--- description: Built for the way work is about to be done. Who runs the firm, how it operates on the methods it sells, and what that means for an engagement. title: The firm | Sterling North Partners --- [Skip to content](https://sterlingnorth.partners/firm#main) [STERLING NORTH PARTNERS](https://sterlingnorth.partners/?hsLang=en) Menu [Start](https://sterlingnorth.partners/start?hsLang=en) [Keep up](https://sterlingnorth.partners/keep-up?hsLang=en) [Go faster](https://sterlingnorth.partners/go-faster?hsLang=en) [Stay in control](https://sterlingnorth.partners/stay-in-control?hsLang=en) [How we work](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work?hsLang=en) [Cases](https://sterlingnorth.partners/cases?hsLang=en) [Book a strategy call](https://sterlingnorth.partners/talk?hsLang=en) [FR](https://sterlingnorth.partners/fr/?hsLang=en) The firm # Built for the way work is about to be done. Sterling North Partners exists because the interesting part of this shift is no longer the technology. It is the work itself, and almost nobody has rebuilt that yet. We would like to be the firm that helps a generation of companies do it properly. Why this firm exists ## Installing it was never the point. Electricity did not pay off when factories were wired. It paid off decades later, when owners stopped bolting a motor onto the old line shaft and rebuilt the floor around what the motor made possible. The wiring was the easy part and the least valuable part. AI is at exactly that moment, and it is happening in every industry at once rather than in technology companies alone. The tools are solved, everybody can buy them, and almost every organization has some. Very few have changed a single department. That gap is where the next decade of advantage sits, and closing it is not a technology project. It is operations work: mapping how the work really flows, rebuilding the parts that should not be done by a person any more, measuring the result on the department's own numbers, and putting it in the hands of someone who will still be running it in a year. That is the whole of what we do, and we think it is the most interesting problem in business right now. Who builds this ## Three careers, one vantage point. Most people arrive at this from one side. Philippe Marcotte has spent a career on three of them, which turns out to be what the work actually requires. #### The consultant Engagement Manager at McKinsey, leading AI and analytics transformation work at a time when that meant building real data infrastructure and getting organizations to operate differently, not buying tools, and later a partner at CYLAD, an industrial consulting firm, delivering AI-enabled systems inside complex manufacturing organizations. That is where the discipline comes from: business cases before money, gates, and measuring impact rather than activity. #### The operator Founder and chief executive of a venture-backed network of tech-enabled medical clinics, where he had to implement rather than recommend, and then live with the consequences every morning. Nothing teaches the difference between a good plan and an adopted one quite like owning both. #### The technologist Hands on the tools every day since late 2022: writing the prompts, breaking the agents, fixing the deployments, and running automated production workflows for years before that. He has seen what executive fluency does in an organization, and what its absence does, across more than a dozen of them. He has been following this shift closely for more than a decade, which is long enough to have watched several waves of it arrive, be oversold, and then quietly change everything anyway. The dated path below is the evidence for that sentence rather than a list of credentials. ![Portrait of Philippe Marcotte](https://sterlingnorth.partners/hubfs/Website%20redesign%20FY2026%20Q3/philippe-firm.jpg) Philippe Marcotte, Managing Director and Founder. Work is conducted in French or English, whichever the department actually works in. The path, by date ### This has not been a recent interest. In 2017 Philippe completed three Microsoft professional programs, in data science, in big data and for artificial intelligence. That was five years before the current wave arrived, at a point when most of the market treated all three as a specialist curiosity. The engineering licence, the process work and the project discipline came before it, which is why this reads as operations rather than as enthusiasm. - 2011Professional EngineerOrdre des ingénieurs du Québec - 2014Project Management ProfessionalProject Management Institute - 2016MBA, with the Dean’s Medal for the highest GPA in the cohortMcGill University - 2016Six Sigma Green Belt, and Certified Scrum MasterMcGill University, and Scrum Alliance - 2017Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science, in Big Data, and for Artificial IntelligenceMicrosoft - 2018Advanced Analytics TranslatorMcKinsey and Company - 2023Certified RPA Associate, and Certified Business Process ProfessionalUiPath, and ABPMP International - 2026Claude Certified Associate, and Claude Certified ArchitectAnthropic The habit underneath the list is the point. Every few years something arrives that changes how work can be done, and the useful response has always been to go and learn it properly rather than to wait for the consensus. That is the same instinct we bring to a client's department. Where that leads ## The method is in the system, not in anyone's head. The most interesting work happening at Sterling North right now is not being done for a client. It is encoding the way the firm works into agents