Regenerative Business Through Acquisition Finds Its Form
System Innovation
Thought Partnership · Developmental Evaluation · Values-Based Organizational Design
A significant majority of Canadian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners are approaching retirement this decade. Without intentional succession, many of these businesses risk consolidation, erosion, or closure—taking with them the jobs, relationships, and place-based knowledge they hold.
Regenerative Capital Group (RCG) saw this moment not only as a risk, but as a critical leverage point. By bringing together entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) and regenerative development, the aim was to transition values-aligned leaders into these businesses—and support them to steward and evolve them as living systems, contributing to the long-term health of the communities and ecosystems they are embedded within.
I was invited early on by Cordell Jacks, Founding Partner and CEO, to provide strategic thought partnership in the design of the fund and its operating model, and to support the organizational development of the team as it formed. This work evolved to include the co-design and developmental evaluation of the application and selection process for the first cohort of CEOs-in-Residence.
The work unfolded in complexity. Integrating regenerative principles into a novel investment and acquisition model required constant navigation between structure and emergence. From a living systems perspective, my role was to help hold coherence across the evolving parts of the system—supporting the team to see interdependencies, surface generative tensions, and make decisions that strengthened the integrity of the whole.
What emerged was not a fixed model, but a developing one: a first cohort of capable, values-aligned leaders, early traction in capital formation, and an organizational foundation able to continue evolving. More importantly, the process itself built the capacity of the team to work in this way—meeting uncertainty not as a constraint, but as a condition for development.
As Cordell reflected, the partnership brought expanded perspective, clarity within complexity, and the ability to recognize opportunity within tension—supporting the work to move forward with greater coherence, intention, and possibility.
