A full review of how your company runs, and a plan your managers will actually use.
I look at your numbers, how your jobs get done and where your work comes from, then build the plan with your management team and help you put it in place. Coaching works with one owner. This works with the whole team.
When companies call me in
This is for companies with a real management layer — a GM, project managers, estimators, office staff, sometimes a board — from about twenty people and a few million in revenue up to roughly $75 million. Construction and trades come first, because that’s where I’ve spent my working life, but engineering firms, developers, manufacturers and other project-based businesses run into the same problems, and divisions inside larger firms do too. I come to you, anywhere in Canada, and travel is billed at cost. Most of the companies that call me are dealing with some version of these:
- Overhead has grown and profit hasn’t, and margin slips somewhere between the estimate and the final cost.
- Nobody can say which jobs, clients or divisions actually make money until the year-end statements arrive, and by then it’s too late to change anything.
- Procedures live in people’s heads, and new PMs learn by guessing.
- The owners or the board want a plan for next year, a growth plan, or a succession plan.
- Winning work is a grind: tendering at thin margins, trying to move from sub to prime, a weak qualifications package, and no real sales effort.
- Someone wants to buy new software to fix a problem nobody has actually fixed yet.
Coaching is one owner in regular sessions, doing the work between them. Management consulting is the whole management team, across finance, operations and sales, with me leading the analysis and the plan. If you run a smaller company and you’re the one doing the work, the Full Contractor Health Check is the fixed-fee version of this review, and 1-on-1 coaching is where most owners start.
If you’ve been asked to find someone
Some of the calls I get don’t come from the owner. They come from a general manager or a contract analyst who’s been told to go and find some help. If that’s you, send the owner this page and my About page, because between them they cover what I do and who I am. A scoping call is where I hear what’s going on, who’s involved and what the owners want out of it, and I’ll tell you straight if I’m not the right fit. After that you get a written proposal with the scope, the timeline and a fixed fee, which is usually what the owner wants to see before anyone says yes.
How an engagement usually runs
Every company is different, so every engagement is shaped around yours. This is the usual shape.
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01
Discovery and analysis — usually three to four weeks
I start by getting your management team in a room and walking through how a job runs, end to end. It’s the fastest way I know to find the places where five people do the same thing five different ways. Then I sit down one-on-one with every manager, PM, estimator and admin person to hear what’s getting in their way and where they think the company has problems. Those conversations stay confidential: leadership sees the themes, not who said what.
The review typically covers:
- Finances — several years of numbers, your true overhead burden, break-even revenue, where margin leaks between the bid and the actual cost, and which hits were one-time versus ongoing
- Operations — what’s written down versus what lives in people’s heads, procedures, onboarding, and job control
- Sales and business development — where your work comes from, bid results and win rate, which jobs to chase and which to walk away from, your qualifications package, GC relationships, buyers you’re not reaching yet, and your website, branding and marketing
- Software — what you actually need it to do, before anyone looks at a product
It ends with a written findings report and a findings meeting with your management team.
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02
The plan, and putting it to work — usually about two months
The plan gets built with your team in working sessions, not written in my office and dropped on somebody’s desk. Every item gets an owner and a date. Depending on what the review turns up, it can cover operations and job control, your overhead and the revenue you need to carry it, a sales and business development plan, a software short-list and recommendation, succession, and a financial case your owners or board can read, showing what each change costs and what it should return.
Along the way we write the priority procedures with the people who’ll actually use them, and put together a training and onboarding outline for new PMs. On software, I define what you need, build the short-list, sit in on the demos and make a recommendation. The vendor handles setup and training. Once the plan’s delivered, I keep working with your management team in follow-up sessions over Google Meet, with text and email support in between.
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03
Optional — coaching for the leader
Once the plan’s in place, the company’s leader can carry on with 12 weeks of one-on-one coaching to keep it on track. It’s the same coaching program owner-operators use.
A recent engagement
The renovation company that thought it was making 25%
A renovation contractor in the Fraser Valley called me in June last year. Nineteen staff, about six million a year in revenue, forty-odd projects on the go at once — mostly residential renovation, some commercial work, a couple of new builds. The owner’s question was simple: with that much work coming through the door, why wasn’t there any money in the bank at the end of the year?
He believed he was making 25% on his jobs. We went through the financials together and the real number was seven to eight percent. The gap was in the estimating. Every job carried a generic ten or fifteen percent project-management markup, but nobody had ever worked out what the site supervisor actually cost — wages, travel time, the hours between jobs. Once we did, the project-management line was earning two percent on a good job and losing money on a bad one. The only real profit in the company was the ten percent markup on materials. Spread across a whole project that came to six or seven percent, which didn’t cover the overhead. The company wasn’t failing. It was standing still, with forty jobs going at once.
