I am a bit of a corporate dropout, but proud of it.
I spent several years in corporate communications managing editorial pipelines, planning strategy around major business events. Basically my job was making sure the right message got to the right people at the right time. And I’m going to pat myself on the back a little and say, I was good at it but, more importantly, I really liked it. However, over my tenure as Editor of Internal Communications I couldn't stop noticing the gap between what large organizations had access to and what small businesses were trying to figure out on their own; usually with no budget, no strategy, and a lot of pressure to just post something.
The gap between what corporate could do in their communications and what was realistic for a small business bothered me enough that, in 2020, I started Loop Consulting to do something about it.
Meet Jana
The early version of my business actually looked pretty different from what it is now, and I’m gonna be really honest and say the path to where it is today wasn’t a straight line. In the very early days I started with selling Instagram content schedules. Then I tried hashtag strategies and moved into social media management and content creation. I even launched a group program for a while. And truly, some of it worked, but most of it was teaching me what I didn't want to be doing and guiding me towards what I’m really good at. With every iteration of my offers I kept coming back to the strategic layer. I liked the planning, the systems, and the thinking that sits behind the content rather than just churning it out. Overtime, I realized the reason I kept coming back to that was it was where my experience actually lived... It just took me a while to trust myself enough to build my business around it.
In November 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
I had just come back from maternity leave after having my twins and I was genuinely starting to feel like myself again. I had momentum and excitement for building in my business and getting my own identity back. And then I heard the words "you have cancer." I felt a lot of things. Terrified, sad, but mostly I felt angry. I was angry that I had to pause again, angry that the momentum I'd been rebuilding had to wait, angry that I had to say ‘no’ to the work coming my way.
But, in retrospect this sounds a little unhinged, I kept working all the way through treatment. Thanks to my family, an amazing network of friends, and my amazing clients I got through it and came out the other side cancer-free, with my business still intact, and somehow with clarity about what I wanted to do.
One part of my personality that I credit with getting me through is my ability to stay positive through difficult times, but I’m still honest about things that are hard. One of the real and lasting side effect of cancer treatment is brain fog. It changed how I work and I had to build systems that could hold everything together on the days when my brain simply couldn't. The silver lining to this is that what I built to cope with a foggy brain were systems that didn't just help me survive, they made my whole business work better. They're the reason I can manage communications across multiple clients without things falling through the cracks. I love a moral and this one is that, sometimes, the hard thing teaches you something incredibly useful.
Outside of work I live in Calgary with my husband, our three daughters, two of them identical twins (which is as chaotic as it sounds), and a little pop named Duke. Every summer my husband and I make the drive to Fernie, BC, where we got married in 2014, and lately we've been adding Radium into the mix and building a whole new set of memories with our kids there.
I’m so excited because my business feels like its in the right place now. I work with established businesses who want someone to think about their communications strategically, with the full picture in mind, supported by real systems behind it. I love when a new client wants to talk about not only what to post, but what their content is working toward and how every piece connects to the next.
I still genuinely believe that small businesses deserve access to the kind of communications thinking that used to be reserved for organizations with entire departments behind them. And this is why I get excited to talk to small business founders as often as I can.
If you are interested in working together…