I’m Adam Martin. I’ve spent my career in Canada’s natural and organic products industry. I ran a $50 million retailer, sold it, bought a manufacturer out of a restructuring, and spent seven years governing the industry from a board seat.
The through-line
I climbed the business I’m asking you about
I grew up in Ontario and went west to UBC for a commerce degree. I moved to Calgary in 2010 to join Community Natural Foods.
I should be straight about how I got in the door, because it’s the same door twice. Community Natural Foods was founded by an uncle of mine. When I joined, my father was the general manager, and I eventually took the seat he’d held. The manufacturer I own today was that same uncle’s business. Both of the companies on this page came to me through family, and I’d rather you had that here than found it out later.
It’s an advantage and I won’t pretend otherwise. It’s also a particular kind of hard. You spend the early years proving you’d have been hired anyway, mostly to people who are too polite to say what they’re thinking, and the later ones making decisions about your family’s life’s work with your family still in the building. Then I led the sale of it.
What family gets you is a first look. It doesn’t get you five roles in twelve years, and it didn’t get me anything that follows.
I started there managing food service. I left nearly twelve years later, the last three as lead executive of a $50 million business with more than 400 direct and indirect reports across multiple locations. In between I ran organizational training and development, led category management, and ran retail operations.
In those years we grew revenue by more than 25%, opened new locations, and put in new HRMS, ERP and e-commerce systems. I restructured the retail operations team from a product orientation to a functional one, which meant moving more than 250 people into new roles. That’s the piece I’m proudest of. You can redraw a chart in an afternoon. Getting 250 people to come with you is a different job.
Then I led the sale of the business to Calgary Co-op in 2019, and ran it as a Co-op banner for three years alongside their executive team. Two organizations with different habits, and the work was holding onto what made ours distinctive while getting it onto a common standard.
What I took from that is the thing I now say to most of my clients. Consistency doesn’t come from the standard. It comes from whether the people running the site believe they have the authority to act on it. A standard nobody helped build is a standard nobody owns, and it needs someone standing over it forever.
Ownership
Then I bought one
Since 2022 I’ve owned and run a privately held natural body care manufacturer. I’m not going to name it here. It isn’t the point, and the people who need to know will ask.
This is my uncle’s business, the one I mentioned above. I didn’t inherit it and I didn’t buy a going concern. I spent a year turning it around first — I built the plan in the first thirty days and improved the bottom line by more than $3 million inside that year — and then I bought it, at a point when it was still worth very little on paper.
That purchase took him out of the business completely, which was the object of the exercise for both of us. Getting a founder cleanly out of something he built, with the thing still standing, is harder than it sounds and it is not a favour anyone did me.
It’s stable and profitable now, and moving to a passive ownership structure. That’s the whole point. If it falls over when I stop, it wasn’t finished.
What I didn’t expect was how much owning a business would teach me about detail. When it’s your own money, nobody else checks the lot codes, the expiry dates, the packaging tolerances, or what a format change does to a retail partner’s sell-through. Regulated manufacturing is unforgiving about discipline and I’ve been hands-on with all of it.
The other thing it taught me is quieter. I’ve signed the personal guarantee. I’ve made the payroll decision with my own money behind it. If you own a business, that’s a specific kind of lonely, and it’s the reason most advice bounces off you. It’s easy to be decisive about someone else’s downside.
Governance
Three boards, two chairs
I chair the board of Foundations for the Future Charter Academy, Canada’s largest charter school system, and have been a director there for three years.
Before that I spent close to seven years on the board of the Canadian Health Food Association and finished as Board Chair, having chaired the nominating and governance committee, chaired the HR committee, and served as Vice Chair. CHFA is the country’s largest trade association for natural health and organic products, speaking for more than a thousand Canadian businesses in an industry worth around $3.5 billion.
I’ve also sat for more than five years on the board of a natural products retailer. I hold the ICD.D designation through the Institute of Corporate Directors, from the Director’s Education Program at the Rotman School of Management.
Governing is a different discipline from operating, and most people only ever learn one of them. Doing both is the reason a board can use me. I know what management isn’t telling you, because I’ve been the management that wasn’t telling the board.
In practice the board work is fairly concrete. Resetting the relationship between a chair and a chief executive when it has drifted into either deference or interference. Building a scorecard and a set of measures a board can genuinely govern with, rather than a report that arrives too late to act on. Running annual board and CEO reviews that produce a real conversation instead of a form. Rebuilding board packages so directors turn up informed rather than reassured.