and skills, so that the method runs whether or not any particular person is in the room. The diagnostic sequence. The way a value model gets built from a department's own volumes. The questions asked before a build is sized. The standard a deliverable has to clear before it leaves the building. Each of those is now written down precisely enough that a system carries it, rather than living in one person's judgment and being reconstructed from memory every time. That is not a productivity trick, and it is not about doing the work faster. It is the only honest answer to the question every buyer of a small firm should ask: what happens to the quality when the founder is on another engagement. The same controls we install for a client run here first. One common version the firm owns, personal copies people can adapt to how they actually work, a route for a good improvement to flow back into the common version, and a check on the output before anything goes anywhere. Quality stops depending on who was assigned. It also means Sterling North is its own first client. Every method we sell has been run on our own work before it reaches yours, and the ones that did not survive that never made it out of the building. > “If I cannot describe how I do something well enough for a system to carry it, I do not understand it well enough to sell it. Writing it down that precisely is the work.”Philippe Marcotte Where we are going ## What we are building toward. A young firm is allowed to say what it is trying to become. Here is ours. #### Growth without drift The test of the encoded method is whether the tenth engagement is as good as the first. Getting that right is what lets the firm take on more work without the thing clients value quietly leaking out of it. #### Whatever arrangement the work needs Some clients want the second build to happen without us, and we hand over so it can. Others want a technology function they never have to hire, and we run that for as long as it is useful. Neither is a better outcome than the other. What we will not do is stay on something the team could now do itself without saying so. #### The Integration Office as ordinary furniture Companies once had no project office, and now every serious one does. We think the same is about to be true of a function that turns AI demand into governed, measured capability, and we would like to have helped make that normal. #### Proof that travels Anonymized numbers from real departments, published, so the argument is settled by evidence rather than by whoever has the better deck. Small firms can do this. Large ones usually cannot. #### Quebec first, not Quebec only Companies here are the right place to build from: close enough to work with properly, and ambitious enough that this kind of work actually matters to them. The method does not care about the postal code, and the work travels. #### Senior people on the work No pyramid, no bench, no junior team learning on your engagement. As the firm grows, that is the thing we intend to protect first. ## Every engagement starts the same way. A thirty-minute call to find the situation and the first step, then a written scope you can take to whoever needs to approve it. Nothing before that is billable, and plenty of those conversations end with us saying you do not need us yet. [Book a strategy call](https://sterlingnorth.partners/talk?hsLang=en)[Or come work here](https://sterlingnorth.partners/careers?hsLang=en) The Future of Work Newsletter ## One sharp observation. Every two weeks. No noise. No product updates. Just Philippe's read on where work is heading and what it means for how organizations need to operate. Email Subscribe Bi-weekly. Unsubscribe anytime. We integrate AI into how departments actually work, then prove it on your own numbers. #### Situations - [Start](https://sterlingnorth.partners/start?hsLang=en) - [Keep up](https://sterlingnorth.partners/keep-up?hsLang=en) - [Go faster](https://sterlingnorth.partners/go-faster?hsLang=en) - [Stay in control](https://sterlingnorth.partners/stay-in-control?hsLang=en) #### How we work - [Sizes and ways](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work#how-we-work-sizes) - [How we build](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work#how-we-work-method) - [How pricing works](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work#how-we-work-pay) - [How we operate](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work#how-we-work-ourselves) #### Tools - [Scope it yourself](https://sterlingnorth.partners/scope?hsLang=en) - [The case for your department](https://sterlingnorth.partners/keep-up#keep-up-case) - [Size the firepower](https://sterlingnorth.partners/go-faster#go-faster-firepower) - [Define your ambition](https://sterlingnorth.partners/stay-in-control#stay-in-control-ambition) #### Company - [The firm](https://sterlingnorth.partners/firm?hsLang=en) - [Contact](https://sterlingnorth.partners/contact?hsLang=en) - [Careers](https://sterlingnorth.partners/careers?hsLang=en) - [Privacy policy](https://sterlingnorth.partners/privacy-policy?hsLang=en) [Book a strategy call](https://sterlingnorth.partners/talk?hsLang=en)[All case studies](https://sterlingnorth.partners/cases?hsLang=en)[All resources](https://sterlingnorth.partners/resources?hsLang=en) [+1 (438) 808-6929](tel:+14388086929)[info@sterlingnorth.partners](mailto:info@sterlingnorth.partners)[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sterling-north-partners) © 2026 Sterling North Partners Inc. 360-03, 55 rue de Louvain Ouest, Montreal, Quebec H2N 1A4. 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