Directors rotate
Two years in, half the people who agreed the plan have moved on. If the reasoning behind each priority is not written down, the new board starts over, and the organization loses eighteen months.
Chambers, associations & community boards
A plan that outlives the board that wrote it.
Your directors rotate. Your staff are already stretched. Your members want to see something happen. Strategic planning for organizations that have to plan under exactly those conditions.
“Mark led us through a structured strategic planning process demonstrating a strong ability to listen and synthesize diverse perspectives. Ensuring alignment and consensus through a comprehensive Strategic Plan and multi-year Roadmap. This enabled us to move forward with clarity, confidence, and unified direction.”
Why this is harder for you
Member organizations plan under constraints most consultants never see.
A private company can decide something on Tuesday and start on Wednesday. A chamber or an association has to carry a board, a staff team and a membership with it. That changes what a good plan has to look like.
Nobody has spare capacity
The executive director is already running events, member services and advocacy. A plan that assumes free time will not get delivered, so the roadmap has to be honest about what can realistically be carried.
Members want visible progress
Renewal season is a referendum on whether the organization is doing anything. You need to be able to show what was committed to and what actually got done, in plain language.
Consensus is not the same as commitment
A room can agree on a vision statement and still leave with nobody owning anything. The value of a facilitated session is the decisions, and someone has to hold the room to making them.
What your board gets
Something you can put in front of members.
The working roadmap is the engine. What your board actually presents is a short, readable summary that says what the organization is going to do, in what order, and how progress will be reported back.
- Facilitated board sessions that end in decisions, not discussion notes
- A multi-year plan with the reasoning behind each priority written down
- A roadmap scoped to the capacity you genuinely have
- A member-ready summary for your AGM or newsletter
- A reporting format your directors can actually read in a meeting
- A handover pack so the next board inherits context, not just a document
Someone who sits on your side of the table
He has already done this for a chamber.
Mark delivered the strategic plan and multi-year roadmap for the Cochrane & District Chamber of Commerce, and EAGL Management is a member there too. So he knows what a board meeting actually feels like, what a volunteer director can realistically take on between now and the next AGM, and what happens to a plan when renewal season arrives.
That matters more than it sounds. Plans written for member organizations by people who have only worked with corporates tend to assume a level of staff capacity and decision speed that simply is not there.
25+ years across sectors
Small and mid-sized businesses, local organizations and provincial government engagements.
PMP certified
Formal project management discipline behind the plan, not just facilitation skill.
One consultant, start to finish
The person in your board room is the person writing your plan. No handover to a junior team.
Board questions
What directors usually ask.
Our budget is tight. Can this be scoped down?
Yes, and it usually should be. The full engagement is four phases, and plenty of organizations only need the first two, or only need the roadmap because the direction is already settled. Scope and cost are agreed in writing before anything starts, so your board approves a known number.
How much time will this take from our directors?
Board time is concentrated into the sessions where decisions actually get made, and those are scheduled well in advance. The assessment, drafting and roadmap work happen outside your meetings.
We had a planning session two years ago and nothing came of it. Why would this be different?
Because the session is the smallest part of the work. What usually goes missing afterwards is sequence, ownership and a review cadence. A plan that is reviewed once a year is a plan that gets discovered to be off track eleven months too late.
Can you work with our funder's reporting requirements?
Yes. Provincial and community-funded work comes with real reporting obligations, and 25 years of public sector engagements means the plan gets built with those obligations in view rather than retrofitted to them afterwards.
Do you travel to us?
Mark is based in Cochrane, Alberta and works on site across the region. Planning sessions almost always work better in person. Follow-up reviews work perfectly well over a call.
Next step
Bring a real question to a short call.
Whether it is a plan that has stalled, a board that is not aligned, or an AGM you need something ready for. No cost, and no obligation.