Hatch Advisory builds the operating models, accountability systems, and leadership a business runs on, and stays through the execution that makes change stick. The work happens at the ownership level, without arm's-length distance.
Get in touchEach has a different shape, but the same requirement: someone who can read the business accurately, build the systems it's missing, and work at the level where decisions get made.
The business is growing faster than its structure. The founder is the bottleneck, roles blur, and what worked at one size is breaking at the next. The work is building the operating model and accountability the next stage needs.
A founder-run business outgrowing the way it started. Decisions still route through one person, the systems are informal, and the team is ready for more structure than the business has. The work is putting in the operating model, roles, and accountability to run without the founder in every room.
An owner is stepping back and the business isn't ready: leadership gaps, undefined roles, a management team that hasn't been tested without the founder in the room. The work is identifying what the business needs to run without its current owner, and building it.
The problem is usually operational before it's financial: a leadership breakdown, margin erosion, an operating line covering what are really structural problems. The work starts with an honest read of what's wrong and moves to what can be fixed.
Acquisitions close. Integration rarely goes as planned. The work is making the combined entity function as intended: culture, systems, leadership alignment, and the gaps the deal process didn't surface.
Most businesses aren't ready to sell when owners decide to sell. Valuation gaps, undocumented processes, management dependency: solvable problems, but only with time. The work is getting the business to a state where a transaction reflects its actual value.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic question, not a scope conversation. What is actually wrong, not the presenting symptom, not the owner's working theory, determines whether there is work to do and what it looks like.
Before scope, there is a prior question: fit. Trust, willingness, and the capacity to act on honest feedback get evaluated before an engagement begins. Not every situation is the right one to take.
The work itself is operational and organizational, with financial fluency underneath. Diagnosing leadership and structural gaps like a COO, reading a P&L like a CFO, working at the level where those problems get solved. Pressure, complexity, and competing interests at the leadership level are not a deterrent, they're where this kind of work is needed most.
Nolan Foster is the principal of Hatch Advisory, a CFA® charterholder and MBA. His career has run at the intersection of operational execution and financial analysis, as an executive, an advisor, and an operator inside businesses at critical inflection points.
As Chief Operating Officer of a BC-based private credit asset manager, with assets under management of approximately $400 million growing to approximately $800 million combined post-acquisition and headcount growing from 35 to about 60, he designed and ran a full company-wide operating and accountability system: role definition, decision rights, and performance management at weekly through annual cadences, with standing board and committee work in the seat. He led the post-acquisition integration across 25 people spanning every executive, owner, manager, and key player at both companies, closing the priority items in four months, and sponsored the retirement of a multi-year in-house platform and its replacement with specialist third-party systems, a decision built on an independent external assessment and an invitation-only request for information to market that he led personally. The organization delivered record capital growth, revenue, and EBIT improvement, and a successful acquisition outcome in 2025.
The COO seat also carried an explicit ownership mandate to improve organizational culture: leadership and executive development, difficult-conversations capability, team-dynamics training, and WorkSafeBC compliance built from top to bottom, including a Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee established to carry substantive physical and psychological safety outcomes rather than to satisfy a compliance checkbox. He held the top enforcement seat when standards were tested.
At a Schedule 1 Bank, he learned the reverse mortgage asset class by facilitating the purchase of over $150 million from the largest originator in Canada, then served as bank-side lead across multiple third-party fintech lending partnerships, from an early-stage company building its first real controls to established operators running at volume, with accountability for the financial performance of five business lines. The reverse mortgage partnership ran the full arc: sourced from its founders, carried to executive approval, then governed through launch to more than $50 million in originations in year two and $100 million in year three. Before that seat, he spent four years as the point person between the bank and credit union executives across Canada, many of them owners of the institution, with regular presentation to and advisory work with elected credit union boards.
His independent consulting practice ran from 2010 to 2016 and included a CFO mandate through the amalgamation of two companies into an IT services firm, operational redesign that reduced customer complaints by 95%, and acquisition sourcing and negotiation on a $100M light oil asset mandate, conducted directly with the owners, executive teams, and boards of privately-held businesses. Alongside the consulting years, he spent seven years as a volunteer program leader and coach within a formalized leadership development program, roughly 2,000 hours, finishing as head coach leading a team of eight coaches across cohorts of about eighty.
Nolan is a CFA® charterholder (2006) and holds an MBA with Distinction. He is registered on the federal Indigenous Business Directory as a member of James Smith Cree Nation, and resides with his family in North Cowichan, BC on Vancouver Island.
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