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Our season finale, and what a conversation to close on.

Katie from Cake & Kale is a Hamilton-based custom cake and wedding cake artist, a mom of two boys with a third on the way, and someone who has spent years being radically honest about mental health while building a business that runs entirely on precision and detail. She lives with OCD, anxiety, and depression. And she makes wedding cakes for a living. She went full-time in 2022 and has been figuring it out, out loud ever since.

In this conversation we get into what Pure O OCD actually looks like when you're mid-build on a wedding cake, the summer before her wedding when a panic attack brought her to the darkest thought she'd ever had, and the cat named Butters who somehow showed up at exactly the right moment. We also talk about what it looks like to run a business at 60% capacity, why she made hiring decisions before she needed them, and the guilt of not enjoying pregnancy when you're expected to love every second.

Find Katie at @cakeandkale on Instagram and at cakeandkale.ca.

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Ayaan Ali built Fiore Med Spa in Westdale Village, Hamilton and she did it her way. Two and a half years in, she has a team of five, a waitlist of clients who found her after something went wrong somewhere else, and almost nine years of experience in a field where a weekend course is still considered the gold standard.

In this conversation we get into what it takes to hold a premium position in a market flooded with discount Botox ads, what a vascular occlusion is and why it matters, the green flags and red flags every client should know, how she built and trains a team she trusts with her name and her patients, and why she started offering GLP-1 weight-loss injections and exactly how she does it differently.

She said three words in this episode I have not stopped thinking about: time is tissue.

Find Ayaan at fioremedspa.com or https://fioremedspa.janeapp.com/ and on Instagram at @fiore.medspa

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Elizabeth Den Hollander was six months into her career as a registered massage therapist when her mom was diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer. That same day, she took over the clinic. She kept it running for nine years, treating clients, building a practice, and navigating grief in the in-between, while her mom fought. A year after losing her, Elizabeth opened Painted Brick Wellness: a multidisciplinary wellness collective in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, where six independent practitioners each run their own business under one roof.

In this conversation, we get into what it looked like to hold a business together while saying goodbye to the person who built it. Elizabeth talks about the Coco framework of grief and what it means that her mom’s clients are still receiving care. We talk about the collective model, what she calls a path that was chosen, and why she built something bigger instead of carrying on alone. We close with the question we ask every guest: what do you want to be recognized for in your community?

Find the Painted Brick collective at @paintedbrickwellness and paintedbrickwellness.com. The practitioners: @rmtelizabeth, @rmtzoe, @inertia.pw, @msmith.osteo, @urbanholisitichamilton, @myocaresolutions. And Elizabeth co-runs @outdoorsypals — free community hikes and coffee around Hamilton, open to everyone.
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