Four kinds of people get in touch, and they’re rarely calling about the same thing. Here’s what each usually turns out to be, and which way of working tends to fit.
Individuals
Successful, and quietly asking is this it
Founders, executives, high performers. People with a track record and no obvious problem to point at. From the outside it looks solved. From the inside you’ve been running a game you stopped believing in, and you haven’t said that out loud to anyone.
Some come because work has taken more than they meant to give it. Some because they hit the number and felt nothing. You don’t need to be in trouble to do this work, and most people who do it aren’t.
Faith is welcome here and it isn’t required. You just have to be a little tired of the wrong scoreboard.
Founders
Building something real, and deciding it alone
Early-stage retail and consumer packaged goods, mostly. You’ve got a product that works and customers who want it, and nobody to think with who has actually done this and isn’t selling you something.
The decisions in front of you are the permanent kind: channel, pricing, the first real hire, whether to take money. I’ve made versions of all of them, some of them badly.
Boards
Everyone means well and nothing gets decided
Small and mid-sized companies and non-profits whose boards either admire management or interfere with it. Often the board grew out of goodwill — founders, funders, friends — and nobody ever set out what the job actually was.
Sometimes it’s the chair who calls. Sometimes the chief executive, quietly, because the reporting says one thing and their instinct says another.
Businesses with an empty seat
The role needs filling and the search will take nine months
Someone left. Or the founder needs to step back from operations and there’s nobody to step into. Or you’ve grown into needing a general manager and not yet into affording a permanent one.
This is the least frequent of the four and the most involved. It’s also the honest answer when a project keeps stalling because nobody inside has the authority to decide.
Size and sector
Where I’m most useful
Coaching travels anywhere and doesn’t care what sector you’re in. The advisory work is mostly privately held businesses between ten and five hundred people — big enough to have real structure, small enough that the owner still knows everyone’s name.
Natural and organic products is where my depth is, on both the retail and manufacturing side, plus the association governance sitting over both. But a bottleneck is a bottleneck, and most of this transfers.
Calgary and Alberta mostly. Coaching runs fine over video anywhere. Fractional work needs me in the building, so it stays closer to home.
Honestly
Who I’m not the right person for
Businesses of several thousand people across a national footprint. I’ve run four hundred, not four thousand, and the job changes at that scale.
Anyone wanting a report that confirms what they’ve already decided. I’ll write you a good one and you’ll have wasted your money.
Anyone looking for a coach who’ll tell them they’re doing fine. I’m warm about it, but that isn’t the job.
And turnarounds that need a specialist insolvency practitioner. I’ve bought a business out of a restructuring, which is not the same as being the person who runs one.