How to hire an Interim President in the GTA.

The GTA tech scene has more advisors than operators. That is the problem with hiring an Interim President in this market. The title is everywhere. The seat is rarely actually being taken.

I am writing this from inside the work. I run interim engagements out of the Greater Toronto Area for B2B SaaS companies whose leadership teams have stopped agreeing on the problem. So this is not theory. This is what I would tell a founder over coffee if they asked me what to look for before they wrote the contract.

What "Interim President" should actually mean.

An Interim President takes the seat. That is the entire definition. They run the staff meeting. They own the number. They make the calls that the CEO would otherwise be making alone or that a missing executive layer is failing to make.

If the engagement does not include those three things, you are not hiring an Interim President. You are hiring a consultant with a different business card.

The Toronto market sells the title loosely. Three things commonly show up as Interim President engagements that are not the real thing.

• A six-week advisory wrapped in an interim contract. The advisor builds a deck, presents recommendations, and exits. The team they advised is still the team executing.
• A one-day-a-week "fractional" engagement. Useful for some companies. Not what most CEOs need when the number is missing. Presence matters when a leadership team is misaligned.
• A search firm placement marketed as interim. The interim is really there to keep the seat warm while a permanent hire is recruited. Nothing changes underneath.

Each of those has a place. None of them is what you want when the revenue plan has missed three quarters in a row and the leadership team is no longer aligned on why.

Three questions that separate the work.

If you are interviewing someone for an interim engagement in the GTA, ask these three. The answers tell you whether you are talking to an operator or a consultant.

1. Who reported to you in your last operating seat?

This filters fast. Operators have run leadership teams. They can tell you who reported to them, what those people did, and what changed under their leadership. Consultants will pivot to "the executives I worked with." Hear the difference. One sat in the seat. One did not.

2. What was your number, and did you hit it?

The number being missed is the entire reason this engagement exists. The person you hire should be able to name a number they owned and tell you what happened. If they own the number now, they will own yours the same way. If they have never owned a number, they will not start with yours.

3. What does the first ninety days look like?

Operators have a system. Mine is the H.E.L.P. Operating System. Four phases. Hear, Evidence, Learn, Proceed. Different operators name it differently. They all have one. If the answer is vague, the engagement will be vague. The first thirty days should be primarily Hear and Evidence. Not slide decks. Not workshops. Listening tours with specific outputs.

The advisor builds the deck. The operator runs the meeting where the deck is no longer needed. Chris, on the difference

What good looks like in the GTA specifically.

A few things are true about Toronto and the broader Ontario tech corridor that matter for this hire.

First. Most B2B SaaS in the GTA sells primarily into the United States. Your Interim President needs to have sold into that market personally, not just managed people who did. Cross-border GTM is its own muscle. Pricing assumptions, timezone discipline, partner motion, and channel design all look different than what works for a domestic Canadian buyer.

Second. The local talent pool is small enough that references matter more than resumes. Ask for three people who reported directly to your candidate. Talk to all three. Listen for whether the team felt clearer or more confused after the engagement.

Third. The cost of getting this wrong is one to two quarters of momentum. That is the real frame. Not the fee. The opportunity cost is the meeting you postponed, the hire you held off on, and the deals that did not close while the leadership team waited for clarity.

What to avoid.

• A bench of generalists. If the firm assigns whoever is available, you are renting capacity, not buying expertise. Hire a named person.
• Vague pricing models. Fixed scope and fixed duration win. Hourly rates without an end date drift into permanent engagements at consultant cost.
• Reluctance to own the number. If they hedge on whether they will own a specific outcome, they will not.
• "We will build a plan and hand it back." A plan handed back to a team that was already overwhelmed solves nothing. The work is to execute the plan, not deliver it.

What I do and do not.

For full transparency. I take one interim engagement at a time. I sit in the President or CRO seat for a fixed period, usually 6 to 18 months. I own the number. I run the leadership team's operating rhythm. I leave a hired successor or a working system underneath. My background is here.

I do not run advisory retainers. I do not attend monthly board meetings as a paid observer. I do not run engagements where the work is to produce a recommendation and exit. Those are different products and there are good people who do them.

If what you actually need is a three-hour strategic session to pressure-test a plan, that is here. If what you need is the seat taken, apply.

The GTA does not have an Interim President shortage. It has a clarity shortage. Hire for clarity. The rest follows.

Last updated · May 2026