This week we spent ten minutes talking to Carlisle’s ‘Best Boss’ Emma Hill, of Radioworks, who talked us through this week’s big headlines, including potential new Cumbrian roads.

Emma won the Best Boss award in the recent Carlisle Living Awards, and has run Radioworks which has bases in the city and London, for 15 years.

Is radio doomed? 

The radio industry is in rude health really. We’ve all heard the rumours that MTV would kill radio, then it was Spotify, but the fact is that 90% of the population listen to the radio.

I think it’s about that relationship with the presenter, and we listen to the radio for company as much as anything.

Carlisle’s ‘Best Boss’ I was very proud to win the award, I think I’m very open and very straightforward and i’m keen to champion our workers needs and allow them to develop.

It was great to be a part of the awards and to see the best of Cumbria, meet some fantastic people and hear some interesting stories.

It was also good for the whole team to also be nominated for ‘Best Place to Work’.

The team all enjoy working in the industry and we keep people for a long time, the first person I employed eleven years ago is still here with us.

Minister backs road upgrades 

We mainly travel to London so we use the West Coast Main Line which is great. I go down there once a week and it used to take about five and a half hours so now it's great we can get there in three and a half.

But in terms of roads we mainly travel to Yorkshire and West Cumbria so some upgrades to those roads would be nice!

And it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the airport as we would find it much easier to fly into London City airport.

Millions to be invested in broadband

The internet is really what allowed us to be here [in Carlisle]. Without realising it, it allowed us to utilise remote networking way back when we started 15 years ago.

Back then email was totally new, and it sounds stupid to anyone under the age of 25 but with our clients all being so far away, without email Radioworks wouldn’t be here!

We’re based at Warwick Mill Business Village and luckily they’ve got great high speed internet access.

We also utilise remote desktop sessions which allows us to work with our London office as if we were sat next to them, so high speed internet is crucial to our business.

Tell us about Radioworks...

We’re a radio advertising business and we’ve been based in Carlisle for 15 years, but we also have an office in London.

Most of our client base is outside of the county, so we’re a little bit of an unknown entity in Cumbria.

The reason we’re still based here is really down to me, I’m a Cumbrian girl and I left to go to university in the south west but I wanted to come home to work in the area where I grew up!

It’s a really interesting industry in a beautiful part of the world.