ABOUT JANA
I’m a bit of a corporate dropout, but I took the good parts with me.
I bring the strategic thinking big organizations take for granted to small business owners doing it on their own — without the jargon, the hundred-page decks, or anything you’ll never actually keep up with.
You don’t need a bigger marketing department. You need someone who’s worked inside one and knows which parts you can skip.
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 and say I was good at it but, more importantly, I really liked it.
But over my years as Editor of Internal Communications, I couldn’t stop noticing the gap. Big organizations had teams, budgets and strategy. The small businesses I loved were figuring it out alone, in scraps of time, following advice written for someone else, under pressure to just post something.
So in 2020, I left to start Loop Consulting.
The small businesses I loved were figuring it out alone, in scraps of time, following advice written for someone else under pressure to just post something.
The part where I sold you the treadmill
Confession: my first offers were Instagram content schedules and hashtag strategies. (We all have a past.) But with every client, I kept getting pulled back to the same thing. The difference was never the posts. It was the thinking and systems underneath them. So that’s what I built Loop around, and these days I’m more likely to tell you to stop posting somewhere than to post more.
The part where the systems held
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.
In retrospect, this sounds a little unhinged, but I kept working all the way through treatment. Thanks to my family, an incredible network of friends and my amazing clients, I came out the other side cancer-free, with my business intact and, somehow, with real clarity about what I wanted to do.
One of the real and lasting side effects of cancer treatment is brain fog. It changed how I work.
I had to build systems that could hold everything together on the days when my brain simply couldn't.
The silver lining is that the systems I built to cope 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 anything falling through the cracks. I love a moral, and this one is simple: sometimes the hard thing teaches you something incredibly useful.
THE FULL-CIRCLE PART
These days, my business feels like it’s in the right place. I work with established businesses who want someone to think about their communications strategically, with the full picture in mind and real systems behind it. My favourite clients don’t just want to talk about what to post. They want to know what their content is working toward, and how every piece connects to the next.
And because my own business runs on those systems, I get to step away from it. I live in Calgary with my husband, our three daughters (yes, two of them are identical twins) and our dog, Duke. Summers mean heading back to Fernie, where we got married in 2014, and making a whole new set of memories with our girls in Radium, BC, without my business falling apart while I’m gone.
That’s what I want for you, too.
Not more posts or a louder online presence,
but a business that keeps working while you’re off living the life that you started it for.
I still believe small businesses deserve the kind of communications thinking that used to be reserved for organizations with entire departments behind them, and it’s why I’ll talk to small business founders any chance I get.
Ready when you are
Your next client is probably already in your network.
The Ecosystem Audit shows you where people are finding you, where they’re drifting off, and what to build so your effort stops resetting.