I am Jill Irving. I co-own a UK ecommerce business, I have lectured Further Education Mathematics, and I have managed a college nursery. I now bring that operating experience to founders and small teams who need a steady, senior pair of hands.
Co-owner of The Loving Company. CertEd Educator. UK and Portugal based.
Working WooCommerce ecommerce
Co-owner of The Loving Company, where I run the supplier feed, the customer inbox, the product catalogue, and the bookkeeping handover myself.
CertEd qualified educator
Former Further Education Mathematics lecturer at Bournemouth and Poole College. A track record in safeguarding, structured documentation, and clear communication.
Senior operating experience
Years of running real teams, real budgets, and real customer-facing services. I am not learning the work on a client's account.
UK and Europe time zones
Based in Broadstone, Dorset and Portimão, Portugal. Comfortable with UK hours, US East-coast mornings, and full European days.
What I do
The lead service is ecommerce virtual assistant work, anchored in a real working WooCommerce business. The adjacent services below are the things I already do every week, not a wishlist of platforms I read about.
WooCommerce product management, supplier CSV feeds, stock and order admin, customer service triage. The work I already do every week at The Loving Company.
Shared inbox triage, ticket replies, returns and refunds workflow, FAQ maintenance. Tone of voice matched to your brand, not mine.
Data entry at scale, document preparation, scheduling, supplier onboarding, record keeping. The quiet work that keeps a business moving.
Receipts and invoices organisation, supplier reconciliation prep, monthly summaries for your accountant. Bookkeeping support, not bookkeeping. The distinction matters.
Why work with me
I run an ecommerce business, every day. As co-owner of The Loving Company, I handle the supplier CSV feed, the customer service inbox, the product catalogue, the stock counts, and the bookkeeping handover at month end. Anything I do for your business, I am already doing for mine. That means the learning curve on a new engagement is short, and the judgement calls (when to refund, when to push back on a supplier, what tidy data actually looks like) are already in place.
I have lectured Further Education Mathematics. Years of teaching at Bournemouth and Poole College taught me to take a tangled subject and turn it into a clear, structured plan. Most virtual assistant work is exactly that, on a smaller scale: an unstructured stream of inbox, supplier feed, or admin chaos, turned into something tidy enough for a small business to actually operate from.
I have managed a college nursery and led Special Educational Needs support. Professional standards from working in education, NHS school health, and safeguarding are not negotiable for me. When you hand over your inbox, your customer relationships, and your data, those standards travel with the work.
How working together looks
No sales calls, no slide decks. A structured way to find out whether we are a fit, before either of us commits to anything bigger.
Get in touch
If you would like to talk through what handing some of your work to me could look like, the contact form takes about three minutes. I respond within one working day.