Dr. Paul Woolner is a successful entrepreneur and business advisor. Paul's consulting practice focuses on the design and implementation of high performance organizations and has included Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial enterprises. His speciality has been assisting entrepreneurial companies with an early stage, proven business model to scale profitably. He has worked extensively with both technologycentric and traditionally based businesses. He has also successfully applied this same methodology to company turn around.
Paul has served as Director and Chair on a number of corporate boards. Among the most notable is Lavalife, where he was engaged as a consultant and ultimately Chairman of the Board during a period of rapid growth for the business. He was instrumental in helping College Pro evolve and grow into a successful multi platform franchising company, today called FirstService Brands, a family of companies which comprise one of the largest home services Franchising enterprises in the world. He continues to advise FirstService Brands.
In parallel to his consulting, Paul has worked in the field of investment - 10 years as a partner in a Venture Capital Fund. He has been a creator and Partner in both public and private funds and advisor to professional money managers.
He has a Master's and Doctorate in Educational Theory from the University of Toronto where his research focused on change management and learning systems.
Elliot Woolner is a Technology and UX consultant that brings a breadth of skills to all of his engagements. He specializes in working with clients to align IT strategy with business strategy, championing user-centered design practices to help clients build better products, and leads Agile software development transformations with clients to help them improve quality of software products as they are built.
Elliot is a graduate of the Canadian Film Center’s Interactive Art & Entertainment Programme, a unique training, research and production think-tank environment for emerging new media content developers, practitioners and companies. Post graduation, Elliot served the lab as Operations Technology Manager and then Technology Manager for three years, building digital collaboration tools and supporting residents in design and prototyping.
He holds an Honors Bachelor Degree in Mathematics & Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.