Meeting Facilitator Profile
Bruce Withrow, Toronto

Bruce founded Meeting Facilitators International in 1992 after recognizing the growing need by senior management for professional meeting facilitation. Since then, he has facilitated over 900 strategic planning sessions, corporate retreats, customer advisory boards, and conferences across Canada, the United States and Europe.

Business-focused and results-driven, Bruce is accustomed to working closely with both senior management teams, and their boards. And while his clients hail from a wide range of industries with a number of distinct challenges, they all share one overriding objective: to reach agreement on an effective plan of action based on a thorough, productive, and participatory debate of the issues.

And that’s where Bruce comes in.

A skilled, neutral, and independent facilitator, Bruce navigates his clients through high-stakes meetings, keeping them on time and on task regardless of how demanding the group or subject matter may be.

With strategic planning clients ranging from Fortune 100 businesses and venture capital backed companies to not-for-profits and associations, Bruce has gained a tremendous depth and breadth of experience. His customer advisory board clients include pharmaceutical and medical device companies who regularly use advisory boards, as well as companies from many other industries who are just considering their first advisory board meeting. Bruce has also provided teams of facilitators for a fascinating array of conferences for clients like Health Canada, Genome Canada, and the Canadian Curling Association.

The variety and sheer volume of his experience – combined with his ability to quickly assimilate and master new and often esoteric material – has often led to meeting participants expressing surprise upon learning that Bruce isn’t actually trained in their fields.

Bruce earned his Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto, where he had a dual major in Commerce Economics and Computer Science. He began his career at KPMG where he articled and obtained his CA designation (the Canadian equivalent of the American CPA) before moving on to Scotia Bank as a computer audit specialist. In 1982 he joined AMP of Canada, where he held a variety of senior management positions for the next ten years. It was while he was at AMP that Bruce recognized the need for independent facilitators.

“Our neutrality and objectivity are highly-valued by our clients. We are probably the only people in the room who don’t have a stake in the outcome, which puts us in the best position to be impartial and unbiased. And by taking over the facilitation of the meeting, we allow the CEO or chair to participate in the meeting in a way they never could before. This – combined with our experience and our toolkit – is what we bring.”

From 1990 to 1994 Bruce also served on the board of Strategic Leadership Forum in Toronto , where he was the innovator behind one of their most successful series of events and the chair of their most successful conference ever.

For more information about our services or about the other facilitators who work with Meeting Facilitators International in Toronto, Chicago, and Montreal Canada please Contact Us.