The Work.
WHERE WE FOCUS TOGETHER.
Leadership Development
I believe our future, both in life and at work, largely depends on our ability to lead. Leadership has evolved into a management philosophy, but it encompasses much more than that. It is the challenge of fully realizing your potential in all aspects of your life. When collaborating with others, the goal is to cultivate not only your potential but also that of the entire team, group, company, or organization. When we discuss leadership, we are striving to create something truly leaderful.
Strategic Transformation
Change is inevitable. The real question is: are you prepared for it? Or, more importantly, are you actively contributing to it? The standard mode of operation is to develop strategies, write plans, and measure our progress against them. I don’t think this is enough. We need to cultivate the ability to think strategically at all times and make decisions with a strategic mindset — then embed that capability in the culture of your organization and aligned with stakeholders, fostering a proactive real-time approach to change.
Operationalizing Growth
Growth is a process, not a goal. To ensure growth is not only possible but sustainable, it needs to live in your organization’s culture — through a shared mindset and continuous learning. Leaderful companies create safety to cultivate a growth mindset that embraces challenges, learns from failures, and views setbacks as opportunities. Operationalizing growth means embedding a mindset of exploration and adaptability throughout the organization, so growth becomes a way of thinking that drives every action and decision.
Operating Principles.
HOW I WORK.
Three ideas that sit underneath everything I do with individuals, teams, and companies.
METACOGNITION
Foundational to the work I do is the reality that we each have a capability to be metacognitive. Most people are unconscious to it, but to be good at it takes awareness and, more importantly, practice. In order to reach our highest level of relational potential — in life and at work — we need to evolve, by practicing metacognition.
RELATIONAL POTENTIAL
Your relational potential is the total capability you have to be in relationships. This is the unique combination of experience, skill, and genetics that informs your ability to relate to others. When you take into consideration what you know about yourself — and how you interact with others — you have a baseline for growth.
THE WORK PROCESS
When I work with you, the first thing we begin doing is separating the relationships from the work process. We discuss how we can best build relational potential — within yourself, your team, your company — as something discrete and shared. By definition, the work process is everything else. Think of the relationships as “being” and the work process as “doing.”
Experience.
THREE DECADES OF LEADING AND BUILDING.
Over the past three decades, I have worked with more than 60 companies, helping hundreds of leaders navigate growth, change, and complexity. More than 90% experienced significant growth during my involvement, including two companies recognized among Canada's fastest-growing businesses in the Deloitte Fast 50.
My work has included leading multiple public and private companies as CEO and COO. I have also worked as the key advisor to Founders, the C suite and boards supporting multiple venture-backed companies, culminating in more than $100 million in mergers & acquisitions, venture capital investments, and private equity transactions. I led the training of business advisors across British Columbia through Innovate BC, all with the goal of helping organizations build the relationships and capabilities needed to thrive.
Through it all, one lesson has remained remarkably consistent:
The quality of relationships within an organization often determines the potential of the outcomes.
Whether the challenge appears strategic, operational, cultural, or financial, there is almost always a relational dimension impacting the outcome.
This realization became the foundation of my work.
About.
PRACTICING RELATIONAL POTENTIAL.
Team. Band. Company. When everyone finds their spot and plays their part, harmony is inevitable.
I have been building teams since I was a kid. There is nothing I love more than putting a band together too. When everyone finds their spot, plays their part, harmony is inevitable. I have been approaching business in the same way for a long time. Pretty early on I developed awareness that the outcome of an opportunity would be largely dependent on the people who were attempting it — team, band, or company.
So for decades now, I have been obsessing with what makes great teams. In a word: relationships. The relationships are the glue that holds everything together. Each individual has what I call relational potential — their ability to relate at an optimal level, for who they uniquely are.
If I ask a room full of people to raise their hands if they think they are living up to their relational potential, I get very few hands raised — if any. Why is that? I think it is because most people don’t really understand it. So if I were to tell you about myself, I would say that I am practicing living up to my relational potential. As it turns out, this is an increasingly useful and important way of being and leading. My mission is to share it.
Before we talk about working together, it may be useful to understand how I work.
Past Clients & Testimonials.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
Working alongside Colin has been one of the highlights of my career. He has an incredible gift for connecting people, seeing potential in others and bringing clarity to even the most complex challenges. What I've always admired most is his character. Colin leads with humility, integrity and genuine compassion. He builds trust naturally because people know he cares, not just about results, but about people. His decisions are always grounded in doing what's right and he's constantly looking for ways to create a positive impact on his team, his customers and the world around him. Colin is the kind of leader you hope to work with and learn from. I have no doubt that anyone who partners with him or is coached by him will come away stronger, more confident and better equipped to lead with purpose.
Elton Pereira
SureSwift Capital Inc
Colin helped me make one of the most important shifts of my leadership journey—from operator to leader. What I didn't expect was that the path there began with myself. Through our work together, I came to understand that self-respect isn't a soft concept; it's the foundation everything else is built on. That realization changed how I show up for myself, my team, my company, and the mission I'm building toward. If you're an emerging leader ready to do the real work, Colin is the person you want in your corner.
Anita Pawluk
CEO, RaceRocks
Colin has a rare ability to help a founder turn a cloud of competing thoughts into a clear path forward. I worked with him during a demanding period of building a startup, and he helped me get sharper on what we were building, how to communicate it, and how to bring the team back into alignment. He combines strategic clarity, emotional intelligence, and genuine care in a way that is hard to find. He is generous with his time, thoughtful with his connections, and deeply committed to helping leaders do their best work.
Aaron Samsonoff
Founding Partner, CTR.com
Colin is one of those rare people who makes everyone around him better. He came into Cognito Health when we were a struggling startup and helped us grow into a mature, smooth-running business, but what I value most is what he did for the people in it. He accelerated my growth as a leader and brought my whole team up alongside me. Colin's real gift is that he sees the relationships beneath the work and builds those first, so the results take care of themselves. If you or your company are ready for its next chapter, start with Colin.
Armon Arani
Founder and CEO at Cognito Health
Colin is smart, matter of fact and creative. He has made considerable contributions to our portfolio companies.
Owen Matthews
Chairman, Alacrity Canada; General Partner, Wesley Clover
Colin was an early advisor when my startup was a prototype with early market validation. His guidance gave my team and I an important confidence boost in our product-market fit, from his experience as a strategic business builder. Colin was also instrumental in connecting us with our CTO and the broader business and investor community. He is a great sounding board for professional development.
Graeme Csath
CoFounder, CoVault
I've worked with Colin for over twenty-five years, across multiple businesses and ventures at various stages of their growth. We have co-founded companies, scaled teams, raised significant capital, navigated crises and success, and rebuilt software organizations under pressure. What's remained consistent is Colin's rare ability to see the whole landscape – combining strategic clarity with a humane understanding of its impact on people. Colin knows how to turn a dream into a strategy and a strategy into an operational plan. Colin can intuit the business opportunities, the team dynamics, the leadership gaps, and create a practical path from intent to execution. He is great at building vision, attracting the right people, and aligning them around that vision. Colin is a builder, a challenger, a mentor, and a genuinely decent human being.
John Harley
Retired Software Guru