like a lot to ask of one business broadband connection, but they’ve gone from strength to strength with Virgin Media’s business broadband.

Natalie’s small business journey began in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. A long-time lover of food and cooking, she spotted that the disruption to supply chains caused by Covid-19 was creating an over-abundance of certain ingredients, in this case, fennel. She took to Instagram and began documenting this phenomenon via her Stories, which soon turned into creating recipes that used the vegetable as the star ingredient. From there, her online presence snowballed, going from sharing new recipes, to collaborations with Estée Lauder, before making the decision to begin offering live, step by step cooking classes to small groups from home.

Bringing a recipe to life via a live video stream is no mean feat. Whether it’s getting the lighting just right, or filming from the perfect angle so your audience can see exactly what you’re doing, creating a successful live cooking class takes a lot of work and skill. Above all, Natalie needed fast, reliable broadband to ensure that a connection issue didn’t leave audiences hanging midway through a stream, with no way of knowing what to do next! Checking the speed and stability of her broadband connection before each stream became something of a ritual and to date, it’s not let her down:

For Jon, Fate v Future was a way to move beyond the corporate world, whilst still pursuing his passion for marketing and creativity. With family in the US and South Africa, running the business from home has meant more flexibility to spend time with the people that matter most, without having to sacrifice business opportunities.

Jon spends most of his working day at Fate v Future collaborating virtually with clients and freelancers. As so much of his work relies on drawing together a network of creative experts, the growing ability of digital tools to recreate the feeling of sitting down face to face and conceptualising ideas with a whiteboard and a marker pen has been invaluable. Unsurprisingly, Jon sees great broadband as essential to this way of working, empowering him to make lasting connections and draw on a global team of freelancers to bring his clients’ projects to fruition.

Great collaboration isn’t the only reason Jon relies on his business broadband at home however. A key part of Fate v Future is their highly popular, eclectic newsletter, which condenses the latest insights from business, technology and culture into a 5 minute read that’s delivered to inboxes twice a week. Putting it together requires the seamless collation of upwards of 100 tabs of information from his browser, a process that’s made much faster and more efficient thanks to the speed of his broadband connection. It’s a unique asset, and one that really sets Fate v Future apart from other small marketing brands.

With Jon and Natalie running their respective businesses from home, there’s no shortage of unusual working arrangements. Jon will often run an ethernet cable down the outside of the house from the second floor to the kitchen, so that Natalie can ensure the fastest, most stable connection for her live streams! Crucially though, both of the businesses and their family are thriving within their current set-up. Natalie is producing more on-demand cooking content than ever to keep up with her growing business and Fate v Future continues to develop a global portfolio of clients and newsletter subscribers. They’ve no plans to move beyond home-working, as their business broadband connection suits their needs perfectly, especially with a young family:

For Jon and Natalie, having a great broadband connection means that things just work as they should, without the need for additional thought or process. This means that they can get on with what matters: Pursuing their passions and enjoying the additional family time that working from home provides.

We hope you enjoyed reading about some of the incredible small businesses that we work with. Find out more about Natalie Chassay and Fate v Future, or explore our business broadband solutions to see how we could help you transform your small business.