Evidence, Marked for What It Is.

Mission35 Mortgages

Canadian mortgage organisation · ~70 agents · 50+ lenders · national expansion underway

Built a custom in-house AI intake that hands brokers a prepared conversation, and repositioned ~70 agents from brokers to mortgage strategists.

The situation. Mission35 had an established service reputation and was expanding nationally, which created an immediate need for repeatable distribution, stronger agent development and real visibility into performance across a growing network.

What we built. Direct customer focus groups to find what was actually preventing confident mortgage inquiries, and a website rebuilt around those findings rather than around the brokerage's own org chart. A custom in-house AI intake that helps clients clarify what they want to discuss before they inquire, handing the broker a better-prepared conversation. Employer-benefits and agent-partner distribution designed as reinforcing growth engines. Management intelligence that detects constraints, recommends interventions and measures the result.

The AI intake. A custom system, not a chatbot on a contact form. A mortgage is a decision most people make once or twice in a lifetime, and they arrive unsure what they are even allowed to ask. The intake helps a client organise what they want to discuss, then hands the broker that context before the call. Discovery time drops on both sides of the conversation.

The repositioning. Agents were repositioned from brokers to mortgage strategists. Most brokerages sell transactions, but the client is making one of the largest capital decisions of their life, usually with nobody connecting it to anything else they own. The product is the same. What is being sold is not.

How lead flow tripled. Three things compounded. First, differentiation: the focus groups showed that clients were not comparing brokerages on rate — they were unsure what they were allowed to ask, and every brokerage website answered a question nobody was asking. Rebuilding the site around those findings, and repositioning agents as mortgage strategists rather than brokers, gave Mission35 a position none of its competitors were occupying. Second, the AI intake removed the friction at the top of the funnel: people who would not have filled in a contact form will organise their thoughts with a guide, so inquiries that previously never happened started arriving. Third, the employer-benefits and agent-partner channels opened distribution that did not depend on walk-in demand. Weekly lead volume rose from an average of seven to 21 over the engagement.

Close rates. The same work lifted the back half of the funnel. Because the intake hands the agent a prepared conversation — what the client wants, what they own, what they are worried about — discovery time drops and the first call starts where a third call used to. Management reports close rates rising from roughly 35% to 40% of prepared conversations over the engagement. More leads, and a higher share of them converting, is what makes the lead-flow figure worth having: volume without conversion is just cost.

Client-reported   The lead-volume figure (seven to 21 weekly) and the close-rate figure (roughly 35% to 40%) are reported on the owner's direct observation. We have not reviewed source reports or financial statements. A three-month window in mortgage overlaps a seasonal swing and sits on a small base, so we are measuring both figures to a full twelve months before treating them as evidence. Lead quality, attribution and funded conversion are the proof layer after that.

Taylor Moving & Storage / Taylor International

Operating business · household goods relocation · domestic, cross-border and international

A quality control system behind 40% of the industry’s top-rated awards, plus a self-pack revenue line that lowers the customer’s price without lowering the margin.

• 40% Of the Industry’s Top-Rated Awards Management-reported
• 98% Customer Satisfaction Management-reported

Quality control. A quality system built around the points in a move where things actually go wrong: planning risk, crew guidance at the point of work, exception visibility before a job fails rather than after, and feedback that closes back into the next move. In a category where every competitor claims care, the difference is whether care is a value or a procedure. Taylor Moving holds a disproportionate share of the industry’s top-rated awards, and the quality system is a large part of why.

Industry contribution. Separately from service awards, the company has been recognised for work improving the industry’s own value proposition and addressing problems shared across it. That is a different kind of credential from doing your own job well, and it is harder to buy.

