Bring one hard problem. Leave with a decision.

For a specific, well-framed problem, usually yes. That is exactly the constraint accelerator mentoring is built around. For something diffuse, like “we need a strategy,” sixty minutes will get you a much better question rather than an answer, which is often the more valuable thing anyway. If the honest answer is that you need three months of work, I will say so.

Because the three sessions are not the same amount of work. A founder session is one person and one problem. A Canadian SME session puts a whole leadership team in the room, which means more preparation and more conversation to run, so it is $450. Enterprise sits at board and CEO level, where one decision can move hundreds of jobs and a long tail of suppliers, so the first sixty minutes are $1,000.

I live and work here, and most Canadian founders and owner-operators will not spend four figures to find out whether sixty minutes is even useful. $250 is a real price, high enough that we both take the sixty minutes seriously, low enough that booking one is a decision you can make on a Tuesday afternoon. It is the same for founders everywhere: a founder in Lagos or Lahore gets the same sixty minutes as one in Toronto, because the advice does not get better when your currency is stronger.

Because the call and the paid sixty minutes do different jobs. The thirty minutes is a fit-and-scope conversation: we find out whether this is a problem I can actually help with, who needs to be in the room, and what a good outcome would look like. It is not a sample of the advice, and I do not give the advice away in it. The advice starts in the first paid sixty minutes, which are $1,000 because they come with preparation beforehand and a written recommendation afterwards. The free call exists so that neither of us spends those sixty minutes on the wrong problem.

After the first sixty minutes, the fee follows the need. Where the work is clear and bounded, that means more sixty-minute sessions or a scoped mandate quoted against a written scope. Where the outcome can be measured, such as revenue, cost or a transaction closed, part of the fee can be tied to performance instead, so we are both pointed at the same number. Either way, the structure is agreed in a short written memorandum before any further work begins, and either side can decline plainly.

No. For founders and SMEs there is no retainer to be sold into, and the sixty minutes are not a qualification call. If more work makes sense I will describe what it would look like and what it would cost, once. For enterprise, if the first sixty minutes point to more work, I will set out how it would be priced, whether more sixty-minute sessions, a scoped mandate or pay for performance, once and in writing. If more work does not make sense, I will say that too and you will still have your write-up.

For founders and SMEs, you send the request below, you get a booking link and an invoice for the sixty minutes, and the session is confirmed once it is paid. For enterprise, you get a time for the free thirty-minute call first; if we go ahead, the first sixty minutes are invoiced at $1,000 and confirmed once paid, and anything after that follows the terms in the memorandum. Rates are in Canadian dollars. If you need to move a session, give a day's notice and there is no charge; sessions cancelled inside twenty-four hours are billed.

Everything discussed is confidential by default, including the fact that we spoke. If your counsel wants a mutual NDA signed first, send it over; that is routine and it will not slow anything down.

I do angel invest, but it is a deliberately separate conversation from advisory work. Advisory sessions are paid in cash so that the advice stays independent of whether I want to be on your cap table. Pay-for-performance fees are cash as well, tied to agreed outcomes rather than to a stake in your company.

I am not a lawyer, an accountant or a licensed financial advisor, and I will not pretend to be one. Where you need those, I will tell you and point you at people who are. I do not write your code, run your recruitment, or produce a deck you can put a logo on and forget about. And I do not take on work in an industry or a situation I do not understand well enough to be useful in.

Yes. Most of my operating career was spent across the United States, the Gulf and South Asia, and current mandates span several of those markets. Sessions are scheduled in your time zone where I can.

Small and mid-sized businesses are the foundational layer of any economy. In Canada they employ most of the private-sector workforce, and the same is broadly true everywhere. When they stall, it shows up in a town well before it shows up in a statistic. Startups are the same layer at an earlier stage, and most of them fail for reasons that were visible to somebody, just not to the founder, and not in time.

It is also personal. I have done the journey rather than studied it. I was employee number one in a country and scaled that business to a thousand people. I have sat in turnarounds where the honest answer to “are we going to make it” was “I don’t know yet.” Looking back, the difference between the times it went well and the times it did not was almost never the quality of the strategy. It was whether someone with scar tissue told me the truth early enough for it to matter. That help did exist for me, but it was informal, unstructured and largely a matter of luck. I would rather it be structured, and available to people who do not happen to know the right person.

The corporate and board work matters for a different reason. A decision made in a boardroom moves thousands of jobs and dozens of smaller suppliers who never get a vote in it. Boards and chief executives are usually well advised on what the market is doing and poorly advised on what their own organization can actually execute. I have been the person who had to deliver the plan after the deck was approved, in operations, in the field and at the year end, so I can tell you which parts will survive contact with the business and which will not. Most of the value I add there is not new analysis. It is knowing where a plan will break.

The instinct is the same in both directions. I would rather help someone make the right call while it is still cheap to change course.