Qualifications
Three sets of letters, three ways of working
I didn’t plan this, but the credentials line up with the work almost exactly.
CPCC. Certified Professional Co-Active Coach through the Co-Active Training Institute, since 2014. CTI is one of the originators of the profession and the certification is a long one. That’s the coaching.
ICD.D. Through the Institute of Corporate Directors, with the Director’s Education Program at the Rotman School of Management. That’s the board work.
MBA from the Smith School of Business at Queen’s, where my class elected me co-president and then asked me to give the valedictory address. I did it through Covid, while running the business, and went straight into the ICD.D after it. A certificate in social impact from Smith as well. Before all of it, a commerce degree from UBC specialized in human resources with a heavy labour relations focus. That’s the consulting and the operating.
The labour piece isn’t decoration. I was lead negotiator for management through an organizing drive at one of our locations. If your business is heading somewhere near that, I’ve been in the room.
Where and how
Calgary, and wherever it’s worth the trip
I’m based in Calgary, Alberta. Most of my work is with businesses in Alberta, and I’ll travel further when the engagement earns it. Coaching runs fine over video. The fractional and interim work usually doesn’t, so that tends to stay closer to home.
Natural and organic products is where my depth is, on both the retail and the manufacturing side. But a bottleneck is a bottleneck. Most of what I do transfers to any owner-led business of roughly that size.
The long line
The coaching looks like a second career. It isn’t.
I’ve been doing one version of this work since I was fourteen, and it took me about twenty years to notice.
Fourteen is when I went to my first provincial student leadership conference in Ontario. By grade ten I was helping run them, alongside people two and three years older than me. I was on the executive of those conferences every year after that, and when the Peel Students’ Presidents Council was founded — a regional council speaking for public school students across Peel — I was the only grade nine in the founding group.
At UBC I was a residence advisor and then a residence coordinator, co-chaired the campus-wide student leadership conference in my senior year, and volunteered with UBC Recreation developing their volunteer team. After I graduated I stayed in Vancouver and did that work professionally, on the staff side of the same program.
Then at Community Natural Foods I was given a job that barely existed anywhere in retail: build an internal coaching program, and run it. So I did. I coached more than fifty staff on their own agendas, which is the important part — not performance plans. Marriage. Health. What they actually wanted. Whether to put their hand up for the next role. Some of the most consequential conversations I’ve been part of happened in a back office behind a grocery store.
I built a leadership program alongside it that we called the Community College, including a ten-week course we called the CNF MBA. Real coursework, real homework, for people who had never been offered anything like it in their working lives. Several of those leaders run parts of that business today, and two have since been promoted into senior roles at Calgary Co-op.
I have more than three hundred hours of coaching behind me. The certification isn’t a weekend, either — the Co-Active Training Institute helped originate this profession, and the CPCC runs across months and multiple courses, with required hours on real clients and recorded sessions reviewed by expert coaches who tell you in detail what you’re getting wrong. It’s the most useful professional training I’ve done, and I’m including the MBA in that.
But it didn’t start anything. It gave a name and a discipline to something I’d been doing for years already. This isn’t a second act. It’s the thread the rest of the career is strung on, and of everything on this page it’s the thing I’m best at.
The rest of it
This is the stuff that really matters
Erica and I met in 2014. I proposed seven months later, which sounded fast at the time and hasn’t since. We’ve been married ten years.
We have four children, currently spanning preschool to grade three. Between them there’s dance, gymnastics, soccer, hockey, swimming, and four sets of piano lessons. Our life is busy in the way that’s impossible to explain to anyone who isn’t in it.
I do the school drop-off every morning. That’s been true through the restructure, the sale, the acquisition, and both chairmanships, and it isn’t a scheduling detail. It’s the constraint that taught me to be honest about what actually had to be done by me.
What I’m proudest of isn’t anywhere else on this page. It’s that I’m genuinely in my kids’ world rather than adjacent to it.
Erica is the best of all of it. We parent together, work together, and serve together, and I admire her more than anyone I know — her passion, and the way she loves this family.
The rest of our life is simple enough. We’re at the lake most of the summer. We take long family road trips, which is still our favourite way to travel. And we host — the dinner table at our house is where most of the good stuff happens.
I don’t list any of that to look balanced. I list it because the work I do now is mostly with people who have won convincingly on one scoreboard and are quietly wondering what it cost them on the other one. I can only say something useful about that if I’ve been keeping both. I have, imperfectly, and that’s the version of me you’d get.