About me

I love solving problems, and I especially love getting a lot of things done, so I’m a natural at putting things in order and getting things done in the least amount of time. In business parlance, this is called efficiency, but I like the term process, aka how do you make the magic happen? Basically, I help clients identify and streamline their processes.

Process was made for business AND people

I think efficiency gets a bad rap because people get a little too caught up in it and forget that processes should support the people in business, not the other way around. I help you find a process that works for YOU, in YOUR business. I’m a sounding board and a second set of eyes.

Processes, in writing

How do you make the magic happen in your business?
What’s your secret sauce, your competitive advantage?
How do you do the thing you do so well, day after day, client after client?
How do you avoid reinventing the wheel, every time?
How do you explain what you do to your first hire?
I’ll help you identify it, sort & smooth it out, and write it down.

What makes you such a process maven?

Totally fair question! Here’s my story.

From a career in newspapers…

I used to be in the newspaper-printing business (the Calgary Sun, if you must know). I was always kind of freakishly interested in doing mundane, repetitive tasks faster, but the Sun was a forcing ground of finding ways to do the same thing (producing a newspaper) faster and cheaper. Notice how there aren’t many newspapers anymore? Yeah. We were working like madmen in a dying industry to keep profits up and costs down, and every year, the belt got tighter. I was the assistant production manager, which meant I got a lot of flack when the presses went down, and absolutely no praise when things were going well. At the Sun, I learned how to make the most of existing or dwindling resources.

… to slinging on a backpack

With my first career circling the drain, I pocketed the money from selling my house and most of my possessions to go travelling for 1.5 years. No friends – just me for company. It is no exaggeration to say the person I was before I went was replaced with the person who returned. The person who returned said, you need to make some changes, and the first change will be getting a better education. The after-travel me was prepared to be humiliated, and scrape through school if scraping was required. If travel taught me nothing else, it taught me there are multiple ways to solve a problem, and university gave me the framework to think through things.

…to law firms

I started my new career as a legal assistant at the very bottom of the pecking order. The upside to starting at the very bottom is you have nowhere to go but up, nobody values your opinion, and you can safely learn what you need to know from the comfort of the sidelines. I learned the business of law and how some incredibly successful people take a service and make it a marketable product. After a while, I realized that my bizarre basket of skills allowed me to see where an administrative process was going wrong, and what needed to be done to fix it. I can’t tell you any details of what I did, because then I’d have to shoot you, but I realized every organization can use some process tweaking. From my eventual position atop the legal assistant food chain, I got to do some tweaking.

… to today, where small business IS big business

I work with entrepreneurs, who can’t afford not to have a solid process in place. Entrepreneurs are a significant force in the Canadian economy. Did you know that 98% of all businesses in SK are small businesses? Why should all the business process fun be aimed at the 2%?