Jer's Bio

Provided 2026-06-12. Captured verbatim. This may be (or overlap with) the content behind the password-protected About page on wilddogsleadership.com (see Questions for Jer, Q13).

I grew up on a farm on the prairies of western Canada. As a young adult in 2000, I moved to the savannah of East Africa where I was involved in community and spiritual development. Living with the Maasai people I was inspired by their culture of shared leadership. I studied together with the elders at the Leadership Training Institute of Nairobi and we brought our learnings back to the community and created a unique leadership program for Maasailand. In 2006 we left Africa and returned to North America where I worked for a multinational food company for 15 years. Their vision was to be "the best Canadian food company in the world." I led their human resources department and we saw tremendous growth. During this time I completed my Masters of Leadership degree and we grew our family. Entering my middle age I became trained as a 'Stephen Minister' which provided me skills to support people to recover from trauma. In 2020 our family left Canada and moved to Asia to start a new season of life and develop another set of lenses on the world. My wife and I lead a team doing a variety of transformational work in different SE Asia countries. I also consult with different organizations from Canada and Asia in the areas of leadership, team building, and human resources. We just became empty nesters and it sucks. What excites me is to see people and communities grow and flourish, starting with my family. My favorite animal is the wild dog and I love their unique example of team leadership, execution, resilience, family, and love.

What this adds to the plan (analysis)

New facts the strategy didn't have:

1. He lives in SE Asia, not North America. The plan's pricing, scheduling, and "15-country pack" economics (Questions for Jer, Q10) now have a home base: cohorts run from Asia time zones; the Canada/NA market is the remote one.
2. B2B pipeline already exists. He currently consults for organizations in Canada and Asia on leadership, team building, and HR. The org-paid cohort (Strategy Brief, "Beyond the course") starts from warm relationships, not cold sales.
3. He has built a multiplication model before. The Maasailand leadership program — studied with elders, brought it back, created a contextual program the community ran — is the Wild Dogs Guides move, already executed once. Stephen Ministry (lay caregivers trained to multiply care) is a second multiplication model he's lived from the inside.
4. The faith thread runs through the whole life — community and spiritual development, Stephen Ministry, "transformational work" — and is consistently worded obliquely in public. That's data for the faith-positioning fork (Questions for Jer, Q5–6): the two-streams instinct matches how he already writes about himself.
5. Trauma-support training (Stephen Minister) — relevant credibility for the depth of work the cohorts open up, and a safety competence most leadership programs can't claim.
6. Credentials for the B2B buyer: Masters of Leadership; 15 years leading HR at a multinational food company ("the best Canadian food company in the world" — likely recognizable to Canadian buyers).
7. Story corpus seeds (Q15): the prairie farm, the Maasai elders, the Nairobi institute, the food-company years, becoming a Stephen Minister, the empty nest ("and it sucks" — that sentence is the voice). The origin arc — prairie farm → African savannah → multinational boardroom → SE Asia — is an About page, a podcast-guest hook, and chapter one of The Wild Dogs Way.
8. "Starting with my family" — his own definition of flourishing starts at home. Raw material for the Q1 goal answer in The Path.