Thriving Through Mentorship: Kate’s Experience with Creative Business Mentoring

Finding the right guidance can be transformative when you’re a creative entrepreneur. Meet Kate, founder of Kate Walton Collections who’s had this exact experience with Digital Boost! through Digital Boost’s creative business mentoring, Kate’s business is thriving 🚀

Kate is a talented artist who transformed her passion for painting into a flourishing wallpaper & prints business. Thanks to the support of her mentors Kate has been able to grow her business, securing deals with amazing interior brands and outgrowing her studio! You can watch Kate’s interview here or read the full interview below 👇

A creative past

At the beginning of her journey, Kate created beautiful hand-painted murals. However, being a mother challenged her to start thinking differently about her business. On-site murals were becoming hard to juggle alongside childcare, so Kate began exploring other avenues for her business. With her love of painting, she found herself drawn to creating hand-painted wallpapers.

Whilst creating wallpaper was a new avenue for Kate, her designs found traction in the interiors space thanks to the beautiful designs that were inspired by Kate’s countryside upbringing.

Navigating the challenges of entrepreneurship

Kate admits that those early days were more about ‘rediscovering [her] identity as an artist’. She also says that when she first started her business, it didn’t feel like a real business! As a creative starting a business, there’s so much passion poured into your art sometimes it can be challenging to see the business side of things initially.

Although incredibly talented as an artist, Kate jokes that she wasn’t the most organised when she first started her business. She acknowledges that she didn’t necessarily have a business plan or marketing on her radar, so knew she needed support to grow her business!

Finding Digital Boost

Knowing that she needed strategic support, Kate found Digital Boost’s free mentoring platform. Kate could browse thousands of mentors and filter by topics that she wanted support with to find the perfect mentors to meet her needs.

With Digital Boost, it meant I could really look through and find who was best suited to what I needed

Kate was supported with her business strategy, website and marketing by Digital Boost’s mentors, and saw tangible results and a growth in confidence thanks to their mentorship.

The power of personalised support

With creative businesses, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t always work because the business is so unique! That’s why Digital Boost’s mentoring was the perfect fit for Kate and her business.

She was able to meet with experts 1:1 and get truly personalised support that addressed the needs of her unique business.

Kate was matched with Ian from the BT team to get help with her marketing! Ian volunteers his time to help small businesses through BT’s longstanding partnership with Digital Boost 😊

SEO mentoring

Ian played a crucial role in helping Kate to navigate the challenges of running a creative business. He reviewed Kate’s website and helped her to optimise it to increase website conversion. Focusing specifically on SEO optimisation, Ian helped Kate to upskill and learn all about SEO and how to use it to organically grow her business. SEO was totally new to Kate, but through Ian’s support, she’s now confident using tags and optimising her content to rank for SEO in her industry. Kate noted that her website had a ‘complete turnaround’ thanks to Ian’s SEO support!

Building confidence

As a solopreneur and creative business owner, feedback can be hard to come by. This is why mentoring has been so impactful for Kate; having a mentor means she has access to feedback and can ‘bounc[e] energies’ and ideas with someone!

As a result of Digital Boost’s mentoring, Kate feels less ‘stressed’ about her business. All her plans ‘are laid out in [her] head in a more organised way’ now thanks to mentoring!

Additionally, Kate has also seen her belief and self-confidence increase thanks to the support and championship of mentors like Ian!

Celebrating wins as a founder

When we asked Kate what she was most proud of, she had two wins!

She secured a collaboration with Lick, a luxury paint brand, that showcased 3 exclusive Kate Walton wallpaper – you can see the campaign here 😍

At the time of our interview, Kate had outgrown her studio and was building her dream space! ✨ Thanks to all her hard work and the support of her mentors, Kate’s business is growing and we couldn’t be prouder of how far she’s come!

We’re looking forward to seeing more gorgeous prints and wallpapers as Kate’s business grows and we can’t wait to see the new studio too 😍

If you’ve been inspired by Kate’s mentoring story, why not try our mentoring for yourself!

We’ve got 1000s of volunteers ready to help you reach your business goals 🚀