Peaks & ValleysConsulting
Operations · Software · Automation · Geospatial

Every business runs on peaks. We go after the valleys.

Tell us if this sounds familiar. Someone knows how the quoting works. Someone else knows which cities need ten days' notice. Renewals live in a spreadsheet one person updates. The Monday report gets rebuilt by hand, every Monday. It all works fine. Right up until she quits, or you buy another company, or the contract goes back out to tender.

We've been that company. Kamila ran a national operation for eighteen years. Alex built the software and the models for regulated field work, public side and private. Neither of us came out of consulting. So we're fairly sure the fix isn't advice. It's writing the thing down and putting it into software that won't let people skip it.

Book a systems audit See what we do
Permit renewals Manual data entry New hire ramp up MON FRI Today After
01Permit renewals
02Manual data entry
03New hire ramp up
A week of real output. Peaks are your team doing what you hired them for. Valleys are where it stalls on something a machine should be doing. The dashed line is our job.
Track record

All from the company our founders built and still run. It's where every bit of this came from.

18Years building a national company
13Companies acquired and integrated onto one platform
1,800Municipalities of permit rules, held in one system
150+Training modules built and delivered in house
5Generations of one proprietary operating platform
45People led across six departments at peak season
01 / Founders

Two operators. Neither of us learned this from a book.

We met doing the same job in two industries that look nothing alike. Both turn out to be compliance businesses underneath. Regulated sites. Rules that change with the jurisdiction. Crews and gear in the field. Paperwork somebody pulls two years later and expects to find. About five years ago we started taking outside clients, mostly companies growing faster than the systems holding them up. When a job needs a specialist we bring one in, and we'll tell you we did.

Kamila Domanska

Founding Partner · Operations, Systems and Brand

Eighteen years building a national company from the inside, most of it running operations and client services. She designs the process a business runs on, then decides what the software has to do to hold people to it. When the numbers don't add up she goes to the source data and works through it line by line.

  • Co-founder of a national signage company, 2008 to present
  • Led the acquisition and integration of 13 companies across Canada onto one platform in three years
  • Leads 35 to 45 people across account management, permit administration, order desk, receivables and design
  • Product owner of a proprietary operating platform now in its fifth generation
  • Built a training program of more than 150 modules and 90 hours
  • Writes every municipal RFP the company submits
  • Permit and bylaw rules for 1,800 municipalities, captured once and enforced in software
  • Investor reporting since 2013, built from the transaction data up

Alex Daignault

Founding Partner · Software, Automation and Geospatial

Alex worked both sides of regulated field operations, public sector and private. The job turned out to be less about the field than about the models, the automation, the processes and the software those organisations ran on, so that became the work. He builds tools that read the files you already keep, and he does the spatial and modelling work. UBC trained in augmented reality and C++.

  • UBC trained in augmented reality and in C++
  • Augmented reality installations delivered for the Royal Family of Bahrain
  • Applies AI to automate operational and field systems
  • ArcGIS Pro, spatial analysis and field data capture
  • Modelling and simulation software, AR installations and experiences
  • JavaScript and React for browser tools, Python for data work
  • Office and Outlook automation, PDF processing, database integration
  • Public data services, open data extraction and geospatial formats
  • Builds tools that run from a shared folder with no server, no licence and no IT ticket
02 / Services

Five places it breaks.

An audit nearly always turns up the same chain. Nobody wrote the process down. So the software couldn't enforce it. So people hold it together with memory and spreadsheets. So the reporting can't be trusted, because it's sitting on all of that. Fix one link and the next one shows up. Hire us for a link or for the chain.

01

How the work moves

Nobody ever sat down and decided how the work should move. It just grew. People improvised around the gaps, and now the only complete copy of your process lives in one person's head. You already know which person.

Operations and processSystems audits, workflow design, gated stages, training programs, and standard operating procedures that outlast the people who wrote them.Post acquisition integrationMoving an acquired company onto one platform, one process and one brand without losing its clients. Thirteen of them in three years.
02

What the system won't let you get wrong

A permit per municipality. A traffic control plan per job. Certifications that expire in the middle of a contract. Proof of work somebody asks for two years later. None of it's hard to know. It's hard to remember, at the right moment, on job four hundred, forever. That isn't a discipline problem. It's a software problem, and treating it as the first one is why it keeps happening.

Compliance and obligationsRegulatory rules captured once and enforced in the workflow, expiry tracking that escalates early, and audit evidence pulled from records you already keep.
03

What stops needing a person

Here's the test. Would a competent person do it the same way every time, given the same inputs? Then it doesn't need a person. Most offices are carrying about twenty of these. None are big enough to complain about. Together they're a salary.

