Execution diagnostic
I map your portfolio against the strategy and name the few initiatives that are real, and the ones quietly burning capacity.
Operating consultancy · Calgary, Alberta
Strategy descends.
Strategy descends.
Execution ascends.
I embed with your leadership team for a fixed window and execute the work the strategy deck has been promising. I have spent two decades turning strategy into delivered software, integrated acquisitions, and teams that run themselves.
How I work
An organization is one system. It only changes as one.
Send the teams on training and their managers keep asking for the old reports. Coach the executives and nothing changes in the standup. As departments optimize their work to support their own needs, they force information up a hierarchy and further away from the execution, slowing decision-making and creating friction. I work all four layers together.
01
Delivery teams
I work the cadence, the backlog, and the technical practices in the flow of your delivery rather than in a classroom, so the team sees what good looks like on their own work.
02
Managers
The work here is what to stop doing, as much as what to start. Most managers inherited a control model and were never handed a replacement, so I build the replacement with them on live work.
03
Individual leaders
This is one to one, and candid. Usually the conversation is about the thing being avoided: the initiative nobody will kill, the role that isn't working, the decision that keeps getting deferred.
04
Senior leadership
At this layer the work is decision rights and the cadence above the teams. Where a decision gets made sets the pace for everything under it, and most of the delay I find is a team waiting on a yes.
Execution leakage
Coordination friction has a price. Almost nobody has put a number on it.
Take a B2B SaaS company with 220 employees and $60M in ARR, spending at the industry benchmark. Decisions are taking longer and each one needs another meeting, because people and departments lack context across the whole of execution. The waiting, and the handoffs and coordination around it, is execution leakage: lost opportunity cost.
5–30%
of a week goes to waiting, handoffs, and coordination rather than the work itself, depending on where someone sits.
$4–6M
a year at this size, or 8 to 20% of salary expense. Call about half of it recoverable.
Those figures come from a model I built on stated assumptions, not from a client's books. Change the assumptions to match your organization and the arithmetic follows. What matters is the order of magnitude, and that it usually sits outside anyone's reporting. Find where the friction is and you can point that capacity back at work customers actually pay for.
Engagements
Two ways to start. Both of them end.
01
12-week embedded bootcamp.
This is for a team standing up or resetting. I run a formal kickoff, build the backlog with the team, and establish the system of work from scratch. The exit is milestone-gated, so you know at the start what has to be true for me to leave.
02
Evolutionary coaching engagement.
This is for a team already in operation that cannot stop to transform, so there is no cutover, no work stoppage, and no kickoff. It runs in three phases: I observe quietly, intervene in small ways, then reinforce and fade. The exit is based on demonstrated capability rather than a date.
03
What you keep when I go.
You keep a Current-State System of Work Map, a prioritized improvement list, the coaching log, a practice adoption scorecard, an exit readiness assessment, and a handoff brief. Your team should be able to run the cadence from those without calling me.
Where this applies
The work I get called in for.
Strategy to operating plan
I turn a multi-year strategy into fiscal operating plans teams can deliver against. I did this as Managing Director of Strategy for a $50B bank's technology and engineering group.
Embedded delivery leadership
I stand up and run delivery teams in-house, then hand the cadence back. As Managing Director of Agile Delivery at a $50B bank I ran a 27-person team across consumer banking, core platforms, and crisis response.
M&A integration
I integrate acquisitions end to end: people, technology, and operations, then capture the synergies the deal was priced on. As Senior Manager of M&A Integration at a B2B SaaS company I ran a $200M cross-border deal that doubled the subscriber base.
Agile transformation
I bootstrap teams from zero to shipping. As a delivery advisor with Ernst & Young I launched and trained an organization's first Agile team inside 10 weeks.
Operating-model evolution
I rebuild how the work flows: shared services, portfolio management, and forecasting that makes the next budget honest.
180,000
users on a new banking app within its first month. Rating climbed 1.3 to 4.4
$1B+
in CEBA relief delivered to over 20,000 businesses on a platform shipped in 3 days
6 wks
new time-to-first-value, cut from six months by reworking the delivery process
Results from roles at ATB Financial, Veriforce, and Ernst & Young.
Two decades of work people relied on
Contact
Tell me what's stuck.
Send me the initiative that isn't moving. Within a week I'll tell you whether I can help, what an engagement looks like, and what it costs. I don't do proposal theatre.