Why the bee
Why the Manchester Worker Bee
There's a lot of thought behind our bee. It carries a family from Manchester, the B in our name, and the way we work. We go above and beyond for every client, and we'd like to do the same for you.
From Tim
My family is originally from Manchester, England. My mom, dad, brother, sister, and my entire extended family are from Manchester. I was born in the United States, but I grew up in a British household, going to England all the time, steeped in British culture.
Everything was British, just in an American world: the food, the television, the pop culture, the news, the sports, all of it. All the way down to our Earl Grey tea, it was normal for us, but different from everyone else in America.
I didn't really pay attention to the bee till I was much older. In the past few years, when I go home to my parents and look around the house, I see it all over the place: on napkins, on drawer handles, a paperweight, a painting, a little decoration on something, a pillowcase cover. Think of it as Easter eggs around the house.
I understand how much the bee means to my family, and how much it means to my mom. It's a reminder of my connection to that part of my heritage.
My parents thoughtfully kept this symbol in their house. It's like they unknowingly grounded us in everything about who we are.
And the B in VBO is Bailey. The B and the bee. I love that connection.
Tim Bailey, Founder
"It's like they unknowingly grounded us in everything about who we are."
Tim Bailey
Our icon
How we work
Bees have been on Manchester's coat of arms since 1842, as a symbol of hard work, and the motto on the arms is Concilio et Labore, often translated as "by council and work." To us, council means a group: we collaborate, we think about what we're going to do, and then we do the work. This is how we are and how we're always going to be.
The Worker Bee in Action at VBO
One Friday night around 9, we caught a hacker in a client's ad account, running ads for a product our client doesn't sell, with the budget turned up to thousands of dollars a day. We cut the budget and switched the ads off. They switched them back on. So we switched them off again, and we stayed on it that night to stop them spending any more of our client's money. By the end of the night, our client had locked them out of the account.
Our ethos is the worker bee. We work for our clients, and we put in the work.