Work that runs itselfDocuments and correspondence, bulk drafting, scheduled reports, PDF and form processing, mailbox triage.Software and internal toolsWeb and mobile apps, operating platforms, dashboards over the spreadsheets you already keep, integrations, and rescuing whatever the last person built.
04

What you can see before you decide

Odd thing about most companies. The routine work gets proper software. The decisions with real money on them get a spreadsheet somebody built once, a map nobody drew, and a number nobody can trace back to anything that happened.

Numbers and reportingReconciliation against a real source, record consolidation, receivables, and reporting you can defend line by line.Geospatial and mappingArcGIS Pro. Site documentation, territory design, routing, coverage gaps, and which rules apply where.Modelling and simulationScenario and what if analysis, forecasting, capacity, pricing, and optimisation on your own data.Augmented realityStanding on the site and seeing the building. Product at full size in the room. The next step shown on the machine.
05

How the work comes in

You can run the tightest operation in the province and still lose. The phone has to ring and the bid has to land. Most operations people ignore this half until a contract goes back out to tender, and then it's suddenly everybody's problem.

Bids and public procurementRFP and RFQ responses written end to end, compliance matrices, reusable bid libraries, pricing against the published scoring.Marketing, CRM and demandHubSpot, landing pages, ad tracking wired through to a closed deal, nurturing, and proposals with a review link and signature.Brand and webBrand systems and rebrands applied to every document a company sends, plus websites and the technical SEO under them.
03 / How we work

Four rules we don't break.

This is why anyone lets us near the system of record in the first place.

R1

Your files stay yours

We read the spreadsheets, folders and mailboxes you already keep. Nothing gets migrated. Nothing gets imported. Your data doesn't move somewhere new unless you asked it to.

R2

Nothing sends or overwrites itself

Letters and emails land in Drafts. Always. If we'd be changing a record you already have, you see both values side by side and you make the call. We back up before we overwrite. Every time.

R3

Built to be handed over

Plain code. Rules written down in English. Six months from now, when you want to move a threshold or reword a template, you shouldn't have to call us. Some people call anyway. That's fine. It should be a choice.

R4

Honest about limits

Sometimes the data won't carry what you're asking of it. We'd rather tell you in week one than hand over something that looks right and isn't. It's cost us work. We'd do it again.

04 / Engagements

Selected engagements.

Work our founders led. Clients stay unnamed where we agreed to that. The numbers are real.

01

Thirteen companies onto one operating system

Post acquisition integration

A roll up across five provinces, from Edmonton to St. John's. Every client, contract, renewal, permit and sign moved onto one platform. Staff retrained on one process, receivables pulled into one ledger, every company rebranded. Buying the company is the easy part. The integration is where the money gets won or lost, and that was the job.

13companies acquired and integrated
3 yearsstart to finish
0clients lost to the transition
02

A permit rules engine for 1,800 municipalities

Compliance systems

Brampton wants black and white with a twenty inch letter limit. Milton allows one line of eleven inch colour and no topper. Multiply that by 1,800 towns and it all lived in the heads of about four people. We wrote every rule down, turned it into fields a system can act on, and wired it into the workflow so the wrong thing stopped being possible instead of merely discouraged.

1,800municipalities, rules held in one system
0installs possible without an approval on file
Blockednot reported after the fact
03

Five generations of a proprietary operating platform

Custom software

Eighteen years of building the thing a national company actually runs on. Booking, mapping, dispatch, orders, clients, reporting and billing, wired into payments, accounting, email and shipping. It's on its fifth generation now. Permissions enforced on the server, eleven gated stages, an audit log on every change.

87relational tables in the current data model
55permissions enforced server side, across 5 roles
0double bookings possible by design
04

Winning back a wave of public contracts

Bids and procurement

A bad year on paper. A whole block of municipal contracts came up at once and every one had to be won again, against bidders with nothing to lose. We wrote every response in house, built to the published scoring, with a matrix mapping each mandatory requirement to the page that answered it. The book grew instead of shrinking.

100%of municipal RFPs written in house
+50%municipal sales in twelve months
0bids lost on a missed form
05

A client book and ledger rebuilt from the transactions

Data and reporting

Thousands of client records, years of duplicates, and a receivables number nobody could defend line by line. We consolidated with the matching rules written down where anyone could argue with them, gave every at risk renewal a named owner, and rebuilt the book from transactions so each figure traced back to something that actually happened.

4,436records consolidated to the real client count
27 daysaverage time to get paid, against 45 to 50 typical
<0.1%of revenue written off as bad debt
06

A training program that survives turnover

Operations and process

The process lived in the heads of whoever had been there longest, and new hires took months to get useful. We rebuilt it as training driven by checklists, not memory. It holds up on the day someone new starts, and on the worse day when someone experienced walks out.

