Equip Your Team: Practical Resources

It depends on the service. Compliance advisory engagements typically run six to ten weeks. Strategic sourcing takes eight to twelve weeks — longer if you have more than twenty vendor relationships to assess. Process optimization is usually six to eight weeks for the analysis and redesign phase, with implementation support extending another four to six weeks. Staff training is the shortest: most programs are designed and delivered within three to four weeks of kickoff.

Yes. While our office is in Mississauga and most of our clients are in the Greater Toronto Area, we regularly work with organizations across Ontario and occasionally in other provinces. Remote delivery works well for compliance advisory and training. For process optimization and sourcing, we typically recommend at least some on-site time — especially during the initial assessment phase — so geography is a factor we discuss upfront.

We use fixed-scope agreements for the vast majority of engagements. That means you know the total cost before we begin. If something changes mid-project that would alter the scope (and therefore the cost), we raise it immediately and get written approval before proceeding. We learned this the hard way — as a client, not a consultant. Ballooning budgets with no warning was one of the experiences that motivated David to start this firm. We price based on the complexity of the engagement, not by the hour, because hourly billing creates a perverse incentive to work slowly.

Possibly, and we will be direct about that. Our services are designed for mid-market organizations — typically 50 to 500 employees — because the operational complexity at that scale is where our methodology delivers the most value. That said, we have worked with smaller firms (particularly those growing rapidly or preparing for regulatory scrutiny) and the engagement can still make sense. The honest answer is: reach out and we will tell you quickly whether we are the right fit. If not, we are usually able to point you toward someone better suited to your size.

Every engagement includes a sixty-day follow-up check-in at no additional cost. After that, we offer retainer arrangements for clients who want ongoing advisory support — typically in compliance, where the regulatory landscape changes frequently. But our stated goal is to make ourselves unnecessary. That is why we invest so heavily in the training component: we want your internal team to sustain the improvements without depending on us quarter after quarter. About 40 percent of our clients do retain us for ongoing work, but it is always by choice, not by dependency.

Three things, concretely. First, the person you meet during the sales conversation is the person who leads your project — we do not hand off to junior staff after the contract is signed. Second, we use fixed-scope pricing instead of hourly billing, which aligns our incentive with finishing efficiently rather than stretching the engagement. Third, we are sixteen people, and we are honest about that. We cannot serve fifty clients simultaneously, so we are selective about the engagements we accept. The trade-off is that every client gets senior attention. If that matters more to you than a big-firm brand name on the report cover, we are likely a good fit.