Hello from Toronto

The Talkative TPM

I'm Rahul. I manage complex projects for a living, and I'm getting ready to buy a small business. Every Deal of the Week, I take a real Canadian listing apart and share what I find. Thinking about buying one too? Start here.

Open the deal files Meet me and my crew

Cartoon of Rahul, bearded and grinning in a black T-shirt, running after three walking file folders labelled with business listings. Three small robots carry folders behind him and little bots float overhead.

Also known as the Talkative TPM

You can call me Rahul.

ra·hul/ˈrɑː.hʊl/RAH-hool

That's obviously a real photo of me chasing businesses.

It's also an accurate reflection of my sprinting pace. Blistering!!!

The robots running behind me are my research crew. Claude and ChatGPT carry the folders. The little ones floating around are Grok, covering X so I don’t have to.

They read the listings I hand them, check the numbers, poke holes in my first impressions and ask every question I'd be too polite (or too introverted) to ask a broker or a seller.

They do the research. I work through all of it, then put together the Deal of the Week.

Day job, night shift

Project manager by day. Exploring businesses after hours.

By day I lead technical and business programs: steering committees, budgets, regulation, governance and a lot of people who need to agree before anything ships.

After hours, I bring that same discipline to small businesses. I read a Canadian listing the way I’d read a project plan, then consider where AI and automation could help—and where they wouldn’t:

AssumptionsWhat has to be true for these numbers to hold?
DependenciesWho or what does it lean on: the owner, one big customer, one supplier?
RisksWhat could break it, and who carries that risk after the sale?
First checkWhich document would I ask for before anything else?
DownsideIf it goes wrong, what does the worst year look like?

I write it up so anyone in the same headspace, thinking about buying a business like me, gets a head start.

Program delivery since 2015

Some things I do.

I turn messy, high-stakes work into a plan people can execute and keep the risks visible until it ships. A few examples I’ve been lucky to take on:

Banking

$45Mportfolio, 70-person program

Kept a major bank's cards, lending and open-banking work moving.

Steering committees saw the risks before they became surprises. I rebuilt a stalled business case and got it funded in eight weeks.

CRM

30%faster campaign delivery

Pulled a bank's scattered CRM and campaign stack into one delivery model.

Salesforce, Braze and SAS CI 360, with marketing, compliance and technology agreeing before the build. A 15-person matrix team through releases and UAT.

AINonprofit

50%less reporting effort

Delivered a nonprofit's first AI implementation.

Modernized a 20-year-old mentoring platform with Salesforce, Azure ML and an AWS-hosted LLM, and built the AI governance and procurement path from scratch.

Real estate

$950Kfunding secured