A cheaper option at the same margin. Most movers win price-sensitive work by discounting, which buys volume with profit. Instead we built a self-pack option supported by software: photo-based inventory, box-count guidance and packing instruction, with the labour moving to the customer rather than the margin moving to the customer. The result is a lower price point that earns the same margin percentage as full service, and it captures moves that would otherwise have gone to a cheaper competitor or a rental truck. Every move is priced at the tier where it performs best rather than the tier the customer can barely afford.

International without new locations. An asset-light model covering both corporate and self-paying international moves. Sales, customer ownership, coordination, technology and quality standards stay in-house; qualified partners supply variable origin and destination capacity. It lets the company win international work in new markets without opening a facility or running a fleet in any of them — expansion funded by partner relationships rather than by capital expenditure.

Operations. Non-value-added coordination, document chasing and manual procurement mapped and designed out, so scarce people spend their time on planning and execution rather than on chasing information that already exists somewhere in the business. Hiring and workforce systems built around paid orientation, coaching and progression, so scarce labour becomes more capable rather than simply more loaded.

Demand. A digital growth system aimed at higher-value long-distance, cross-border, international and corporate relocation rather than volume at any margin. Over the same period management reports that lead flow tripled, during a stretch when the housing market was frozen and corporate relocation volume had stalled. Growth while the underlying market contracts is a stronger signal than growth while it expands, because the market is not doing the work — but that figure is being restated against dated source data before we lean on it.

How lead flow tripled. The mechanism was differentiation, not spend. Most movers compete on the same claim — careful crews, fair price — so the buyer chooses on whoever answers the phone cheapest. The quality system and the award record let the company take a stronger position: the mover with a procedure behind its promises, aimed at the long-distance, cross-border and corporate work where that proof matters most. The self-pack option then widened the funnel at the other end, capturing price-sensitive moves that used to go to a rental truck, at the same margin percentage as full service. Two entry points, one for the top of the market and one for the bottom, both feeding the same operation.

Close rates. Management reports close rates rising from 33% to 39% over the same period. The driver is the same as at Mission35: better-prepared conversations. Photo-based inventory and structured intake mean the estimator already knows the job before the first call, and the quality record does the convincing that a discount used to do — so a higher share of inquiries convert without buying the work on price.

Client-reported   The award share, the satisfaction figure, the lead-flow figure and the close-rate figure (33% to 39%) are management-reported and are being restated against dated source records before we make them load-bearing. Award names, issuing bodies and years are being confirmed for publication. The self-pack revenue line is built and in rollout; its margin effect is modelled on current pricing rather than measured across a full season. Corridor economics under the asset-light model are modelled, not measured.

An Industrial Equipment Business

Acquisition evaluation · refurbished machines, automation, parts, maintenance · not proceeded with

Modelled how a one-time equipment sale becomes an installed-base business with recurring parts, maintenance and automation revenue across four geographies.

The situation. We were evaluating the business for acquisition. It sold refurbished industrial machines, where the equipment sale is valuable on its own but lifecycle service, parts, automation and the existing installed base represented a materially larger opportunity than the company's transaction systems could see.

What we designed. A value proposition structured across machines, automation kits, parts and maintenance, with margin profiles separated by revenue line so growth decisions could reflect contribution rather than top-line sales. The logic for capturing machine identity, configuration, customer, parts history and upgrade potential, turning an installed base into an account development engine. Multi-market growth across four countries tied to one qualification process.

Why we did not proceed. The site was too far from our base to run properly, and the remaining lease term was too long to break without destroying the economics of the deal. The commercial thesis held. The logistics did not, and we would rather walk away from a good business we cannot operate well than buy it and find out.

Not implemented   The work was completed and well received by the owner, but it was never deployed and produced no measured result. It appears here as evidence of how we approach a business model, not as evidence of an outcome. The company is not named and no financial detail is published, because both were disclosed to us in acquisition diligence.

My Finance Team

Venture · household wealth development system · in evaluation for pilot

A household wealth development system: family-office infrastructure for households that are not ultra-wealthy, with continuous monitoring, opportunity detection and professional coordination but without the family office.