The company wasn’t failing. It was standing still, with forty jobs going at once.
That finding set the rest of the engagement, which ran into the spring.
The estimating process was rebuilt from scratch. The old calculator had the wrong prices in it and not enough detail, and the estimator kept coming in under cost, so he went and I built the new estimate by hand — every job now priced in the real cost of supervision and overhead. Sales was the owner, and the owner was the bottleneck, so we hired a salesperson and he stepped back to being involved instead of being the whole sales department. The company had no brand at all — not even its competitors knew it existed — so we started with the basics: vehicle wraps, shirts and hats for the crews, Instagram, the Google Business Profile, and a first run of Google and Meta ads.
Inside the company there was a binder of SOPs nobody had read. They were abstract, they looked like AI had written them, and most of the staff didn’t know they existed. We kept the few worth keeping and built a way of actually putting them to work. We replaced Buildertrend with JobTread, which fit the company better and cost less, and cut several thousand dollars a month in software and other recurring spending that wasn’t earning its keep. Field leadership was restructured: a project manager promoted from inside, a new site manager hired behind him, and the people who weren’t carrying their jobs let go. A whiteboard went up, and the field staff started meeting monthly to see what was in the pipeline and to tell us what would go wrong on the next job before it was set up — which is the cheapest project-planning tool there is.
I was on every site. We went through the subcontractor list and replaced the ones that were too risky or unreliable, and we pulled the warranty-claim history and changed the processes behind the claims that kept repeating.
What I can say and what I can’t: the rebuilt estimate priced jobs to a margin in the mid-twenties instead of the single digits, and the owner stopped being the only person who could sell a job. The engagement ended in the spring, before a full year of jobs had run through the new numbers, so I don’t have an after-the-fact margin to put here and I won’t invent one. Every consulting engagement I take now includes a 90-day review after the work ends, for exactly that reason.
How I think about this work
Fix it before you grow it. If a quarter of what you do isn’t working and you grow three times bigger, that quarter is three times the problem.
Software comes last. Software laid on top of a problem that isn’t fixed just adds a learning curve.
Nothing goes in the plan that the team won’t use. It’s built with them, so it’s already theirs on the day it’s done.
There are two ways to have more money: make more or spend less. It works best when you do both.
How it’s priced and what’s included
The coaching page publishes its prices. This page doesn’t, because the scope depends on the company: a twenty-person renovation outfit and a two-hundred-person civil contractor don’t need the same work, and one price for both would be wrong for one of them. Tell me about your company and what’s going on, and I’ll come back with a written proposal that spells out the scope, the timeline and a fixed fee. Travel is billed at cost, and all prices are in CAD, plus GST.
Where the work calls for it, I build the thing instead of handing you a recommendation about it. If the estimate is the problem, I build the estimate. If the managers need a meeting rhythm, or the company needs a hiring plan, I set it up with the people who’ll be using it.
Every engagement includes a 90-day review after the work ends. I come back, we look at the same numbers we started with, and you see the before and the after side by side. That’s the only honest way I know to tell whether the work paid for itself.
Common questions.
How is this different from your coaching?
Coaching is one owner in regular sessions, doing the work in between. Management consulting works with your whole management team across finance, operations and sales, and I lead the analysis and the plan. Plenty of companies do both: the plan first, then coaching for the leader to keep it on track.
Are the staff interviews confidential?
Yes. People talk more honestly when they know their name won’t be attached, so leadership sees the themes that come up, not who said what.
Do you set up the software?
No. I work out what you actually need it to do, build the short-list, sit in on the demos and make a recommendation. The vendor you choose handles setup and training.
How long does it take?
Usually three to four weeks of discovery and analysis, then about two months building the plan and putting it to work. The timeline for your company goes in the written proposal.
What kinds of companies do you work with?
Companies with a management layer, from roughly twenty staff up to about $75 million in revenue. Construction and trades come first, but I also work with engineering, development, manufacturing and other project-based companies, anywhere in Canada. If you’re an owner-operator with a smaller crew, 1-on-1 coaching or a diagnostic is usually the better fit.
What does it cost?
It’s priced per engagement after a conversation, because no two companies need the same scope. You’ll get a written proposal with the scope, timeline and fee before anything starts. Prices are in CAD, plus GST.
Do you publish results?
Only ones I measured. Every engagement now ends with a 90-day review so the before and after are both real numbers. The case on this page says plainly what was measured and what wasn’t.
Is the problem more about the people than the process — morale, change, communication? See group coaching →
Start with a scoping call.
Tell me what’s going on in the company. I’ll tell you honestly whether management consulting, group coaching, or something else is the right move.