Strategic planning for companies in every province and territory

West Coast

British Columbia companies often plan around two very different climates inside one province. A firm with crews or customers on the southwest coast faces wet, mild winters, while operations in the Interior or the North deal with longer, colder seasons, and an operating budget that treats the province as one block will be wrong for half the year.

Our British Columbia page covers how we split targets by sub-region, how we handle a team spread between the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and the Okanagan, and which provincial offices are worth knowing when the plan includes new entities or new hiring.

Prairies

On the Prairies, winter is a planning input, not background. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba all have long cold seasons, and owners whose revenue follows outdoor work or construction usually need a budget with an honest shoulder season rather than twelve equal months.

• Alberta: two large metro centres a few hours apart, which shapes how leadership teams meet and how targets are split.
• Saskatchewan: wide distances between centres, so offsite logistics and online review cadence carry more weight.
• Manitoba: a province where one city holds most of the market, which makes concentration risk a natural scenario to model.

Central Canada

Ontario and Quebec sit side by side, yet the planning questions we meet in each differ sharply. In Ontario the common issue is footprint: a company in the Greater Toronto Area deciding whether Ottawa, Hamilton or London belongs in the three-year plan. In Quebec the plan must also treat French-language obligations as a costed item.

See the Ontario page for multi-city sequencing and the 13% HST, and the Quebec page for how we build language work, GST and QST into the plan. We give no legal advice on language rules; we make sure your plan budgets time and money for the work your advisers confirm.

Atlantic Canada

Atlantic companies tend to be smaller and more relationship-driven, and their plans benefit from fewer, sharper priorities. The four provinces share a maritime climate that moves the busy season, and three of them charge 15% HST while Nova Scotia charges 14%, which matters when you compare quotes or price across provincial lines.

• New Brunswick: bilingual service decisions, and three mid-sized cities competing for attention.
• Nova Scotia: Halifax concentration versus growth outside it.
• Prince Edward Island: small-market planning where one large customer can change the year.
• Newfoundland and Labrador: an island and a mainland region with very different operating conditions.

The North

In Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, logistics and seasonality dominate the operating plan. Travel windows, long cold winters and small labour pools mean that a plan's hiring line and its delivery timeline need wider buffers than anywhere in the south.

Our territories page covers all three, including Nunavut's Inuktut requirements for businesses, which a plan should treat as a standing operating cost rather than a one-time project.

How we work across Canada

Wherever you are, an engagement runs the same way: a free initial conversation, a short written proposal, interviews and data gathering, a facilitated session, and a plan document with a one-page summary and a scorecard. The three-year strategic plan is usually the anchor, with the quarterly strategy review keeping it current.

Meeting formats

• Online video sessions for interviews, drafting reviews and most quarterly reviews. These work well for teams spread over several time zones.
• In-person sessions for leadership offsites and board strategy days, held in your city or at a venue your team chooses. See leadership offsite facilitation.
• Phone, text and email between sessions for quick questions and document turnarounds.

Time zones

We are on Pacific time, which means a 9 a.m. session in Halifax starts at 5 a.m. in Vancouver. In practice we schedule eastern sessions for late morning their time and western ones for the afternoon, and offsite days follow your local clock.

Fees and tax

Fees follow the published consulting rates on our pricing page, in Canadian dollars. Tax is added on top based on your province: GST or HST in most of Canada, and GST together with QST in Quebec. The rate for each region is listed on its own page, using the Canada Revenue Agency rate tool as our reference.

A worked example of regional splits

Say a company with $6 million in revenue operates in two provinces, with $4.2 million from the first and $1.8 million from the second. A plan that sets one company-wide growth target of 10% hides the real question: should the smaller region grow faster to justify its overhead? We usually set separate targets, for example 7% and 17%, which still produce roughly 10% overall ($4.49 million plus $2.11 million is about $6.6 million). The board then sees which region carries the growth and can fund it accordingly.

If you would like to talk through your own footprint, see how a first conversation works or read the guide to writing a three-year strategic plan.