Scope in writing, always
Even on a $50 job. Deliverable, dates, price, and what's explicitly excluded — sent before work starts, confirmed by you.
About
A small support practice, not a labour pool.
Canon Consulting provides reliable virtual assistant and business support to entrepreneurs and small businesses — helping them save time, stay organized, and improve productivity by handling the administrative, research, and data work that keeps getting pushed to next week.
The idea
Solve specific recurring problems. Don't sell generic hours.
There's no shortage of places to buy administrative help. Most of them compete on being cheap, and the hidden cost lands on you: work that has to be checked, instructions that have to be written twice, and output that arrives as a bare file with no explanation.
Canon Consulting is built the other way around. A narrow set of services, done to a standard where you don't have to inspect the result. A written scope before anything starts. A summary with every delivery. And a bias toward telling you the honest answer — including when that answer is "this isn't worth paying me for."
The business model is simple and I'd rather be open about it: I want the one-time project to go well enough that you'd rather hand me the recurring version of it than keep doing it yourself.
Positioning
I help busy business owners save time by taking care of repetitive administrative, research, and data organization tasks.
What Canon Consulting isn't
- Not a "we do everything" agency
- Not a race-to-the-bottom gig service
- Not a generic pool of hourly labour
- Not a reseller handing your work to someone you've never spoken to
Who you're working with
One person, start to finish.
You speak to the person doing the work. Nothing gets passed to a subcontractor you've never met, and nothing leaves here without me having read it.
In practice that means the standard doesn't drift between jobs, your preferences get remembered rather than re-explained, and the second month of any recurring task takes less time than the first.
Canon Consulting is newer, and the rates reflect that. What I'd suggest is judging the work rather than the tenure — the sample deliverables show exactly the format and standard you'd get, and a first project is deliberately small so the risk sits with me.
How I work
Six things I hold to.
These aren't marketing lines — they're the actual operating rules, and you can hold me to any of them.
Verify, don't assume
Every number, price, name, date, and link checked against an original source. No fabricated statistics or citations, ever.
Flag, don't guess
Where the source data is ambiguous, it comes back highlighted for your decision rather than quietly filled in with my best guess.
Your originals stay untouched
I work on a duplicate. Whatever happens, you can always go back to the file you sent me.
No silence
Replies within four business hours. A mid-point update on anything longer than three days, without you having to chase.
Say no when it's a no
If something's outside what I do well, you'll hear it on the call — not after you've paid for a mediocre version of it.
On AI
Used openly, and never as a substitute for reading the work.
I use AI tools for the parts of the job they're genuinely good at: gathering raw research material, first drafts, and working out the cleanup logic for a messy dataset. That's part of why turnaround is fast and the pricing is what it is.
What doesn't happen: unreviewed output reaching you. AI is confidently wrong often enough that a verification pass isn't optional — a single incorrect competitor price is enough to make a whole report worthless. So every figure gets checked, every link gets clicked, and the analysis section of any report is written by hand.
If you'd rather I didn't use AI tools on your work at all, say so and I won't. Some clients have policies about it, and that's a completely reasonable thing to ask.
Your data
- Client files are never used as samples or shown to anyone without written permission
- Each client gets their own folder; nothing is shared between clients
- Happy to sign an NDA before you send anything
- Files returned or deleted at the end of an engagement, whichever you prefer
If your work involves personal, health, or financial data with specific handling requirements, tell me up front so we can agree how it's stored before anything moves.
Fifteen minutes is enough to find out.
You describe where your week goes. I'll tell you what I'd take on first — or that I'm not the right fit for it.