Questions founders ask before booking the conversation.

We work with founder-led service businesses, typically between $1M and $20M in revenue, where the founder built the company through personal force and is now the bottleneck. Most fall into two camps: professional services firms — accounting practices, consulting firms, agencies — and trades and blue-collar businesses — construction and specific skilled trades. The industry matters less than the structure. The common signal: the business grew because of the founder, and now it can't grow past the founder. If you're under $1M, you probably need traction more than architecture. If you're over $20M with a real executive team in place, you likely need a different conversation than the one we have. Book the conversation if you want us to tell you which side of that line you're on.

Probably not, but the honest answer depends on what's underneath the revenue. If you're at $1M and stalled, you don't need more strategy decks — you need to know where the architecture is broken. That's usually a smaller piece of work than founders expect. The mistake is hiring an advisor before you know the diagnosis. The right first step at any size is the same: a 20-minute conversation where we tell you what we actually see. Book the conversation and we'll tell you whether the work we do fits where you are.

You probably have an architecture problem if you've already tried the marketing tactics and none of them moved the needle. Architecture problems look like marketing problems from the inside — leads slow down, the website feels off, the team can't articulate the offer — but the failure is structural, not tactical. The test: if you replaced your website tomorrow, would the underlying confusion about who you serve and why still be there? If yes, no tactic is going to fix it.

You don't need to be ready. Most founders we work with started the engagement still routing every decision through themselves — that's why they called. The work is the path to readiness, not the prerequisite. What you do need is willingness to look at things you've been avoiding and to act on what we find. If you want a consultant who'll validate what you already think, we're the wrong choice. Book the conversation if you'd rather hear what we actually see.

Two primary engagements. Consulting Plus — strategic advisory across positioning, marketing, sales, and lifetime value, delivered as one-page strategies and implemented in sequence. Executive Coaching — ongoing one-to-one work with the founder, structured around a 90-day goal cadence. Most Consulting Plus engagements begin with an in-person Messaging Workshop as the entry point — the Workshop installs the positioning piece across the founder and leadership team in a single day. Each service has its own page with scope and deliverables.

A single page that captures the strategy for one of the four domains — positioning, marketing, sales, or lifetime value — written specifically for your business. Not a template. Not a 60-page deck nobody reads. One page that the team can hold in their hands and that drives every downstream decision. The constraint is the point: if it doesn't fit on a page, the thinking isn't tight enough yet. The four pages, built in sequence, are what we mean by architecture. Book the conversation to see what one looks like.

No. Marketing is one of the four domains. The mistake most founders make is calling it a marketing problem when the marketing is actually downstream of broken positioning, an absent sales process, or a missing lifetime value system. We work across all four. Some engagements are scoped to one domain; most need at least two. The diagnosis tells us which.

We build the strategy that drives those things and stay through implementation until the system runs — but we don't replace your designer, agency, or in-house team. If you don't have those people, we help you decide whether to hire, contract, or use software for each piece. The work isn't done until the engine runs. That's different from done-for-you and different from coaching. We call it done-alongside-you.

Every engagement starts with an assessment, because good strategy starts with understanding what's working. For Consulting Plus, the work most often begins with an in-person Messaging Workshop — where we install positioning across the founder and leadership team in a single day. From there we move into the relevant one-page strategies and stay through implementation until the system runs. Cadence varies by engagement: Executive Coaching meets every week. Consulting Plus finds a rhythm that fits the business, the founder, and the team. Most Consulting Plus engagements run 6 to 12 months — some last considerably longer. We don't take Consulting Plus work that can't run at least 6 months; architecture doesn't compound in less time. Book the conversation to talk through what your engagement would look like.

A full-time hire is a salary commitment, a management responsibility, and usually a six-to-twelve-month ramp before they're producing strategic work. A fractional advisor — done well — gives you the strategic capacity without the overhead, and starts producing within weeks. The trade-off: you don't get someone in your Slack all day. If you need an operator inside the business, you need a hire. If you need someone who can see the architecture clearly and help you build it, that's the work we do. Most founders need both eventually. The order matters.

Depends on what you mean by results. Clarity — usually within the first month. The team naming who they serve, the founder feeling the fog lift — that's early. Operational shifts — leads moving differently, the founder taking a weekend, the team running a process without you — that's typically three to six months in. Compounding architecture — the kind that changes the business permanently — is a one-to-two year arc. Anyone promising a 90-day transformation is selling you a tactic, not architecture. Book the conversation if you want a realistic timeline for where you actually are.

Yes. We don't replace what's working. If you have a marketing manager, an agency, a CRM, or systems already in place, the engagement starts by understanding what they're doing and where they're stuck. Sometimes the work is helping the existing team execute against a clearer strategy. Sometimes it's identifying where the team is the wrong shape for the work. Either way, the answer comes from diagnosis, not from a default playbook. We bring the architecture. Your team and tools execute it.

Three engagement structures, three formats. The Messaging Workshop is a fixed fee — $12,000 USD, travel inclusive. Consulting Plus runs as a monthly retainer that starts at $3,500 USD and scales with the work the architecture actually needs. Executive Coaching is a monthly retainer at $1,500 USD. Workshops are often the entry point for a Consulting Plus engagement; when that's the path, the Workshop fee is folded into the start of the retainer rather than billed separately. Final scope and fee are set after the conversation. Book a 20-minute working call and we'll talk about what fits the work you actually need.

