About Us
We are a group of highly skilled and experienced consultants who solve business problems through a people and culture lens. We’ve worked with big name clients (1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Canfor, Visier) across a breadth of industries (franchising, technology, startups) to solve meaningful problems (increase operating capacity, scale culture, integrate mergers, attract great people, and more).
While our business looks very different now to what it once did, our commitment to our values hasn’t changed. We believe:
Who, not what - We celebrate that business is by people for people. We treasure relationships and partnerships.
Grow what you love - We embrace a growth mindset. We'll always choose impact over empire.
Evidence based - We use research and data to craft solutions. We uncover overlooked insights and apply them.
Simply beautiful - We leave it better than we found it. We believe the best solutions are simple to understand and implement.
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Our Team
Rhys Green
CEO & Co-Founder
Rhys is a dad, entrepreneur and avid (aka improving) tennis player. Rhys' values of learning, growth and family have influenced all his career decisions. He believes that if you’re not scared of the next step you’re probably in the wrong place. By the age of 27, Rhys was leading a team of 700+ indirect reports. It was there that the importance of culture was really solidified for him. Rhys’ love of solving people problems has always led to positions where competitive advantage is won and lost based on attracting, engaging and retaining people. Rhys lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife and two daughters.
Jerry Gratton
CPO & Co-Founder
Jerry is an entrepreneur, advisor, former People & Culture executive, and self-professed people-aholic. Recognized multiple times as a top HR leader, along with awards for Great Place to Work and Admired Culture, Jerry has 25+ years of experience building high performing teams across a variety of industries and companies. These include Crystal Decisions, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Aritzia, Mindfield, and O2E Brands. He has personally owned four businesses and helped countless other owners and leaders realize the benefits of a highly engaged culture. Jerry is a husband, father, home renovator, guitar hack and generally happy guy.
Jennifer Bennet
Senior People & Culture Consultant
Jen comes to Trailblaze as a former People & Culture executive and consultant with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and business background. She has build teams that last and led the P&C strategy, programs, and talent solutions for rapid growth startups and admired brands within North America such as Lush Cosmetics, Kit and Ace, Nurse Next Door and http://Later.com. What people love about working with Jen is her thoughtful radical candour and ability to quickly identify the root cause of performance and operational roadblocks. She listens and learns, asking the right questions to find creative solutions that unlock people’s potential and passion to do their best work, building teams that last. Oh, and did we say she gets shit done?! Jen is a lover of art and design, and a maverick at heart seeking new adventures in travel, skiing, and surfing with her two daughters.
Cayley Benjamin
Leadership Coach & Facilitator
Cayley is an experienced, Vancouver-based coach and facilitator who leads with kindness. She is an entrepreneur, mom, a certified yoga and meditation teacher and a lover of peanut M&Ms. With over 15 years of personal and leadership development program facilitation and coaching experience, her experience spans a spectrum of sectors and has included working with C-suite executives and people leaders in professional services, retail, tech, manufacturing, and mining, as well as professional athletes, yoga teachers, and entrepreneurs. Her last role in-house was as the Mindful Performance Manager at Lululemon where she designed and delivered personal and leadership development workshops and retreats to employees globally. As she’s in the early years of parenting herself, Cayley has a particular passion for supporting working parents as they navigate paid work and the highs and lows of parenting.
Christine Wendl
Leadership Simulation Facilitator
Christine is deeply passionate about empowering others to reach for the best version of themselves and to make a positive impact as leaders in their area of influence, no matter if you are a CEO of a company, a leader of a team, an entrepreneur, employee or a stay-home-mom. We all lead from somewhere! After 15 years of education, professional experience in leadership development, culture transformation, and learning from the best such as John Maxwell, today Christine does what she was born to do: training people from all backgrounds, industries and levels of leadership to become the ones to make the difference, to be leading examples of character, values and vision that others truly want to emulate and follow.
Ali Fillmore
Leadership Coach and Facilitator
Since the late 1990s, Ali has been designing, developing, and facilitating learning, leadership, and personal development programs, as well as coaching executives within the corporate environment. With levity and depth, she boldly challenges individuals and teams to break through barriers to achieve new levels of performance. Ali joined Trailblaze Partners in 2023
As a certified facilitator, coach, yoga + meditation instructor, and end-of-life doula, Ali combines her diverse skills to serve her clients holistically. Ali’s warmth and humour ease participants’ trepidation and create an open and engaging environment. This skill has served her well as she is trusted and relied upon as a coach and advisor for senior leaders across an organization.
Richard Jeremiah
Advisor
Richard is a deep thinking, people-focused and principled advisor with an unending passion for high performance. He counsels executives to breakthrough outcomes by helping them clarify ambition and direction, identify key performance drivers, uplift leadership competence and craft compelling narratives. Richard does this by leveraging his affinity for systematic and strategic thinking, deep understanding of the human condition and organizational dynamics, and diverse mix of professional and educational experiences. Over the past 20 years, Richard has amassed ten years' experience advising and guiding companies on strategy in both consulting and in-house roles, six years' experience building and leading high performing product teams in start-up, scale-up and mature technology companies, completed university degrees in Commerce (with honours), Political Science and most recently Psychology, and has over ten years’ experience training and competing at the elite level in distance running. During this time, Richard has worked with individuals and teams throughout Oceania, Asia and North America in the agribusiness, consumer goods, transport & logistics, FinTech, HRTech, eCommerce and Private Equity sectors.
Graham Carter
Advisor
Graham Carter is an entrepreneurial executive specializing in construction, engineering, technology, and clean energy, and he’s distinguished as one of Business in Vancouver’s Top 40 Under 40. He currently works as a principal at Vertex Developments and Maven Consulting, two companies he co-founded. At Vertex, Graham’s project structuring skills and investment savvy enable the company to create imaginative multi-family homes for the red-hot Vancouver real estate market. Maven, his utility engineering and construction consultancy, serves utility partners on large-scale infrastructural projects and made #70 on Maclean’s 2019 list. Starting out as an Auckland University of Technology graduate trained in Engineering, Electronics, Software and Business, Graham has repeatedly proven his talent for conceiving and leading companies that blend technology with profitability, and science with service.