I'm the Vision Builder.
I turn your imagination into reality through technology.
I'm a fractional CTO. The people who call me have something they want to build, a vision, a bet, a project that matters more than the others. They don't have the technical person in the room to make it real. That's the job. That's been the job for thirty years.
The harder the problem, the more excited I am to see it come alive. "We don't even know if this is technically possible" is my favourite sentence.
If any of this sounds like you, you're in the right place.
A vision to multiply
You've built something real. A business that works. A team that delivers. Now you can see how much more it could be, if the right technology, deployed sensibly, freed your people to do the work that actually grows the business. You're not behind on anything. You're ambitious about what comes next, and you want someone who's done this before to sit with you and build it.
A bet that has to be made real
You've made a commitment to something, a launch, a pivot, a feature, a market move, and now it has to ship. Maybe you've already announced it. Maybe you've already sold it. Whatever shape it's in, it needs someone who's built things like it before, who can sit in the room with you and your team and make the bet land.
A vision waiting for a builder
You can see what the next version of your product, your operation, or your platform should look like. There's just no one inside to make it real. The vendors pitching you sound confident, but you've been burned before, and you want someone in your corner who'll tell you what's actually true, and then build the thing.
Three thirty-second versions of the same conversation. The full one usually starts with a phone call.
What I actually build.
I'm fractional, which is a polite way of saying: as much of me as you need, no more. Sometimes that's a single afternoon. Sometimes it's a year. The shape of the engagement comes from the shape of your vision, not from a service menu.
- Take a vision you've been carrying, for a product, a system, an operational shift, and build the first real version of it with your team
- Sit with you for a day and find where AI actually multiplies your business, and where it doesn't
- Take one of your real projects, work through it with you, and ship the version of it that has the new technology built in
- Walk into a bet that's been promised but not built, and get it shipping
- Stand in as your CTO for a quarter while you figure out what the long-term technical seat in your business should look like
- Take a project that everyone else has written off as impossible, and build it
- Translate between your team and the technical people they're talking to, when those conversations have stopped working
- Tell you, plainly, when the answer is "not yet"
If your vision isn't on this list, it's probably still something I can build. Ask me.
How working with me starts.
A conversation, free.
Thirty minutes, on a call. Tell me what you want to build. I'll ask questions, listen for the shape of it, and tell you what I actually think, including if I'm not the right person for it. No deck, no pitch, no follow-up sequence.
A first piece of work, scoped clearly.
If we both want to keep going, we start with something defined. A short diagnostic. A first piece of the build. A fractional engagement for a quarter. You'll know the scope, the cost, and what you'll have at the end before we begin.
Whatever the vision needs next.
Some visions take a week. Some take a year. Some need me steadily for a long time, some need me intensely for a short one. The work follows the vision, not the other way around. There's no retainer trap and no long-term contract.
Visions I've built.
Thirty years of the same call: someone with a vision that didn't yet exist, looking for the person who could make it real. The companies got bigger. The shape of the call didn't change.
A national campaign sold before it was built
Labatt had sold the country on a designated-driver campaign with a face-on-superhero feature, fourteen days from launch, with a build plan that wasn't going to make it. I scrapped the plan, built the version that would actually ship, and we launched on time.
Read the full story →A platform the team had given up on
The team was convinced they'd hit a hard physical limit and the only path was a multi-year, multi-million-dollar rebuild. I disagreed. There was a simpler version. We piloted it in a corner, utilization dropped 40%, and Postmedia got eighteen months of breathing room.
Read the full story →A vision that had failed for a year
Anheuser-Busch had been trying to build a global employee portal for a year. The team was demoralized; the executives were frustrated. The vision wasn't the problem, nobody in the room had the standing to make a call. I took that role, and the portal launched as a company flagship within months.
Read the full story →
I'm Ed.
I've been the person they called for about thirty years. The sales team at Postmedia used to sell things to clients that didn't yet exist; I'd be the one who'd make them real before the launch date. I architected one of Canada's first headless CMS platforms in the early 2000s, before the industry had a name for it. I grew a team from one person to fifty. I've been on the rescue calls when no one else could figure it out.
What I've learned, across all of it, is that the technology is almost never the hard part. The hard part is having someone in the room who's seen this shape of thing before, who isn't trying to sell you anything other than the right answer, and who's actually going to build it once it's been figured out.
That's the seat I take.
What do you want to build?
Tell me. The first conversation is free, and I'll be honest about whether I'm the right person for it.
Start the conversation