ROI on architecture is harder to isolate than ROI on a tactic — because the architecture is what makes every tactic work. If positioning is finally clear, every downstream marketing dollar performs better. If the sales process actually exists, every lead converts at a higher rate. If the lifetime value system runs, growth comes from clients you've already paid to acquire. The clearest way to see the math is to look at the alternative: another year on the wrong foundation, with the cost of waiting compounding alongside it. We're happy to look at that calculation with you directly. Book the conversation.

We don't run your day-to-day marketing, manage your team, or replace specialist execution — designers, developers, ad buyers, copywriters. We don't deliver 60-page deliverables that sit on a shelf. We don't sell tools, software, or affiliate relationships. We don't promise specific revenue outcomes — anyone who does is either lying or about to be wrong. What you get is strategic clarity, one-page strategies that drive decisions, and someone who stays in the work until the system runs. Everything else is named explicitly in the proposal and contract.

We commit to outcomes, not guarantees — and we work hard to deliver them. The “no guarantees” line gets misused two ways. Some marketing agencies skip making guarantees because they don't actually believe in their own process. Others make guarantees as a sales pitch and can't follow through. Neither is honesty. Marketing and sales operate in an ever-changing landscape; anyone who promises you a specific number is either lying or about to be wrong. What we will do: stay engaged until the architecture is built and the engine runs. Service doesn't end at strategy — it ends when the system is producing results.

Different work. An agency executes — they build the website, run the ads, manage the channel. A strategic advisor diagnoses what's broken and decides what should be built. Hiring an agency before the strategy is clear is the most common mistake founders make, and it's expensive: you pay them to execute against a strategy that doesn't exist yet, then blame them when it doesn't work. The right sequence is strategy first, then execution. Sometimes the same firm can do both. Most can't. Book the conversation if you're not sure which you need.

A coach helps you think more clearly about decisions you're already making. An advisor tells you what they see and brings strategy you don't have. Both are useful. They're not the same thing. If you want someone to ask better questions and hold you accountable, you want coaching. If you want someone to diagnose what's broken in the business and help you build what's missing, you want advisory. We do both — but they're different engagements with different scopes. The Executive Coaching page is for the first. The Consulting Plus page is for the second.

Most consultants arrive with a system. A proven process. A framework they've applied to hundreds of businesses before yours, and a confident promise that it'll work for you too. We arrive with a question — because the architecture problem is different in every business, and the gap between where you are and where you could be is always in a slightly different place. If you want to be told what worked elsewhere, hire someone with a process. If you want to be told what's actually happening in your business, that's the work we do. Book the conversation if you want to see the difference.

That's most of our clients. They've been through the proven processes, the frameworks, the playbooks — and they're still stuck because the playbook was built for someone else's business. The diagnosis tells us why the previous work didn't move the needle. Often it's because it was tactical work bolted onto a broken foundation. Sometimes it's because the strategy was right and the execution stalled. Either way, naming what actually happened is the first piece of the next engagement. Book the conversation and we'll tell you what we see.

Based in Manitoba, Canada, working with clients across North America, Europe, and South America. Most of the work is remote — weekly working sessions over video, async between. The Messaging Workshop is in-person by design; we travel to the client for that one. Consulting Plus and Executive Coaching engagements include in-person sessions when they materially improve the work, but the default is remote. Travel costs for in-person work are scoped in the proposal.

Yes — and beyond. The practice is genuinely international. Clients are based across Canada, the United States, Europe, and South America. Cross-border engagements are straightforward: contracts are written under Canadian jurisdiction, and we invoice in the client's currency — CAD for Canadian clients, USD for US and most international clients, EUR for European clients when that's preferred. It's a logistical detail, not a question.

You own everything built specifically for your business — positioning, messaging, the one-page strategies, and any documents produced during the engagement. The Four Frameworks methodology and Narrative Messaging framework are Van Dycke's; you're licensed to use them inside your business indefinitely. The distinction matters: we bring the methodology, you keep the work product built for you. Specifics are written into the proposal and contract.

Cleanly. Every engagement has defined scope and a clear exit — either at the end of the project, at a defined off-ramp, or with 30 days' notice on retainers. We don't lock founders into long contracts. The one rule we hold: if we start an engagement, we stay through implementation until the system runs. Walking away mid-build is how strategy becomes a document on a shelf, and we won't do that. If something isn't working, we name it and decide together — that's part of the work.

The Four Frameworks is the diagnostic model underneath every Van Dycke engagement — Positioning, Marketing, Sales, and Lifetime Value, built in sequence because each depends on the one before it. Underneath the four is a single through-line: trust. Positioning designs for trust. Marketing builds it. Sales is where trust gets invested. Lifetime Value is where trust gets leveraged. The frameworks aren't a checklist — they're the diagnostic structure for naming what's broken and what to build, in what order.

A brand messaging framework built on story architecture — the underlying narrative shape that makes a brand recognisable, repeatable, and memorable. Every Van Dycke client engagement uses Narrative Messaging at the positioning layer. It's also available as a standalone framework for teams who already have positioning clarity but need to install the narrative across their messaging. The Messaging Workshop is the fastest way to apply it.

Because the established methodologies were built for someone else's business and turned into formulas the original authors would no longer recognise. The Four Frameworks and Narrative Messaging exist because the work we do — diagnostic-first, founder-led, architecture-level — didn't fit cleanly into anything already on the shelf. We'd rather use the tool we built for this work than borrow one that wasn't. That doesn't mean we dismiss other methodologies — it means we use the one designed for this.