A fair, honest question tends to come up early in a first conversation with a leadership team I haven't worked with before: have you done this in our industry, and are you actually local. It's a reasonable thing to want to know. It's also, once you look closely at what the work actually is, answering the wrong question.
What the methodology is actually made of
A Keel engagement runs on a small set of structural pieces: a strategy map built around four fixed perspectives, a contribution matrix that scores who's genuinely positioned to move each priority, an OKR discipline derived from that scoring rather than written in isolation, and a performance rhythm that turns all of it into a recurring habit instead of a document. None of that is industry knowledge. It's a structure for how a group of people argue through priorities together and hold themselves to revisiting the argument.
Compare that to what genuinely would require sector-specific expertise — someone optimizing a production line needs to understand that production line; someone advising on healthcare regulation needs to understand that regulatory environment. That's real, earned domain knowledge, and it's a different kind of thing entirely from what a strategy execution workshop does. The four perspectives — financial outcomes, how you're seen by customers, what you do exceptionally well, what you're building for the future — are deliberately generic categories, because every operating business, regardless of what it makes or sells, has to answer some version of all four.
This is also why the client owns every piece of what comes out of a session, not just in the loose sense that it's "their strategy," but literally: the strategy map itself is distilled from their own knowledge and documentation — what they already know about their market, their numbers, their operations — not a framework I'm importing from outside and asking them to adopt. I bring the structure. The content was always theirs.
Where geography actually matters, and where it doesn't
I'm based in Toronto, and most workshops run in person with teams here — that's a real, practical fact about how the work happens day to day, not a limit on who it can serve. For teams elsewhere, I'll travel, or the whole thing runs just as well hosted virtually. The parts of an engagement that benefit from being in a room together are the same parts that benefit from it regardless of where that room is, or whether it's a room at all: the live argument over focus, the discomfort of a contribution score someone disagrees with, the moment a team commits to a weighted priority out loud in front of each other. None of that requires me, specifically, to be nearby. It requires the argument to happen, in person or on a screen.
What doesn't survive distance is the same thing that doesn't survive an ordinary week, wherever the workshop happened: the habit of coming back to it. That's the actual risk in any engagement, not geography.
The honest version of the question
So the better question isn't "have you worked in my industry" or "are you nearby" — it's whether the structure itself holds up once the room empties out. That's true whether the room was in Toronto or a set of video tiles, and it's true regardless of what the business actually makes or sells. The methodology doesn't know the difference. It was never supposed to.