Sunesis provides services to help fast-growing businesses blossom
Sunesis Consulting is akin to a physician.
But instead of helping maintain physical health, it diagnoses potential risks to the health of a company’s corporate culture, business practices and governance structures while prescribing the required “medicine” to avoid toxic decisions and environments that can shorten its lifespan.
Lori Caltagirone, chief executive officer and president of Sunesis Consulting, can think of plenty of analogies to describe the Calgarybased company she founded almost 14 years ago.
But its reason for being can be summed up in one simple statement: Sunesis helps fast-growing companies be better.
From providing organizational diagnosis such as process and internal controls evaluations and internal audit services to whistle-blower investigations to board evaluations, Sunesis helps innovative and entrepreneurial firms map out their futures.
And it has the track record to prove it.
“Because we are a boutique organization, we have worked with over 50 clients,” she says, adding a few are now listed among the 60 largest companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Sunesis is particularly adept at helping small firms with innovative products and services grow into large players in their industries.
These firms may not be the big blue-chip companies, but they are often market leaders.
It’s a prowess that has made Sunesis an indispensable consulting and advisory firm — competing in the same space as multinational companies with thousands of employees.
“What really sets us apart is we focus serving the needs of the Calgary and area business community,” she says about the firm of a little more than a dozen employees.
And success draws the successful. Sunesis’s stellar reputation has allowed it to attract top-notch consultants and advisers.
“These are individuals who have led organizations in the past with experience in particular areas that are meaningful to fast-growing entrepreneurial organizations,” she says.
“So they understand well the growing pain points and can help navigate organizations through the pitfalls
they’ve been through themselves.”
Its team often aids enterprises to develop processes that these companies would struggle with on their own — like supply chain management, corporate governance and risk mitigation.
“When you’re a highgrowth organization you tend to run lean so you often don’t have that wide-ranging
kind of corporate expertise,” Caltagirone says.
Sunesis specializes in tending to those corporate sore-spots, so its clients avoid “Frankenstein,” haphazard growth, especially in this age of disruptive technology.
“Robotics, artificial intelligence and blockchain — these all have big impacts companies often don’t fully understand,” she says. “We help organizations understand the impacts of these emerging technologies on their business processes and the risks they introduce, so they can be impactful and productive as these technologies become commonplace.”