I advise a select group of founders, CEOs and boards navigating growth, transformation and strategic change.
Next Phase Advisory is my platform for working directly with a select group of founders, CEOs and boards navigating growth, transformation or an important strategic decision. I take on only a handful of engagements at a time — bringing the perspective of someone who has built, scaled, sold and reinvented businesses from the operator's seat.
I am an operator first. I have spent twenty-seven years building consumer businesses: WATCH IT!, which I owned outright and grew to more than thirty stores and $30 million in system-wide sales; Spiritleaf, which reached 100+ locations and a $131 million exit; and a public company through restructuring. My work is running companies, and my intention is to run one for the next decade.
I work with people I find interesting on problems I understand. When an engagement calls for depth beyond my own, I bring in specialists I have worked with and trust. The engagements are short and defined, and I only take work where I have done the thing being asked about.
It keeps me close to good operators and honest about what is actually working right now.
Building a consumer brand and deciding whether to franchise, raise, or scale the hard way.
Running a multi-unit or franchise system that has stalled somewhere between proof and scale.
Weighing a strategy reset, a succession question, or whether the business is ready to be sold.
Private equity and family offices assessing a consumer or multi-unit business before or after they own it.
Working with directors on the questions that sit above management: whether the strategy still holds, whether the leadership team is the right one, and what the board should be asking for. I have sat in the seat that answers to a board and the seat that reports to one, on both the TSX-V and the CSE.
The work I know best: turning one good location into a system other people will fund. Model design, unit economics a franchise partner will underwrite, national rollout, brand and merchandising, and the operating discipline that holds a system together past the first fifty units.
Most businesses are sold on the story they can prove, not the one they can tell. I have taken two companies through public markets and led one to a $131 million acquisition. The work here is getting the numbers, the systems and the narrative into a condition that survives diligence.
I speak at conferences across North America on building consumer brands, franchising, and what it is actually like to lead a public company through both growth and contraction. Plainly, with the parts that did not work left in. I also emcee and host — conferences, fundraisers and not-for-profit galas, including events with former heads of government and national figures on the program.
If you have something specific in mind, tell me what it is and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person.
I reply to every direct message personally. If you are running an executive search rather than an advisory engagement, that conversation is here.