Beyond Advisory.
Into Action.
A private management consultancy for mid-market companies — fractional leadership, workplace investigations, outsourced HR, and Canadian market entry. We work alongside you for as long as the situation requires.
In practice since 2019Operator-ledOakville & Toronto
Selected clients
Many engagements are confidential. Client references available on request.
Three practice areas, built around the decisions owners actually face.
We scope each engagement to the situation in front of us. The team, the timeline, and the deliverables are shaped by what the business needs — not sold from a catalogue.
Executive & Operational Leadership
Senior partners placed in your business with the authority to make the call — not only advise on it.
Explore the practicePeople & Culture
The full people function, from compliance and investigations through culture, leadership, and the harder conversations.
Explore the practiceGrowth & Transition
Long-form advisory through the inflection points — Canadian market entry, scale-up, succession, and the professionalization that follows. Multi-year engagements, embedded alongside the leadership carrying the business through.
Explore the practiceSelected engagements.
A nine-month fractional CFO engagement that carried a cleantech scale-up to its $12M Series A.
Embedded finance leadership, cash-flow discipline, and the board-ready reporting that made the round possible. Twelve million raised on the timeline the founder needed.
A UK mining-analytics platform built into a 12-client enterprise business in Canada.
Fractional operating leadership, Natural Resources Canada partnership, and enterprise business development over 18 months — $3.8M+ in contract value and every client renewed.
A confidential investigation for a recreation organization facing multiple harassment allegations.
Five weeks, 28 confidential interviews, one evidence-supported report to the board — followed by a separately scoped culture-remediation program.
They didn't just advise. They were in the room when we made the decisions that mattered, and they stayed until our own leadership was ready to carry it forward. Nine months in, the systems they built are ours — and we're still calling them when we need a considered second view.
Ghaleb El Masri
Founder & Managing Director
Most consultancies hand you a deck and leave. 1205 stays accountable for the work.
Ghaleb founded 1205 after COO and Chief Transformation Officer roles inside multinational businesses in Europe, with a Joint Global Executive MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School. His experience sets the operating standard: how 1205 diagnoses a mandate, shapes the engagement, and governs the quality of what is delivered — with a named lead accountable on every engagement.
About the firmStrategy is the easy part. Execution is where we stay.
The shape of an engagement matters more than the deck that opens it. Here is what we sign up for — and what we decline — before the first working session.
- Own the call. We sit in the meeting where the decision gets made, and we make it when it falls to us.
- Write the document nobody wants to write. The investigation report. The board memo. The restructuring plan.
- Stay longer than you expected. The exit is when your team is ready — not when the SOW expires.
- Leave systems, not slides. The cadence, the document, the policy you can run without us.
- Sell you a framework. The playbook gets written inside your business, not imported from a deck.
- Cheerlead. If the diagnosis is rough, you hear it on the first call — not the third.
- Staff juniors on the work. Senior practitioners carry the mandate — the people in the room are the ones accountable for it.
- Leave you dependent on us. Every engagement is designed to make us redundant.