Operations & Alliances · Toronto, ON
I find where the workflow breaks.
I get under the hood of sales, operations, and partnerships, find the actual breakdown, and fix it myself. No handoffs, no committee.
Email Me Directly →About
Jaret ManuelToronto-based. BBA from Acadia University, then an Account Executive seat at Salesforce.com from 2006 to 2008, enough time to learn what a sales process looks like from the inside, not the theory of it.
I joined FormAssembly as a founding sales hire, before the product had found its market. There was no sales function to inherit, only one to build, so I built the SDR and partnerships functions alongside it. I was named to the company's inaugural executive team, with a seat in executive meetings for its Series A raise, and served as Director of Partnerships & Strategic Alliances from 2014 to 2020.
From there I became Global Alliances Director at Aprika, a Salesforce-native project management platform, building partnership strategy around macroeconomic and market-cycle analysis rather than whatever was trending that quarter, with real budget ownership around $1M at points along the way.
Today it's just me, working alongside agentic coding tools to build and ship the fix directly, whether the workflow is a SaaS pipeline or an exporter's quote-routing process. Twenty years in, I still measure the work the same way: not by what I recommended, but by what actually got fixed.
What I Do
Four pillarsWorkflow Diagnosis & Repair
I go into an operation and find where things are actually breaking: a quote stuck in someone's inbox, a CMS nobody trusts anymore, export data that doesn't reconcile. Then I fix it — redesign the workflow, put the right tooling behind it, and make sure the fix holds after I'm gone.
Partnerships & Alliances
I built the partnerships function from scratch at FormAssembly as it grew to $11M ARR, and again at Aprika, grounding partner strategy in where the market actually is in its cycle. I know which relationships are worth pursuing, and how to structure them so they produce revenue instead of goodwill.
Technical Fluency
I can sit in a room with your engineers and follow the conversation — responsive web design, modern web stacks, core networking like VPNs, VLANs, and remote-access architecture. Enough to translate what the business needs into something a technical team can build without losing anything in the handoff.
Hands-On Build
I don't stop at the recommendation. Using modern web stacks and agentic coding tools, I ship working product myself: sites, internal tools, a payments engine, the systems an operation actually runs on. You get the person who did the work.
How I Work
Just meThere's no account manager between you and the work. When you email me, I'm the person who scopes the engagement, does the diagnostic, and ships the fix — the same person who spent six years building FormAssembly's sales, SDR, and partnerships function from a pre-product-market-fit startup to $11M ARR and 105 employees, and who later ran global alliances at a Salesforce-native platform. That's not a staffing model I settled for. It's the one I chose.
I use agentic coding and AI tools daily, and they let me move at a pace and technical depth that used to require a small team: auditing a website, fixing a broken quote-routing workflow, building a payments engine, writing production code myself. The leverage is real; the judgment behind it is still twenty years of operational pattern-matching, not automation for its own sake.
You get direct access, a fast answer, and one person accountable for the outcome. When a project needs more than that, I'll say so up front.
Who I Work With
Not an industry — a methodI don't specialize in an industry. I specialize in finding the key issue and fixing it, which is why the list below reads like a grab bag until you notice what's actually consistent: me, doing the diagnosis, then doing the work.
A licensed seafood exporter was losing quotes somewhere between the inbox and the invoice. I audited the website and CMS, found the compliance documentation gaps, rebuilt the quote-routing workflow, and checked the export data against what was actually shipping.
A vacation-rental property needed a website that did its job and a clear-eyed look at which government grants were worth chasing. I handled both in the same engagement.
A payments engine, built rather than architected on a whiteboard for someone else to build.
An Ontario auto dealer wanted a growth brief that reflected how their floor actually sells, so I spent time on the sales process before I wrote a word of the brief.
Infrastructure work where working technical fluency is table stakes, not a differentiator I have to explain.
Product and go-to-market work for an early-stage fitness app and an apparel brand.
Get in Touch
Email me directly and tell me what's not working. I read and answer every message myself — no account manager, no intake queue. You'll typically hear back within a day or two.
jaret@northkeyconsulting.com