Move beyond the norms of your industry.

Build a business grounded in your life, not someone else’s.

Bring more intention, awareness, and play to the process.

Kate, smiling joyfully and leaning toward the camera, sits on a vintage red chair in an art studio. She's wearing a black blazer with pleated sleeves and ripped jeans. This photo is collaged over a colourful, messy painting of hers.

About Kate

Kate Smalley is a small business advisor, facilitator, and educator based in Toronto, Canada. She offers founder support and business development to principled, industry-shaping entrepreneurs.

She helps small business owners do the big visioning, strategic, and skill-building work of growing a business that aligns with who you are, the life you want, and the example you want to set.

Her work draws on 12 years of experience in marketing (mostly with early-stage startups), 8 years of experience in finance, and ongoing study in systems thinking, emergence, non-dual consciousness, trauma recovery, and organizational development.

She’s ghostwritten for some of Canada’s most well-established fintech brands (Wave, Borrowell) and consulted on education development, content marketing, strategic communications, and customer acquisition for a handful of startups and non-profits across North America (FP Canada). Kate has a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University and a graduate certificate in Financial Planning from George Brown College. She’s a Qualified Associate Financial Planner (QAFP®), a certified Trauma of Money Method facilitator, and is currently completing programming in Internal Family Systems (IFS).

Kate uses her broad background in marketing and finance—alongside ongoing study and personal experimentation—to apply an integrated lens to business development.

Kate, a white woman with shoulder-length, naturally curly hair and dark glasses smiles brightly at the camera. She's sitting confidently on a stool, with a studio behind her, wearing the same white button down and light-wash jeans she wears every day

Current Work

Currently, Kate works with independent creatives, entrepreneurs, and small business owners across North America. She advises them on their growth strategy, business model development, and marketing communications.

She’s worked with retail shop owners, make-up artists, authors, photographers, industrial designers, weavers, spiritual teachers, investment advisors, financial planners, furniture makers, painters, executive coaches, brand designers, beauty founders… all sorts of thoughtful, generous, warm folks who are in it for the long haul and eager to do things differently.

Through her work, she’s interested in developing nuanced understandings of growth and learning how to engage intentionally with our businesses. By exploring these things alongside her clients, she hopes to offer us new ways of being in relationship with our businesses and ourselves. Ways that center joy, play, possibility, care, contribution, and fullness.

Learn more about me by exploring my values, FAQs, and client testimonials. .

I'm walking away with a much better sense of what it is to speak to yourself kindly, which is the foundation I want to continue to build on. After working with you, it is easier to enjoy the process because I am finally less intimated by it.”

— Anaïsol, Commercial & Documentary Photographer

Portrait photography by Kenda Al Yakobi.
All other photography and illustrations by me. Website by me.

© Kate Smalley. All rights reserved.