I began my career in family mediation, working with family business owners on the disputes that surface around succession, legacy planning, and the ordinary friction of running a business together. I carried that lens into my role as Chief Partnership Officer ("CPO") with a multi-family office, where I built and stewarded relationships with ultra-high-net-worth clients, offering family business mediation as part of that work. As those clients acquired and invested in companies, they increasingly turned to me for something else: the human capital on which those businesses depended. It was the foundation for everything that followed — the conviction that the hardest problems in any organization are rarely technical, but human.
In that capacity, and later as a fractional CPO to family offices, founders, and high-growth companies, I advised clients on identifying the right strategic investors for their specific mandate — and on the external partnerships that shape an organization's trajectory. I have facilitated millions of dollars in capital partnerships across Canada, the United States, and Europe by connecting founders, investors, and strategic partners through trusted networks and enduring relationships. My advisory work spans C-suite engagements across real estate, clean technology, pharmaceuticals, med-tech, food tech, and manufacturing — sectors where leadership decisions carry outsized consequence and limited margin for error.
Throughout that career, I noticed something the traditional executive-search market wasn't accounting for: an enormous amount of exceptional female talent had left full-time roles, not because it stopped being capable, but because full-time was no longer the right fit. Women who had led businesses, closed financing rounds, built legal frameworks from scratch, and navigated every kind of organizational complexity imaginable — sitting outside a system that was still built around one full-time seat per company.
That was the founding insight for Altevere: the best female executive talent isn't all working full-time, and most firms aren't built to access it. So we built one that is — a bench of exceptional women, vetted to the same standard I'd come to expect from the women I'd worked alongside for years.
My family's roots run through Atlantic Canada and back further still to Scotland, and one story in particular has always shaped how I think about leadership. My great-grandfather, Captain Daniel MacDonald of Newfoundland, spent his life at sea — and in all his years at the helm, he never lost a single crew member. That kind of record isn't luck. It's what happens when someone takes personal responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of every person under his charge, in conditions where the margin for error was brutally small. I think about that often. The stakes at Altevere aren't life and death, but the principle is the same one my great-grandfather lived by: the people who work with you, for you, and alongside you are not a resource to manage. They are people you are responsible for. That's in my blood, and it's built into how I run this firm.
I founded Altevere to close that gap. Not by advocating from the sidelines, but by building a model that actually works — assembling and managing your executive bench, structured for immediate impact and lasting legacy.
Every Altevere engagement is personal to me. Whether you are a company looking for the executive leadership you need right now, or an exceptional female executive looking for a platform that matches your capability — I want you to know that this was built with you in mind.
I am also the Founder and CEO of Gray Executive Search, a retained executive search firm for family businesses and family offices, and CanadianPolicy.com, a non-partisan civic platform designed to help Canadians understand and engage the policy decisions that shape their lives. I volunteer with Daya Ventures, a female-focused health tech accelerator that works with some of the foremost female start-up entrepreneurs, based in Sweden.
I look forward to our conversation.
