For nearly ten years I've mentored founders inside Google's startup accelerators, and for twenty I've run operations, turnarounds and transformations across Canada, the United States, the Gulf and South Asia. That work is now available directly: by the hour, or by the mandate.
Startups and Canadian SMEs book directly. Enterprise mandates begin with an introduction.
Two decades of operating roles, built inside these organizations.
Verizon
Jang Media Group
TCS Holdings
Ways to work together
Same preparation, same directness, same person on the call. What changes is the scope and how we get started.
You bring the thing that's genuinely stuck: a stalled funnel, pricing you can't defend, a board losing patience, a co-founder problem, or an AI feature you can't tell is a product or a demo. We spend the hour on it.
For owner-operators and leadership teams who have built something real and hit the ceiling of what got them here. Succession, the first professional hire, systems buckling under growth, an offer on the table, or a technology plan you're being sold and can't evaluate.
Board and CEO advisory, transformation programs, market entry, transaction support, and interim executive mandates for banks, insurers, listed groups, family offices and government-adjacent organizations.
What the hour is actually for
If one of them is close to something you've said out loud in the last month, an hour will be worth more to you than another quarter of thinking about it.
“We raised a seed round and the growth we promised isn't there.”
“Everyone tells me we should be using AI. I can't tell what's real.”
“Our best operator is leaving and almost nothing is written down.”
“Someone has offered to buy the business and I don't know if it's a good offer.”
“The team has doubled and the systems that got us here are breaking.”
“We're profitable in Canada and have no idea how to enter the US or the Gulf.”
“The board has lost confidence in the plan and I need a defensible one.”
“Two of my leaders disagree and I've become the permanent tiebreaker.”
“We've spent eighteen months on a transformation and I can't see what it bought.”
“I need someone who has actually done this to tell me whether I'm wrong.”
Google for Startups Accelerator
The session you can book is not a new product. It is the format I have been running for Google's accelerator founders since 2017.
In 2017 I joined the initial mentor cohort of what was then the Google Developers Launchpad Accelerator, and spent that summer in San Francisco working with more than thirty growth-stage companies. The program has since become the Google for Startups Accelerator, and I have kept mentoring through it across cohorts in North America, Southeast Asia and the wider region, for close to a decade.
A few of the companies I sat with went on to unicorn valuations. Most did something less dramatic and considerably more useful: they stopped doing the wrong thing three months earlier than they otherwise would have.
The format is unforgiving in a way that turns out to be a gift. A founder gets a short, scheduled block with a mentor they have never met. There is no discovery phase, no relationship-building, no deck. They state the problem, I ask the four or five questions that actually determine the answer, and we reach a decision inside the hour, or we establish, honestly, that they are solving the wrong problem.
That is what the $250 hour is. It is not a sales call with an invoice attached, and it is not the first step of a funnel toward a six-figure engagement. Plenty of the founders I mentor never needed anything more than the hour. If yours turns out to be one of those, I will tell you so and we will both get on with our week.
It is also why the same rate applies to Canadian owner-operators. A twenty-year-old manufacturer in Mississauga facing a succession decision deserves the same hour as a Series A founder in San Francisco, and the problems rhyme more often than either group expects.
Track record
Advice is easy to give and hard to be accountable for. Everything below is work I owned, with a number attached to it. Open any line for what actually happened.
A transitional CXO mandate at a Canadian SaaS ad-tech business in turnaround. Structural, financial and delivery discipline restored inside the first quarter, which turned into a one-year transformation mandate.
A SaaS and PaaS group digitizing B2B2C value chains across pharmacy, life sciences, supply chain and insurance. Built the onshore and offshore service organization end to end. The digital-onboarding IP was acqui-hired by Zindigi, part of JS Bank.
One of South-East Asia's largest third-party logistics groups, twelve thousand employees. Took the logistics business from a compressed revenue position back to operating profit and rebuilt the delivery management, rider, warehousing and fulfilment platforms.
Brought in to build a digital future for a seventy-year-old print and television business. Digital went from zero to the largest revenue contributor in the group. 35 million organic page views with no ad spend, and 5 million app downloads in twelve months.
Employee number one in country for Ad-Tech/Lead Gen startup. Scaled from zero to one thousand people in three years, owning the group's largest P&L, and supported the company's listing on the London Stock Exchange as part of the executive team. Led delivery for AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Comcast and T-Mobile.
Built a transformation consulting service line in the Middle East and originated mandates with national utilities and sovereign wealth fund portfolio companies. Piloted the first national open data exchange in that market.
Hired by the chairman and chief executive to stand up greenfield technical and pre-sales infrastructure for a global launch, and to build the machine-learning hiring engine behind it. Cleared product audit by KPMG and McKinsey; the engagement led to McKinsey Solutions investing in the company.
Global SOX compliance at Tyco; sanctioned-country trade and political risk at GE Advanced Materials in the Netherlands; systems and operations engineering at Verizon. This is where the discipline came from.
How it works
For startups and Canadian SMEs the whole process is three steps and takes about a week from first click to written recommendation.
Pick a time and write two or three honest paragraphs about the problem. Not a pitch, not a deck; the version you would tell a friend. I read it and do my own homework before we speak.
No slides, no preamble. We spend the whole session on your problem. If I think you are working on the wrong one, you will hear that in the first ten minutes rather than the last.
Within one business day you get a one-page summary: what I heard, what I would do and in what order, what I would stop doing, and where I think you are exposed.
Enterprise mandates work differently. They start with an introduction and a confidential conversation at no cost, and are scoped in a short written memorandum covering mandate, cadence and boundaries, before any work begins. Either side can decline plainly, and I will offer onward references if I am not the right fit.
Background
Writing
Mostly about Canada: where our capital goes, where our talent goes, and the trade corridors we keep leaving on the table. All public, none of it behind a signup.
More regularly: FAST-er, a weekly newsletter on transformation, four years and over 200 issues. Musings, the long-form blog. Everything on X.
Questions people ask before booking
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,” an hour 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.
$250 is a deliberate choice rather than a discount, and it is the same hour whether you are a funded startup or a forty-person manufacturer.
I live and work here, and most Canadian founders and owner-operators will not spend four figures to find out whether an hour is even useful. The people who most need the conversation are usually the ones least able to buy it, and that is a bad way to run a country's business community. $250 is a real price, high enough that we both take the hour seriously, low enough that booking one is a decision you can make on a Tuesday afternoon.
Holding the same rate everywhere keeps it honest globally too. A founder in Lagos or Lahore gets the same hour as one in Toronto. The advice does not get better because your currency is stronger.
No. There is no retainer to be sold into, and the hour is not a qualification call. If more work makes sense I will describe what it would look like and what it would cost, once. If it does not, I will say that too and you will still have your write-up.
You send the request below, you get a booking link and an invoice for the hour, and the session is confirmed once it is paid. 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 hours are paid in cash so that the advice stays independent of whether I want to be on your cap table.
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.
Get started
Choose the track that fits, describe the situation in a few sentences, and you will hear back within one business day, with a booking link and invoice for hourly sessions, or with a time to talk for enterprise mandates.
The more specific you are about what is actually stuck, the more useful the first hour will be. Rough and honest beats polished.
