Between executive mandates, I selectively advise a small number of founders, CEOs and boards navigating growth, transformation and strategic change.
Next Phase Advisory is a personal advisory platform — not a firm, and not a business I am building.
I am an operator first. I have spent twenty-seven years building consumer businesses: WATCH IT!, Spiritleaf, and a public company through restructuring. My work is running companies, and my intention is to run one for the next decade.
Between mandates, I take on a handful of engagements at a time with people I find interesting and problems I understand. There is no team, no pipeline and no growth plan. 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. That is the whole reason it exists.
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 and moderate 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.
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.