About Katie Cooper
I've spent twenty-five years building things. This part is about helping other people build theirs.
What I've Built
I co-direct a technology company with my husband, Durgan. We've run it together for more than twenty-five years, which means I've been through the whole cycle more than once: the good years, the lean ones, the decisions you make at eleven at night and think about again at six the next morning.
Ten years ago I built a second business alongside it. The Social Giraffe took me into social media, then into teaching it (six-figure years, over three thousand people through courses and challenges), and then I sold it. Running two businesses at once teaches you things running one never will, mostly about what you can and can't personally hold.
Earlier than either, I worked in marketing on the Eden Project bid. Somewhere in the middle I spent time as a SEN teaching assistant and a school governor, which taught me more about how people actually learn than any course has.
More recently I've built The Art of Pausing®, an app that puts simple creative practices in people's pockets. I mention it not to sell it to you here, but because building it took the same things everything else did: a clear idea, a lot of decisions, and the nerve to keep going when the middle bit got hard.
None of that is a list of credentials. It's the reason I can sit opposite someone with a difficult business decision and not need it explained to me.
What I'm Actually Good At
Seeing the gaps. Someone brings me a business they've built out of something they love, and I can usually see both what's missing and what's possible, often before they've finished describing it.
I also know the other half of it. What it's like to build something out of something you care about and find you've created a beast you can't control. What it's like to be doing well by every visible measure and still feel that something fundamental is missing. And what it's like to have no space at all in which to stop, breathe, and work out what.
Passion is what gets these businesses started. It's almost never what keeps them running, and nobody warns you about the distance between the two.
So I work on both: the structures a business needs to hold itself up, and the person holding it up in the meantime.
Why I Trained in the Other Things
Running your own business teaches you something management books mostly skip: the strategy and the person carrying it are not two separate problems.
I've watched capable people make worse decisions because they were exhausted. I've done it myself. So alongside the business years I trained in coaching, positive psychology, NLP and hypnotherapy, not to become a therapist, but because I wanted to understand the part of the problem that spreadsheets don't reach.
Most support asks you to pick one or the other. You go to a consultant for the plan and a coach for the person, and neither of them sees the whole thing. In an owner-led business, the whole thing is the point.
The Pause That Changed How I Work
Two years ago, after a very long stretch of very hard work, I finally stopped.
What arrived in that pause was painting. Not as a hobby, and not as a break from the real work, but as a way of thinking I hadn't had access to before. Answers turned up sideways, when I'd stopped chasing them. Things I'd been circling for months became obvious in an afternoon with a brush in my hand.
That's not a mystical claim. It's what happens when you finally give a tired, over-committed mind somewhere else to be. And it's the whole reason Power In The Pause® exists: pause creates space, space creates awareness, awareness creates change. I didn't work that out from a book. I worked it out because I'd spent years not pausing, and then I did.
It's as true of a pricing decision as it is of anything more personal. The people I work with aren't short of information or effort. They're short of the room to think clearly about what they already know.
What This Stage Is About
For a long time I was the one building. I liked it, and I was good at it.
This stage feels different. It's about taking what I've learned and putting it to work for other people: sitting with someone while they decide whether to grow, or hold, or stop; asking the question nobody around them will ask; helping them get to an answer they can act on.
That's what The Pause to Power Pathway® is. Not a framework I read about, but twenty-five years of having made the decisions, plus the training to understand why they're hard, offered one person at a time.
I've also developed creative practices that get people there faster than talking in circles does. Some clients use them constantly. Others never touch them. The work is led by what you need, not by what I happen to have built.
The Art
Two years on, painting is a serious practice rather than a discovery. Large abstract canvases, and small unframed watercolours.
My original work is at Katie Cooper Art. It's a separate practice from the mentoring, and you're welcome in either.
Where I Am
I live in rural Somerset with Durgan, three sons who are all nearly grown, and a menagerie of animals.
I like photography, writing and being outside. And after a working life spent building things, nothing gives me more pleasure than a day to myself at home. Which, given what I do for a living, is probably the point.
If You're Weighing Something Up
The first step is a conversation. No charge and no obligation. Tell me where the business is, what you're deciding and what you'd like to be different.