The Slowdown

. Hello and happy new year! Whether you are taking a slow and steady approach to the new year or diving head first into goals/intentions/planning… you may be wondering what’s in store for marketing and online business this year. No matter what business you’re in or how big your business might be, in 2026 your biggest competition is trust. Today our digital reality is, well, fake. Or at least a lot of it can be. AI slop and deep fake videos, even audio, are everywhere. Literally anything, even...

This week I wrapped up the very first cohort of the Slow & Steady Decelerator! Our final workshop was all about how to be sales-y without invoking Harry Wormwood. And then we had one final office hours session to celebrate wins and reflect on the shifts and progress made over our eight nine weeks together (we extended the container by a week thanks to an ill-timed washing machine repair). Together we celebrated new clients and new collaborations, but also the kind of wins that don't show up...

Hey babe, how are you and your inbox holding up this week? While the avalanche of Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday/Giving Tuesday and all adjacent promos adds up to decidedly too much email – this is a great time to sit back and observe how other small businesses are using email marketing at this time of year! Wading through big box brands' mostly bad and ugly emails, I did find a couple of gems – and trends – from creative small businesses that found cool ways to do promos...

“When I’m feeling sorry for myself, I’ve started engaging with other small business owner’s content.” My friend, fellow small business owner and class mum Julie shared this with me earlier this week. We were chaperoning a field trip, exercising our entrepreneurial right to take a random weekday off to chaperone 27 grade fives through the hallowed halls of Queen’s Park. Naturally our conversation turned to talking shop. I don’t have to tell you, dear small business owner, that it’s been a...

I love a good plan. Give me your colour-coded calendars, Notion dashboards, spreadsheets, 100 sticky notes… However it looks, a clear plan is such a powerful start. And for many of us – especially the thoughtful, international and/or spicy ones – it feels like progress. And it is. Planning is action. But eventually, the real work has to begin: moving from planning into doing. That’s exactly what came up in a recent Decelerator Office Hours session. By this point, most participants have mapped...

The Decelerator launch? Let’s just say… it didn’t go exactly as planned. Some parts worked beautifully. Others kind of flipped. Sometimes even on the same day! And then there was that one missed opportunity I’m going to be thinking about for a loooong time. But in this economy, I’m still calling it a win! This week I’ve been deep in post-mortem mode – digging through survey responses, conversion stats and my launch notes to figure out what to carry forward and what can go straight into the...

Sometime between Labour Day and Canadian Thanksgiving I jumped timelines and now I’m an avid baseball fan who never misses a Blue Jays game. (Toronto/Canadian friends know!) Here’s the remarkable thing about watching a lot of baseball: you start to notice things go wrong way more often than they go right. A pretty good pro baseball player might get to first base only 30% of the time they’re up to bat. Home plate? Maybe once every four or five games. Over a 160-game season, that’s a whole lot...

A few weeks after I launched the Heavy Flow podcast, I got a DM from a publisher: “We love your voice. Have you considered writing a book?” And then I did what any aspiring author who’d dreamed of writing a book their entire life would do when approached by a publisher: I ignored it. Part of me thought it was spam – until they followed up with an email. That's when another part of me said, "nuh-uh. Hard no." I wasn’t an expert. I had no plan, no proposal – none of the things I thought you...

This spring, I couldn’t wait to get my garden going. I planted seeds under bright lights, tended to my seedlings, and finally moved them outside to my rooftop terrace when the threat of frost had passed. But once they were in the soil, they didn’t exactly take off. Some stayed small and leggy. Others just… died. Every time I stepped into the garden, I was tempted to rip it all out. There was a part of me that said, “Wow, you can’t even plant a damn seed right.” Clearly I’d done something...

Something I hear a lot from clients and biz friends is that they “know they have to market more.” And sometimes, doing more is the answer. You do need more visibility, more consistency, more conversations… But here’s something I learned doing market research this summer – folks weren’t struggling because they needed to do more. They have the plans mapped out in pristine Notion dashboards. Tactics bookmarked. Google Docs overflowing with possibilities. Yet when it came time to actually put...