The problem. A household’s finances are fragmented across institutions, assets, entities and professionals, and nobody is responsible for continuously optimising the whole. The accountant sees tax. The broker sees credit. The advisor sees the portfolio they manage. The realtor sees the transaction. Each one is competent inside their slice and blind outside it, and the household ends up acting as project manager for its own financial life. Wealthy families solve this by paying for a family office. Everyone else gets annual reviews and disconnected transactions.

What we built. Not a budgeting app, a planning tool or a collaboration portal. A persistent financial model of the household — accounts, debt, properties, corporations, insurance, goals — and an intelligence layer that reads the relationships between them rather than storing them side by side. A dividend arriving is not filed as income received; it is read as a change in liquidity that may bear on mortgage paydown, corporate versus personal investment, a planned acquisition, tax reserves and insurance, and the relevant professionals are brought in accordingly.

The reframe. Most financial professionals are structurally reactive: the broker is called when someone needs a mortgage, the accountant around tax season, the lawyer after the decision is already made. The platform detects the conditions for action as they emerge rather than waiting to be asked, which moves a broker from transaction processor to portfolio manager and an accountant from annual compliance to continuous advisor.

Why development, not planning. Planning produces a static report. Development is a progression. A household that wants another rental property is not told it cannot afford one; it is told it is roughly fourteen months from being acquisition-ready, and given the sequence — credit, debt reduction, liquidity, rental income, corporate distributions, mortgage structure — that gets it there. The same logic carries risk: at today’s financing cost, does this specific leveraged position still improve this particular household’s situation, or not?

The adoption mechanism. Financial software usually fails because it asks professionals to do extra work to create consumer value. This is designed the other way around: the broker gets renewal monitoring and refinance detection, the accountant gets document chasing automated away, the property manager gets NOI intelligence that generates borrowing capacity that generates another acquisition. Revenue arrives before workload does. Improving one professional’s job creates another professional’s opportunity, which is the mechanism the whole network rests on.

Why the household owns it. Industry software is built as advisor CRM, broker CRM or practice management, which means the professional owns the record and the household loses continuity every time it changes advisors. Here the household owns the system and professionals plug into it. Change accountants and the financial history stays. That is the difference between a professional SaaS product and household infrastructure, and it is the most consequential architectural decision in the venture — the operating layer is what makes wealth development possible rather than episodic.

Where it stands. The platform is currently under evaluation for pilot testing by several large Canadian financial organisations, alongside individual and smaller enterprise pathways. Those conversations are confidential and the organisations are not named here.

In evaluation   Evaluation is not adoption. No pilot has been signed, no usage data exists, and no contract, adoption metric or financial result is claimed. Architecture, workflows, professional value propositions and enterprise materials are complete, and professionals reviewing the platform have described it as addressing a real unmet need — which is qualitative problem validation and nothing more. We will name counterparties and publish numbers when a pilot is signed and we are permitted to.

Bearings

Venture · mobility intelligence for relocation management companies · product architecture complete

Rebuilt a dormant category — culture training — as a continuous signals and intervention product that relocation management companies can sell to employers.

The reframe. Generic, episodic culture programs were disconnected from the moments where employees and host managers actually experienced friction. Providers delivered content but could not assemble the assignment-level data needed to see why adaptation was breaking down.

What we built. Signals across destination, corridor, role and assignment stage rather than one identical learning journey. Root-cause separation across assignment selection, host-manager fit, preparation, workplace behaviour, family adjustment and organisational support. De-identified aggregation so a relocation management company can see patterns no single employee, manager or vendor can observe alone — and sell employers an evidence-led way to act on them.

Awaiting pilot   The signals model, dashboards, intervention logic and commercial model reflect completed product design. The product is awaiting pilot testing and deployment with relocation management companies; until that runs, adoption, assignment improvement, retention effects and financial outcomes are not claimed and no counterparty is named.