Nominee Summary
Rural Business Matters, founded by Sue Emery, is a marketing coaching business supporting women running rural businesses across the UK. Launched in 2025 from her home in the Cairngorms, it incorporates 1:1 coaching and a membership, The Marketing Larder®. She teaches her own framework, The Rural Reputation Method, to help busy entrepreneurs build an online reputation that matches their in-real-life brilliance, because reputation is the most important factor in countryside customers’ buying decisions. The majority of clients to date are land-based businesses, including an agricultural buying group, a flower farm, and a farm vet practice.
What makes your nominee stand out?
There is no shortage of marketing advice to 'go viral', chase followers and post more content. There is a near-total absence of advice built around how rural customers actually make decisions, through reputation, trust and personal recommendation. Rural Business Matters (RBM) exists to fill that gap. Its founder spent twelve years running her own businesses and in employed roles in events and communications across rural Scotland. In April 2025, following a period of maternity leave, she pivoted this experience into an online business, run from her home in the Cairngorms, allowing her to work around family life. This background shapes who the business supports. The majority of clients to date are land-based businesses including a venison producer, a pedigree Valais Blacknose breeder and several farm diversification businesses. Support is offered through bespoke 1:1 coaching and The Marketing Larder®, a membership designed for scalability, supporting a growing community of rural businesswomen without a proportional increase in delivery time or cost. In under a year, the business has helped over 30 clients achieve measurable results, including a 100% increase in online course sales, alongside consistently strong testimonials citing increased sales and marketing confidence. What sets RBM apart is its clear mission to make marketing advice for rural-focused businesses accessible and practical for busy, entrepreneurial women. The founder’s methodology, The Rural Reputation Method, guides clients to market themselves authentically and effectively, resulting in an online presence that matches the reputation they’ve built in real life.
Supporting the local community
RBM supports rural communities across the UK by offering remote coaching and an online membership that empowers entrepreneurs who might not otherwise have access to the right marketing support to grow their businesses. The majority of 1:1 clients to date have been land-based businesses, and within The Marketing Larder® membership, many current members are farm diversification owners, marketing new ventures alongside their core farming businesses. This includes shepherd hut accommodation, a secure dog exercise field, and a children's magazine about where food comes from. These businesswomen don’t have the time to travel to attend in-person training that likely focuses on marketing for more urban businesses. RBM also delivers free webinars to organisations within the rural business community, sharing marketing knowledge with audiences who may not otherwise access it. This has included the Association of Veterinary Physiotherapists and Women Who Work in Rural, with a further session for Women in Agriculture Scotland planned for summer 2026. Collaboration with the wider rural business community is also central to how RBM operates. Guest masterclasses in The Marketing Larder® have featured rural business owners and experts from across the UK, including Pannie Laing of Logie Steading, Claire Venus of Creatively Conscious and Hols Mulligan of Just Custard Copy, ensuring members benefit from a breadth of knowledge and connection. From August, RBM will begin hosting in-person training events at Greenbrae Steading, Moray, bringing rural businesswomen together to learn and connect face to face, alongside the online support already offered.
Maintaining high ethical/environmental standards
The online business and marketing industry is saturated with advice promising fast, dramatic results: "post your way to 10k", "use these AI prompts to sell out in 48 hours", and "how I made 7 figures online". This advice is rarely built with rural businesses in mind, and often conflicts with the values rural businesses and their customers hold. Countryside buyers make decisions based on reputation, trust, and personal recommendation, not follower counts or manufactured urgency. Encouraging rural business owners to adopt tactics built for an entirely different audience does them a disservice. RBM was built specifically in response to this. Through the Rural Reputation Method, the founder's own framework, guiding clients to build marketing around intention, connection and visibility rather than chasing trends. Its positioning, "the antidote to just go viral," reflects a genuine ethical stance: rural businesswomen deserve marketing advice that is honest, realistic and aligned with how they and their customers actually operate. This extends to how the business operates day-to-day. Pricing is transparent with clear and achievable outcomes for clients. Marketing strategies built with clients favour sustainable, repeatable practices that fit their business and their life, rather than high-pressure tactics that don't reflect their values. Authenticity is always encouraged over AI-generated content. While environmental impact has not yet been a primary strategic focus, the business operates entirely online with no physical products or unnecessary travel required to deliver its services, a low-impact model that the founder is mindful of maintaining as the business grows.
