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The name is the story.
Contour North isn’t a name we brainstormed on a whiteboard. It’s where we come from and how we work, all in two words.
Contour North isn’t a name we brainstormed on a whiteboard. It’s where we come from and how we work, all in two words.
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.
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 trip that taught us every brain has its own map →
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.
The one you meet is the one who carries it through. No handoff, no getting passed to someone else.
The honest answer, even when it’s “you don’t need to pay us for this.”
A 100% Indigenous-owned firm, from ownership to the person doing your work. Lived identity, paired with real depth.
An Inuvialuk owner’s connection to the Western Arctic, and the perspective that comes with it.
Every course, finishedIn orienteering, the win isn’t running fastest, it’s reading the smartest line between points. We do the same for you: the clearest path, not a template. Said plainly, built properly, and with care for the people it’s for.
Determination is our hallmark. In orienteering we’ve taken wrong turns, collected wasp stings, and missed our share of controls. We haven’t run every race clean, but we always find our way back to the finish, a little sharper each time, and no one’s ever had to send a search party. Why it matters to you: projects go sideways too. Scope shifts, budgets tighten, key people leave partway through. We adjust the route and get you there anyway.
You can count on us being there: quick to respond, present when it gets hard, and still on it long after the initial energy’s worn off. Reliable when it counts.
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.
Twenty-eight years in complex organizations, from frontline HR to leading the people function to the boardroom. Ellice has led people and governance across the public and private sector, from a provincial legislature and Crown corporations to oil and gas, aviation, higher education, and Indigenous government.
She holds a BSc in Physical Geography, a BMgt with a double major in Human Resources, Organizational Studies and Industrial Relations, an MBA, and a Chartered Director designation. She’s a CPHR, a Canadian HR Awards finalist for Use of Technology, and qualified to administer more than ten assessment tools.
She took the geography degree for the field trips, which is only mostly a joke. Then in third year she took one HR course, and the terrain she wanted to read turned out to be people.
Ellice is Inuvialuk, and it shapes how she reads a room and a table. Outside work she orienteers, a sport that’s taught her to stay calm, adapt, and keep moving, usually after a few wrong turns she’s happy to laugh about.
Thirty-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. During his tenure as GM of a commercial construction company, revenue grew more than 200% at steady margins, opening public, institutional, and Indigenous markets. He runs a business the way he runs a project, with owner-level accountability.
Outside of work, Larry is a lifelong sports fan and player, baseball, curling, and orienteering, and he never turns down a chance to travel somewhere new and find good food while he is there. It is the same instinct he brings to a job: show up prepared, read the situation, and enjoy the work along the way.
That’s the edge she brings: the questions you can’t ask from inside your own organization.
That’s the other half of the edge Contour North brings: a builder who has stood at every stage, so problems surface in plain language while there is still time to fix them.
We take our bearings from the North.
Whatever terrain you’re navigating, start with a conversation.
