Operational systems for small businesses.
Operational systems for small businesses.
I'm John. I bring structure to the parts of a business that tend to fray as it grows: how decisions get made, how work gets coordinated, and how it all stays coherent.
The work is hands-on—built inside businesses, alongside the real work, starting where the friction actually is. My approach developed most directly out of my work with Michel's Bespoke, a founder-led tailoring business where I built the operational backbone from scratch—orders, pricing, client records, automations, reporting. It started with a simple invoicing problem and expanded from there, focused on freeing the business from time spent reconstructing orders, updating spreadsheets, and searching files so they could focus on the craft and the clients.
Earlier, I worked in innovation and design roles inside large organizations (IGM Financial, Ontario Lottery & Gaming, and TC Media). The problems were similar in principle: translating what a business was trying to do into systems and routines that could actually be adopted across complex, cross-functional environments. The difference was mostly scale and politics.
Across both contexts, the through line is the same: make implicit things explicit—routines, priorities, information—so teams spend less time chasing loose threads and more time on the work that moves things forward. Once something is explicit, it can be examined, discussed, and improved. The sensitive part is changing how it runs without distorting what it is.
I didn't come to this work through "operations" as a defined discipline, but by exploring adjacent ones. My graduate thesis on design methodology led me to years in design research and strategy, building knowledge systems, experience architecture, and practice guides before any of it had an operational label on it.
That background shapes how I approach the work now: not as optimization for its own sake, but as something contextual—grounded in how the business actually runs, not how it's supposed to run on a diagram.
I'm a backyard tinkerer, with two old cars I maintain as drivers and ongoing projects. The '89 Mustang is simple, modular, and well-documented—like a full-scale Lego kit. I've touched nearly every part, having taken it down to a bare shell, swapped the complete drivetrain, and mixed parts between different trims. The '98 Range Rover is the opposite: less common, more finicky, and surrounded by a culture of esoteric knowledge and partial solutions that embrace character over performance. Some systems respond to structure, others resist it—both are worked through piece by piece.
My background spans engineering, design, and business: MBA, University of Toronto (Investment Banking / Innovation & Entrepreneurship); MDes, Carleton University (Interdisciplinary Design); BScE, Queen's University (Mechanical Engineering).