I am the proof
this works.
I built four revenue streams while holding a full-time job. Not because I had lots of spare time. Because I stopped circling and started taking the next small step towards forward momentum.
Not a coach. An operations director.
I'm Jodie. Sales Operations Director at a US software company, Chartered Accountant, 25 years in commercial finance and sales operations. I built The Colour Rebel, Colour Rebel Studio, PopRoundToMine and Anti-Spiral alongside a senior full-time corporate role, as a single mum to two young children.
My whole career has been one job: turn activity into revenue, and cut everything that does not. I am not here to help you feel better about your work. I am the numbers person who builds the systems that decide whether a business makes money or quietly bleeds out.
And for years, I ran my own creative businesses the way most creatives do. In denial.
I know the spiral because I lived in it.
I had the skills. I had the ideas. On paper I was the last person who should have been stuck. I was still stuck.
I counted the wrong list. The launch I had not done. The income that had not landed. The followers I had not gained. The to-do list that never got shorter. I mistook thinking about the business for running the business.
None of that was the problem. The problem was that I was circling. Smart, busy, productive-looking circling. And circling does not pay.
I tried to perfect the work before I would let myself start.
Here was my favourite stall. I told myself I could not begin the business properly until my creative workflow was perfect. One more process to refine. One more system to tighten. Then I would be ready to put the work out and ask people to buy it.
It felt responsible. It was avoidance.
You cannot learn what sells in private.
Growing an audience takes time. Learning which designs land and which ones fall flat only happens once they are out in the world, in front of real people. I was trying to skip the part of the process that actually teaches you, and calling it preparation.
And I was hiding my best asset to do it. The rigour. The process improvement. The logical, operator side of my brain. I treated it as the boring bit to keep offstage while I tried to be purely creative. That side is not the enemy of a creative business. It is the thing that makes one survive.
So I stopped waiting. I let the design work keep evolving, because it always will, and I ran the business side in parallel instead of holding it hostage to perfection.
What actually changed.
Not more knowledge. I already had that. What changed was execution capacity. The ability to decide, ship, and let the result teach me something, instead of staging endless dress rehearsals in my head.
Revenue is feedback, not a verdict on your worth.
A number is not a judgement. It is data. It tells you what to do next. The moment money stops being a threat to your creative identity, you can actually use it.
I subtracted the noise, built the brand, bought back my time, and built leverage. The streams I built while employed are the receipts.
Why I built Anti-Spiral.
Because the creative entrepreneurs I meet do not have a knowledge problem. They have an execution problem dressed up as a confidence problem.
You know what to do. You have watched the trainings and bought the courses. You are building something real around a job, or kids, or both, and somewhere in the gap between knowing and doing, you spiral. The work stalls. You blame yourself. The spiral gets louder.
Anti-Spiral is business education for people who think like that. It teaches execution, not craft. I will never tell you how to make your work. I will show you how to make it pay.
Subtract
Cut the noise that keeps you busy and broke.
Build the Brand
Make the work findable, and make it sell.
Buy Time
Systems and tools that hand your hours back.
Build Leverage
One unit of effort, paid more than once.
Underneath all of it sits the part most business advice ignores: the spiral itself. The overthinking. The self-sabotage. The reason you stop. We deal with that head on, because tactics do not work on a brain that is busy talking itself out of the next step.
Who this is for.
Creative entrepreneurs, mostly surface pattern designers, who overthink, stall, and self-sabotage. People building a business alongside everything else, who are done waiting to feel ready. If you know exactly what you should be doing and cannot make yourself do it consistently, you are in the right place.
I am not a guru. I am not selling a feeling. I am the operator who built it the hard way, while employed, and worked out the system so you do not have to.
Stop circling. Start building.
Two minutes will tell you the exact pattern keeping you stuck, the one move that breaks it, and the words to do it with.
What's your spiral pattern? →Prefer a tool? Get the free Monthly Planner. Ready for the room where it all happens? Join the Membership waitlist (founding price £37/month).
One email. Every Tuesday. Worth the inbox.
Every Tuesday morning you get one email from me. Coffee-length read. One clear action for the week ahead, written in real time as I build my own business using the same structure.
No padding. No hype. Just a weekly note from someone doing the work.
I'll only email you about Anti-Spiral. Unsubscribe any time. No sharing, no spam.
Anti-Spiral is a Jodie Kemp project. For creative entrepreneurs who are done circling and ready to build something that moves.