Who you're actually talking to.

I started in inside sales at Kal Tire, then cold called as a business development rep at SiteDocs, then ran enterprise sales development at Vendasta. I've been the person handed a number and a list with no system behind it. So when we set a target together, it's one a real person can hit on an ordinary Tuesday, not one that only works in a forecast.

Before software I spent four years running a commercial truck rental branch: hourly staff, a physical fleet, customers who arrive at 7am already behind. That's where I learned that a process nobody owns falls apart the first busy week, and that your team will tell you exactly where it breaks if you ask them the right question.

Most of the last decade has been hiring, coaching, rebuilding and sometimes letting go of teams, up to director level at SiteDocs and Harvard Media, and most recently at Hypelocal. That's why the people and accountability work isn't a framework I picked up. It's the part of the job I've been judged on, and the part I'm proudest of.

Harvard Media is a 120-year-old radio group in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and I was part of the leadership team through their move to digital-first. As Director of Growth I oversaw customer success and training operations, along with parts of revenue operations. The lesson I carry from it: an established business doesn't have to be torn down to sell differently. You build new offerings on top of what already works, and every one of them has to fix a real problem for the person or company on the other end. And your people have to believe in the change, not just be told about it. If the team doing the work doesn't think it's worth making, it happens reluctantly or not at all.

I've spent years on the partnership and channel side, where growth is supposed to come from other people's customers. Done properly it beats every other channel on return, and I've watched it happen twice: the channel work at Locafy became one of the biggest revenue drivers behind their IPO, and the partnerships I led at SiteDocs returned more than any other revenue channel there. At Hypelocal I managed partnerships with platforms like Notion, HubSpot and Zapier. Most of it is relationship work and follow through, and most partner deals die quietly for lack of both. If your next number has to come from partners or a new channel, we'll build it around what partners actually do, not what the pitch deck promises.

At Hypelocal I ran growth and operations alongside CEOs and owners, and the clients we worked with generated more than $600M in revenue and 40,000+ qualified leads. That's where I learned to tell the difference between automation that saves your team hours and automation that just moves the mess somewhere else.