What counts as a strategic project
A strategic project is a transaction, a structure or a decision with a beginning and an end. It is not ongoing accounting bought in a smaller size. The business has an objective: move growth to the next generation, get a lender to yes, buy or sell a company, put a holding company between the operating business and its cash, or resolve a CRA matter. The project exists to reach that objective and then stop.
Because these engagements sit next to lawyers, lenders and buyers, they are scoped from four things: the objective, the records, the entities and the timeline. Legal implementation always stays with your lawyer, and we coordinate with them rather than around them. Where a lender is on the other side, the package is built for the desk that reads it, which is where the firm's banking and corporate-finance background earns its keep.
The project work we take
The work falls into four families, and many projects touch more than one:
- Structure: holding company setup including Section 85 rollovers, family trusts, estate freezes, corporate reorganizations and amalgamations, incorporations and shareholder changes
- Transactions: buying a business, on the shares-versus-assets question and what each means; selling one, with preparation well before the listing; commercial property, including how it is owned
- Financing: lender packages and projections, acquisition financing structured before the offer rather than after, and complete CSBFL applications with supporting documentation
- CRA matters: representation through reviews, audits and correspondence, and voluntary corrections where a previously filed position needs fixing
What ties the four together is that each has a counterparty and a clock. A freeze has a valuation date, a purchase has a closing, a financing has a credit committee, and a CRA matter has a response deadline. Project work is organized around that clock from the first day, because a technically perfect structure delivered after the closing date is worth nothing, and a rushed one delivered on time can cost more than the delay would have.
How a project is scoped
Every project starts the same way: we understand the objective and the records first, then you receive a written scope and fee, and no work begins until you have both. The scope names what is included, what is not, what we need from you and when. There are no package tiers and no standard price list, because there is no standard business: a rollover involving one corporation with clean books and a rollover involving three corporations and a trust with two years of catch-up are different projects that happen to share a section number.
This is also why we do not quote on the first phone call. A number produced before the records are understood is either padded to protect the firm or low to win the work, and both versions cost the client. The discovery conversation is free; the number that follows it is real.
Sequencing gets the same treatment as price. Structure work in particular has an order that cannot be improvised: a Section 85 rollover has election paperwork with real deadlines, a freeze has to be valued before it is implemented, and a sale-side purification has to happen well before a letter of intent, not the week of closing. The written scope lays the steps out in order, names who does each one, and shows where your lawyer and your lender come in, so nobody discovers in month two that step four needed step one done differently.
What changes the scope and the fee
Six facts move a project quote more than anything else, and we ask about all six early:
- How many entities are involved, and whether a trust is in the picture
- The state of the records, since planning built on unreconciled books has to start with the books
- Whether a valuation is needed, as it is for most freezes and many purchases and sales
- Whether a lawyer is already instructed, because the legal and tax steps have to land in the right order
- The deadline, and who set it: a closing date, a lender's condition or a CRA response date compresses everything
- Who is on the other side: a buyer, a vendor, a lender or the CRA, each of which changes what the deliverable must survive
None of these facts make a project impossible. They make it a different size, and you should know the size before you commit to it.
When a project is the right shape, and when it is not
A project is the right shape when the objective is genuinely bounded: one structure to build, one transaction to close, one matter to resolve. It suits businesses with internal finance staff who need specialist work their team does not do, and owners who keep a year-end accountant they are otherwise happy with. We regularly complete a project and hand the result back to the incumbent accountant, with working papers they can rely on. Taking a project from us does not commit you to anything beyond it.
It is the wrong shape when the project is a symptom. If the financing package is hard because the reporting is always late, or the reorganization keeps stalling because the books of three corporations never agree, the bounded engagement will succeed once and the problem will return next year. That situation points to the Ongoing Financial Partnership, where structure, reporting and tax run as one function and project work happens inside the relationship. Plenty of clients arrive as a project and stay as a partnership; we will tell you which one your situation actually is, in writing, before you spend anything.
How to start one
Send a short note describing the objective, the entities and the timeline through the contact page. Walla reads every submission personally and replies either way, usually within two business days. If the project is real, the next step is a conversation about the objective and the records, followed by the written scope and fee. If a second opinion or a one-time consult would answer it faster, we will say so and point you there instead.
