Building Processes and Procedures Since 2006
WDFalconer Consulting is a Vancouver-based practice working with organizations across North America. We were founded on a fairly unglamorous conviction: that most operational problems are not failures of capability but failures of visibility, and that the fix begins with writing down what is already happening.
Don Falconer
Principal
Don began his career in learning and development rather than in operations, and the order matters. He spent nine years at Boston Pizza International from 2006, moving from corporate trainer through regional business manager, advising more than fifty franchise locations, to leading franchisee and leadership development nationally. In that last role he designed and launched a management certification programme delivered to roughly 1,500 restaurant managers across Canada.
The part he still talks about is not the programme itself. It is standing in front of several hundred franchise owners at a national conference, presenting to a room that had learned to be sceptical of anything head office sent them, and watching them decide it was worth their time.
The consulting practice was formalized in 2015 and has run alongside everything since. Operations came in between: retail expansion for a cannabis retailer opening across two provinces, opening leadership for two hospitality venues in Vancouver, people operations for an ERP implementation partner in print manufacturing, and an executive role at a Vancouver marketing agency.
What connects the whole of it is a preference for the room over the report. The most useful hour in any engagement is usually the one where somebody who does the job explains it out loud and everyone else realizes they had it wrong.
We assemble the team the engagement needs rather than the team we happen to have.
WDFalconer operates as a coordinating practice. Don leads every engagement and is present for every session, and beyond that we draw on an established network of specialists according to what the work actually calls for: technical writers, instructional designers, graphic designers, copywriters, communications and change specialists, and others as circumstances require.
The advantage of this structure is that you are not paying for a bench between engagements, and you are not receiving whichever consultant happened to be unallocated that month. The people on your project are there because their particular expertise is required.
Specialists brought in where the route requires them.
How We Set Up for Success
We do not guarantee outcomes
Any consultancy that guarantees results is either misunderstanding the work or misrepresenting it. Documented process changes nothing by itself. The results come from your organization following through on the plan, and we are not a substitute for that.
We work with your people, not around them
Engagements that consist of interviews with leadership produce documents about leadership's understanding of the business. We need access to the people doing the work, and we need their supervisors in the room when we talk to them.
You own everything
Editable source files in formats you already use. No proprietary platform, no licence to maintain, and no dependency on us to keep your own documentation current after we leave.
We use AI, carefully
It has genuine value in producing documentation at speed, and we use it where that applies. It is an optimization tool and not a substitute for judgement. There is a human involved in every letter on every page.
Case Study: Print Shop, San Francisco
Lahlouh is a print and supply chain services company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. They came to us with documentation already in place, which is less common than you might expect and less helpful than it sounds. Their standard operating procedures ran to eighteen pages each. Every one was accurate. None could be consulted at a glance by somebody who simply needed to know what to do next.
We mapped the underlying processes and produced clear workflows showing responsibilities, document flow and the systems involved at each step. The maps became the foundation for onboarding new employees, retraining existing ones, and running performance improvement, in place of a binder of rules that sat on a shelf until it went out of date.
We had full company buy-in, which is the single largest predictor of whether this work succeeds. Two years after the engagement closed, they told us the process mapping had been one of the most valuable exercises they had ever undertaken.
I had prepared myself for a session filled with dry, repetitive information I had probably heard somewhere else before. Instead, Don quickly abolished all my expectations for a dull experience.
Seminar attendee
- Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, operating on Pacific time.
- Remote by default, on site for discovery and workshops where it makes a material difference, which it usually does.
- We work across industries. Sector knowledge is not a prerequisite for understanding how work moves through an organization.
- Comfortable in Microsoft environments including SharePoint, Teams and the Power Platform, as well as Notion, Confluence and plain files in a shared folder.
Ready? Let's Go
Send us a note describing the situation. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.