Five coaches.

Eric McRae is a serial entrepreneur and startup coach with 30+ years of experience and 450+ founders in his portfolio. He’s seen the pattern repeated across every business type: founders undervalue what they deliver, invest capital poorly, and build without a clear value proposition tied to their customer and pricing.

At Founders Coach, he helps early-stage founders stress-test assumptions and build genuinely profitable business models shifting their decision-making so they invest time and money in the right things at the right time. He’s an Advisor and training program facilitator with Invest Ottawa, a regular speaker in Ottawa’s entrepreneurship community, and sits on boards at Invest Ottawa, Connected Canadians, Phacktory, and others.

His insight is grounded in lived experience: he’s built businesses, consulted across sectors, and volunteered as a mentor and innovation hub facilitator in Cambodia. He believes the fundamentals of business positioning, customer understanding, accounting, and profitability don’t change by business type. Everyone deserves access to the systems and expertise that actually work.

Seann Poli is an entrepreneur and corporate executive with more than 30 years of experience in corporate leadership, capital markets, private capital and business development. Over his career, he has founded and led multiple companies, served in senior executive and investment roles, and participated in raising more than $200 million in private and public capital. His experience includes building and financing early-stage companies, corporate strategy, financial planning, valuations, investment structures and strategic partnerships. As a former executive of a publicly traded company and currently Chief Investment Officer of CECUM Corporation and co-founder of JanRX Medical, Seann has extensive experience communicating complex business and financial matters to private investors, public shareholders, boards, regulators, government stakeholders, strategic partners and capital-market professionals. He brings a practical founder’s perspective to Founder’s Lab, combining the realities of starting and operating businesses with the financial discipline required to fund, manage and grow them.

Patrick Kavanagh is a marketing strategist, experiential leader and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience building brands, shaping growth strategies and creating customer experiences across the UK and Canada. His work spans brand strategy, experiential marketing, retail, innovation and go-to-market thinking, giving founders a practical view of how ideas become propositions, propositions become brands, and brands become businesses people choose. Alongside his consulting work, Patrick has built businesses himself as co-founder of STEM the Gap Academy and co-owner of Helina Baby, bringing the perspective of someone who has not only advised entrepreneurs and some of the world’s biggest brands, but has faced the same questions around positioning, growth, customers, and commercial reality.

Jeffrey Edwards is the Founder and President of The MakeWell Performance Group. For more than 25 years, he has worked as an executive coach, business consultant and corporate trainer with founders, executives and senior leaders across the public and private sectors.

His specialty is mindset and leadership presence. Jeffrey examines how leaders think, listen and respond under pressure, and how those choices affect decisions, relationships and the way teams work together. His background in professional development and adult learning shapes a practical approach: leaders need opportunities to question assumptions, practise new responses and apply what they learn in the situations they face every day.

Jeffrey’s experience spans startups and global corporations, as well as universities and colleges, with work in technology, financial services and business services. He has worked with leaders across North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Oceania. Across those settings, his focus remains on the person behind the role and the capacity needed to lead others well.

Pascal Laliberté is a product designer, builder and customer researcher who helps founders understand one of the most important questions in business: why does a customer actually decide to buy? Through his consultancy, he works with founders and product leaders on buyer psychology, customer research and product decisions, and has written more than 100 articles exploring how buyers make choices. His background also spans UX, software development and product building, giving him a practical view of the relationship between customer insight and what a company chooses to create. He’s also active in the Ottawa community, leading the Minimum Viable Meetup group and its Projects Night events.

Pascal applies tools from the Jobs-To-Be-Done theory to uncover the forces behind purchase decisions: what causes customers to switch, what holds them back, what alternatives they are really comparing and what progress they are trying to make. That insight can influence product strategy, positioning, sales messaging and even how to sell to all who interact with and buy into the idea of business (suppliers, employees, partners, etc).

At Founder’s Lab, Pascal helps founders to make better hypotheses about what will cause their customers (and stakeholders) to sign-up, to gather evidence by interviewing customers, and to shape better products as a result.