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

Meet your guide & strategic thought partner, Kate.

Kate Smalley is a small business advisor, educator, and facilitator based in Toronto, Canada.

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 change you desire to shape in the world.

Her work draws on 12 years of experience in marketing (mostly with early-stage startups), 8 years of experience in personal 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 professional education development (FP Canada), content marketing, strategic communications, and customer acquisition for a handful of startups and non-profits across North America. 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®) and a certified Trauma of Money Method facilitator.

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

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 practices.

She’s worked with retail shop owners, product manufacturers, 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 shape and be shaped by 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.

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

© Kate Smalley. All rights reserved.

“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