The heart of who I am — why I started Jem HR.

I spent twenty-five years as an HR practitioner inside Canadian companies — financial services, manufacturing, professional services, and a few quietly impressive private firms most people have never heard of. I was lucky in my career. I had bosses who let me make decisions, mentors who told me when I was wrong, and enough variety to learn that there is no universal HR playbook.

What I noticed across all of it is that the work is better when it's done close to the truth. Close to the team. Close to the founder's actual fears. Close to the conversation people are afraid to have. The further HR sits from that — in committees, in policy reviews, in vendor presentations — the worse the advice gets. Jem HR is the practice I built so Canadian businesses could get senior HR thinking from that kind of proximity, without carrying a full executive on the payroll.

I started in HR as a generalist and spent the first decade learning what good HR looks like inside companies that take it seriously. Financial services taught me rigour: every decision documented, every conversation defensible, every policy aligned with regulators who would actually read it. Manufacturing taught me operational realism: an HR strategy that ignores the production schedule isn't a strategy. Professional services taught me people leverage: the firm is the people, and the people decisions compound faster than any other lever.

By the time I was running HR at the senior level, I had sat in on every kind of conversation a leadership team has. Hiring an executive who wouldn't work out. Letting a long-tenured leader go because the company had outgrown them. Telling a CEO that the team didn't believe what he was saying in town halls. Telling a board that an investigation was going to surface something they wouldn't like. None of those conversations are taught in HR programs. They're learned in the room.

I use that phrase a lot. It's not a slogan. It means three specific things in the day-to-day work.

It means I want to know the team. Not their titles — the people. Who is carrying more weight than they're getting credit for. Who is performing well on paper but everyone is nervous about. Who is going to leave in six months if nothing changes. You can't get that read from a survey. You get it from sitting in real meetings, asking the right questions in 1:1s, and being trusted enough that people tell you what they actually think.

It means I want to know what the founder is actually afraid of. Most CEOs have one or two unspoken fears about their team — a particular hire, a particular blind spot, a particular conversation they keep putting off. The advice you'd give them changes completely depending on which fear is driving the decision. Good HR consulting starts by surfacing that, not by reviewing the org chart.

It means I want to be in the room when the decision is made. Not after, in a debrief, where it's already too late to change anything. The work I do has the most leverage when I'm in the meeting where the call is being made, asking one or two questions that shift what gets decided. Most consulting frameworks aren't built for that. The CEC executive coaching practice and the senior HR practitioner background are.

There are three deliberate choices behind how this practice runs.

First, I work fractionally and project-based. I am not building an HR firm with associates. The advice you get is mine, the work you get is mine, and the engagement scales by hours and projects rather than by headcount. That keeps the quality consistent and keeps the price below what a full-service firm would quote.

Second, I refuse percentage-of-comp recruiting fees. They distort the advice. If I make 25% of the offer salary, I am incentivised to push you toward a higher offer and a faster close. That's bad for you and it's not what a senior practitioner should be selling.

Third, I'll tell you when you don't need me. The first conversation is a 30-minute call. About a third of the time it ends with "here's what I'd actually do, and you don't need to hire anyone for it." That's not modesty — it's the basis of the long-term relationships that make the practice work. The clients who hire me back six times over five years are the ones who learned to trust me by being told no the first time.

Most of my clients are Canadian small and mid-size businesses between 10 and 250 employees, where the founder or leadership team is making the people calls without a senior HR partner in-house. Industry doesn't matter as much as people think; people problems rhyme across sectors.

I'm not the right person for a few situations. Companies that need a full-time CHRO and the resources to hire one should hire one. Companies that primarily need administrative HR — payroll, benefits, compliance paperwork — should look at a PEO or an outsourced HRIS provider. And companies looking for someone to validate decisions they've already made tend to be unhappy working with me, because validation isn't what I sell.

Senior HR judgement, brought in fractionally, used in real time. We don't sell programs. We sell better decisions, made faster, with someone in the room who has seen this before. The work shows up as written role briefs, structured interviews, coaching engagements with measurable outcomes, OHSA-compliant investigation reports, and culture diagnostics that fit on three pages instead of thirty.

If that sounds like the kind of HR consulting you want, we should talk. The intro call is 30 minutes and there's no obligation. Whatever you decide afterwards, you'll leave with a clearer read on what's actually in front of you.