Contour. North.
Contour lines are how an orienteering map describes terrain, every ridge, valley, and hillside drawn as a line you learn to read on the run. We know them well: we're both orienteers, and we've raced at many of the same events, each on our own course. Larry has orienteered since high school and competes well in his age category; both of us have raced at the World Masters Orienteering Championships in Spain. Ellice came to the sport later and is still climbing: she started on beginner courses where every control sits at an obvious trail junction, and now navigates by rocks, hills, and contour lines. Her knees haven't improved. Her navigation has.
Orienteering taught us the discipline we bring to consulting: read the terrain honestly before you commit, check your bearing often, and when you take a wrong turn, everyone does, recover fast and keep moving.
Read: The Man Who Never Gets Lost, the race trip that taught us we're both neurodivergent →
Ellice is Inuvialuk. Inuit of the Western Arctic, and her connection to the North is rooted in identity as much as geography. Her family comes from Banks Island; her career has run between Victoria and Inuvik, through Indigenous governance, a provincial legislature, and the boards of Northern organizations.
North is also what a compass finds: the direction you trust when everything else is unfamiliar. That's the promise in the name, and why our tagline is "Shaping your direction."
Orienteering: a timed race through unfamiliar terrain with only a map and compass. You choose your own route.
Four values. No poster required.
Say it plainly.
No jargon. No filler. If a sentence makes you squint, we rewrite it. That includes this website.
Finish the course.
Determination is our hallmark. In orienteering races we've taken wrong turns, collected wasp stings, and once navigated to the wrong marsh entirely. We still finished every race. Why it matters to you: projects go sideways too. Scope shifts, budgets tighten, key people leave partway through. Plenty of consultants hand back a hard problem half-solved. We adjust the route and get you there anyway.
Respect is practice.
Not a statement, not a poster. It shows up in who gets hired, how a board is supported, how an investigation is run, and how every person in the room gets heard.
Leave the map behind.
Good consultants make themselves progressively unnecessary. We build your people, your controls, and your bench, so what we chart together keeps working after we've gone.
The people on this website are the people who show up
Ellice Edey
Founder · Fractional HR · HR & Governance · SpeakingTwenty-eight years of making HR work in complex organizations: people strategy through transformation, compensation that survives board scrutiny, governance service and advisory, sensitive investigations, and culture people actually want to work in, paired with certified psychometric facilitation and applied AI. Inuvialuk, orienteer, relentlessly determined.
Larry Squire
Founder · Fractional General Manager · Project & OperationsThirty-five years of getting things built: estimating, procurement, contract and budget administration, safety and spec compliance, and the delivery discipline that lands projects on the number. As a fractional GM, Larry runs businesses the way he runs projects, with owner-level accountability.
She's sat in every one of these.
She has read the organization from every position, from the front line to the boardroom to owning the company. That is the vantage Contour North brings: the whole terrain in view, and the questions you cannot ask from inside it.
Everything we do is oriented from here.
The North isn't a market we entered. It's our reference point, the true north the firm is named for, and the vantage we bring to every room.
That's us. Now tell us about you.
Whatever terrain you're navigating, start with a conversation.