150+modules built and delivered in house
90 hoursof structured training
7 to 8 yearsaverage tenure on the teams it trains
07

A week of manual work reduced to one command

Automation

Two jobs that between them ate days every month. Exception lists became personalised drafts, addressed off an existing register and grouped so someone holding five files got one email instead of five. And a public data service with paging limits, inconsistent field names between layers, and queries that fail by returning nothing at all instead of an error. Both now run on one command.

Multi daymanual exercise, now a single command
Drafts onlynothing ever sends itself
Re-runnableedits survive later regeneration
05 / Fit

Two kinds of company we go after.

We could work with almost anybody. We'd rather be the obvious call for two kinds of company than adequate for everyone. You deal with the people doing the work. No account manager in between. It makes us quick, and fairly blunt.

Where we do our best work

  • Acquirers and roll ups. Private equity backed platforms and strategic buyers who need ten companies to become one, not ten companies with a shared logo. Thirteen integrations in three years is the rarest thing we own.
  • Utility, telecom and locate contractors. A permit per dig, a traffic control plan per job, certifications expiring mid contract, and proof of work someone will ask for two years from now. Structurally identical to the operation we already built this for.

Also a good fit

  • Companies bidding to municipalities and the public sector
  • Multi site operations regulated differently in each jurisdiction
  • Field operations where the site, the crew and the paperwork all have to line up
  • Teams of 5 to 300 running on spreadsheets, Outlook and memory
  • Owners who already know which task is eating the week

Not a fit

  • Work needing a staffed 24 hour help desk
  • Anyone looking for a body shop instead of a partner
  • Anyone who wants a deck instead of a working system
  • Rescues that have to be finished by Friday
06 / Questions

What people ask before they hire us.

Straight answers, including the ones about money.

What does a systems audit include?
We spend time inside your operation and watch the work happen, instead of asking people to describe it. You get a written document: a map of how work moves through the company, where it stalls, what each of those stalls costs you per year, and a costed, prioritised list of what to do about it. It covers process, software, data quality and the handoffs between departments. The document is yours whether or not you hire us to build anything.
How much does custom business software cost?
Far less than most owners expect, because we don't start with a platform. A single focused tool, such as a dashboard over an existing workbook or a document generator, is usually days of work, not months. A full operating platform is a larger commitment and we'll tell you so before you spend anything. We quote fixed scope with a fixed price after the audit, so you're never signing up for an open ended hourly build.
Do we have to move our data out of our spreadsheets?
No. Your tracking workbook is the system of record and no one wants to replace it. Our tools read it as it's, including merged headers, header rows that aren't the first row, and dates entered five different ways. Columns are matched by name instead of position, so inserting a column doesn't silently break every figure on the page. If a move makes sense later, we'll say so, but it's never the starting point.
Can you help us respond to a municipal RFP?
Yes. Our operations principal has written every municipal RFP her company submits, across 1,800 municipalities, and We write full responses, build the compliance matrix so a single missed form never disqualifies a bid, set pricing against the published evaluation criteria, and build you a reusable content library so the next bid isn't written from scratch. We also manage prequalification and vendor registration.
What is geospatial consulting, and does my business need it?
Geospatial work means using location as data instead of as an address on an invoice. If you've vehicles, field crews, physical sites, service territories, assets in the ground, or customers spread across a region, most of your hardest questions are location questions. Where to open or close. Which crew goes where. Where you aren't serving and should be. Which regulations apply to which site. We answer those in ArcGIS Pro and hand you a map and a record your team can work from.
How long does a typical engagement take?
An audit is about a week of our time and lands as a written document. A focused automation or dashboard is usually one to three weeks from there. A larger platform or an integration project runs longer and gets broken into pieces you can see working as they land. We show working software early and on purpose, so if something is wrong you find out in week two instead of month six.
Where are you based, and how far do you work?
We're based in Nelson, British Columbia, and we work right across Canada and the United States. Most engagements run remotely, with site visits where the work needs eyes on the ground, which is usually field operations and geospatial documentation. Our own company operates coast to coast, so distributed teams and multi jurisdiction operations are the normal case for us instead of the exception.
07 / Start here

Start with the audit.

Every business is different, so we scope it that way. We come in and watch how the work actually happens, then write it all down. Where the week goes. What each stall costs you a year. What it'd take to fix. Then you decide. The document is yours either way. A couple of people have taken it and done the work themselves. Fine by us.

Email us (250) 423-9511
Emailadaignault@peaksnvalleysconsulting.com
Phone(250) 423-9511
FoundersKamila Domanska · Alex Daignault
Based inNelson, British Columbia
ServingCanada and the United States
ResponseWithin one business day