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. It taught me how companies work and the people inside them, so I became their external partner, helping them grow through relationships. I carried that lens into my role as Chief Commercial Officer, 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 and interim Chief Commercial Officer to family offices, founders, and high-growth companies, I led business development, opened doors to partnerships, and 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. I have stood beside owners as leadership changed hands, which is why I built Altevere.
Throughout that career, I kept meeting the same kind of leader: exceptional women who had led businesses, closed financing rounds, built legal frameworks from scratch, and navigated every kind of organizational complexity imaginable, and who had chosen to step back from full-time roles. Not because they had stopped being capable, but because they wanted to work in a way that fit their lives. Their expertise was as sharp as ever. It simply needed a home.
That was the founding insight for Altevere: the experience of senior women is one of the most valuable assets a growing company can draw on, and it should not take a full-time role to put it to work. So I set out to build something different: a consulting firm where like-minded senior women collaborate on client projects, share what they know, and hold each other, and our clients, to the standard I had come to expect from the women I had worked alongside for years. It brings that experience to the companies that need it, and flexibility is built into how we work, for our clients and for the women on our team.
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 - taking on the leadership problems growing companies cannot yet solve alone, and staying accountable until they are solved. A consulting firm, 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 also serve on the WILL Executive Council Canada, part of the WILL Forum. Founded in India in 2007, it has run more than 200 meetings and brought together more than 6,000 women. It has now expanded its reach into Canada.
I look forward to our conversation.
