Strategy, elegantly facilitated and thoughtfully articulated.

I work with management teams who still believe in profit, positive cash flow and earnings per share, and for organizations seeking to align strategy with stakeholders and employee behaviours. A no-nonsense approach. Smart tenets, developed from scratch. Straightforward business math, linked to your P&L. And plain language to express it all.

Strategies flop for lots of reasons. Rarely, it is about poor reads of macroeconomics and missed pivots and similar. Most strategies run off-course from the outset, with politics and emotions and loyalties getting in the way. These are strategy killers, creating manipulations and dangerous interpretations of the facts. We will stay disciplined, and get professionally to the finish line.

Organizations also often believe they struggle with getting the facts – market sizes, shares, and the like. My experience is different, it is telling the truth which is actually the hard part. An unwillingness to address, factually and objectively, poor decision making/ weak performance/ inadequate or incorrect analyses/ internal gripes and turf wars. Embracing the truth is critical or we will get nowhere. We will tell the truth and get to the heart of the matter.

And then we come to resource questions. Most of the questions, in the end, we face are resource-related: should we increase the budget or decrease the budget? When and how should we launch the product – actually, should we launch it at all? How should we cut costs to protect margins? The shoulds…difficult decisions. The answers are often not straightforward, and require perspective and constructs. Context before strategy, strategy before structure, structure before resources…a good guide for frames which we will build together to help make better decisions.

Mark is a skilled facilitator known for framing problems with precision and a hard-nosed approach in the room. A recognized subject matter expert on corporate strategy, strategic planning, growth strategy, and re-branding, Mark brings to his clients big ideas, sound fundamentals and a track record of transformation leading to double & triple digit improvements.

Mark has worked with large, global clients with boots-on-the-ground experience in Canada, the US, the UK, Mexico, Brazil and China – as well as with private companies, industry associations, NGOs and Governments. More importantly, he has sat in the chair. In addition to his current work with MHC, Mark owns a high growth local food business and previously held positions as an Executive Director at a Business School, CMO at a National Sports Organization, Partner at a Management Consultancy, and Head of Strategic Planning at an Agency. His coaching tree includes alumni now working at: McKinsey, BCG, Ideo, Uber, Bain Capital, and Google, among others.

Mark’s current mandates include acting as an Advisor at The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, sitting on the board of the publicly traded BIGG Digital Assets in Vancouver, and building out the corporate structure of the Canadian conglomerate BW Intl.