A year ago I took over as Chair of Advocis Ottawa.
The first question I started asking, out loud, in meetings where it was not particularly welcome, was this one.
Why are we putting people in a room?
Not “who should we book.” Not “what’s the topic.” Just, why the room.
Because in-person events are not cheap. Venue, food, AV, staff time, the volunteer hours nobody sees. And if the answer to “why the room” is that we have a good speaker with a good topic, that is not a good enough answer anymore.
We can do good content virtually. That is the problem.
If the whole value of the session is the content, we can deliver that virtually. And frankly, we can deliver it better.
Virtual means the speaker can be in Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, anywhere. We are not limited to who happens to live within driving distance of Ottawa on a Tuesday morning. The quality ceiling on a virtual session is genuinely higher because the pool is bigger.
I know nobody is thrilled about that. I know you would rather be in a room. I would too.
But if I ask you to block a morning, drive out to a hotel, eat a breakfast you did not need, listen to a presentation, and then leave, I have taken three hours from you and given you back something I could have emailed you a recording of.
That is a bad trade. And people stop showing up when you make it enough times.
So here is the filter we landed on.
If it is a high value topic and nothing else, we run it virtually.
If we are going to put people in a room, the room has to be the point. Community first. Networking first. Seeing people you have not seen in a year. Meeting the accountant you have been meaning to call. Standing beside a carrier rep and actually talking instead of trading emails for six weeks.
High value content still has to be there. That is table stakes. But it cannot be the only reason we asked you to drive somewhere.
Everything we have run in Ottawa this past year has been built on that filter, and it has changed what we say yes to. Some good topics got moved to virtual. Some good in-person ideas got killed because the connection piece was not strong enough to justify the cost.
We have some strong things coming for the end of the year too, and I will get to those.
But that filter is why the thing I actually want to tell you about looks the way it does.
We built the big one.
September 28, 29 and 30 in Ottawa. Brookstreet Hotel out in Kanata, which if you have not been is a genuinely nice property in the west end.
We are calling it Strategies for Success 2026. The theme is Future-Ready.
Three days, and each one is doing a different job.
Night one is Mike Downie.
Monday the 28th. Registration late afternoon, tapas and networking, then the opening keynote, then dinner.
Mike Downie is a documentary filmmaker and the brother of the late Gord Downie. He is also a co-founder of the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund. His keynote is about storytelling, leadership, and meaningful impact.
Here is why I wanted him specifically, and it is not because of the name on the poster.
Storytelling is the actual skill in our business. It is the thing that separates the advisor who explains a strategy from the advisor whose client repeats that strategy to their spouse at the kitchen table that night in their own words.
You already know your products. You know the tax treatment. You know the illustrations. What most advisors are short on is the ability to make a family feel something about a decision that will not pay out for thirty years.
Mike has spent a career doing exactly that with material far harder than ours.
And it is the right way to open, because the dinner that follows is where the room actually forms. You are not walking out at 8:45 in the morning. You are sitting at a table with people, having had something worth talking about handed to you.
Day two is the full program.
Tuesday the 29th. Breakfast at seven, doors and exhibitors, then a full day.
Elke Rubach opens with the morning keynote. She is a former lawyer who built her practice around the family rather than the product, and her session is on future-proofing family wealth. Her core argument is one I keep chewing on. A collection of sophisticated strategies is not the same thing as a coordinated plan. If you work with business owners or multi-generational money, that one should sit a little uncomfortably.
Then Underwriting Unplugged, moderated by Reh Bhanji at Desjardins. Then a panel on the future of wealth covering portfolio management outlook, seg funds and dealer operations.
Afternoon is a carrier session with Brent Swatuk from Desjardins, then AI and the Future of Advice, which is practical application rather than theory. Then Craig Gauthier does a session called No Rules, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Brian Haney closes it out. His keynote is on sellability, on building a practice that is profitable, scalable, and worth something to a buyer. Shark Tank mindset, applied to your own book.
That last one matters more than people want to admit right now.
A lot of you are on one side of that transaction or the other in the next five years. Either you are buying, or someone is going to make you an offer, or you are going to find out the hard way that what you built is a job and not an asset. Very few people are having that conversation honestly.
We end at the Options Jazz Bar. Because of course we do. See the filter above.
Then we golf.
Wednesday the 30th is the Advocis Ottawa Charity Golf Tournament at The Marshes, which is right there at Brookstreet.
Late September in Ottawa is the best golf of the year and it is not close. Cool mornings, no bugs, the leaves are starting to go.
Grab a foursome. Bring a client. Bring the accountant you keep meaning to build something with. It is for a good cause and it is the third community day in a row, which was the entire design intent.
Why I am telling you this.
I have not sent one of these in a few weeks. This is part of why.
But I am not writing to you just because I am the Chair and I have registrations to fill. I am writing because I think this is the best one day conference we have put together in this city, and I do not say that casually.
The content is future-facing. Not “AI is coming” future-facing, which is a session nobody needs anymore, but practical questions about what planning looks like in five years, what a practice is worth, how you buy one, how you sell one, how you tell a story that makes a family act.
And it is built on the filter. Every hour of it is either high value content or deliberate connection time. There is no filler in there because I would not have signed off on filler.
You do not need to be in Ottawa to come. Fly in on the Monday, keynote and dinner that night, full program Tuesday, golf Wednesday, home Wednesday night. That is a tight, high density trip and Ottawa in late September is worth the flight on its own.
You also do not have to do all three. Come for the conference. Come for the golf. Come for one and stay because you ran into someone worth staying for.
I will be there the whole time. If you come, find me. I would rather have twenty real conversations that week than two hundred impressions on a post.
Details, full agenda and registration are here:
Talk soon,
Andrew