Level-headedness could be expected of a 48-year-old consultant who is regional managing partner of advisory services for MNP Inc., a major mid-market chartered accountancy and business advisory firm, and, indeed, Mackenzie Kyle has a strong sense of practicality.
Underneath, however, he has a sense of adventure and willingness to sample the unconventional – perhaps more so than others who are similarly schooled in the rational rigidity of mathematics.
For example, when Kyle was 29, he and future wife Laura bought a used sailboat in New Zealand and started to make plans to sail to Hong Kong.
"We had this crazy idea to sail somewhere," said Kyle, who had sailed throughout his childhood.
Australia had granted Kyle a one-year work permit, so he was based in Sydney working for what was then Booz Allen, doing consulting work for client Air New Zealand.
The year was almost up and the two, who had been living on a boat in New Zealand, were turning their sights to what would be next in their lives. They had a friend in Hong Kong who had invited them to stay in his large house, and they just had to figure out how to get there.
"A variety of things didn't make sense for the timing," Kyle said, revealing his practical side. "You've got to go in the right season, not the wrong season, because there would be storms and bad things happen.
"New Zealand was also in the process of changing regulations, which also made it more complicated. We would have had to have spent several thousand dollars more on safety equipment."
The duo's practical side convinced them to shelve recklessness and abandon plans to sail to Hong Kong through South Pacific storms, but it did not completely gut their penchant for adventure. They backpacked across Southeast Asia, visiting Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before ending up, two months later, in Hong Kong.
Loose Hong Kong employment restrictions enabled Kyle to find work as a consultant, so in 1996 he spent about eight months enjoying the waning days of British rule over what is now a special administrative region of China.
Laura returned to Canada to tend to her ill grandmother, and Kyle soon followed, putting her and family ahead of life as a globetrotter.
It's surprising that Kyle has stayed in Vancouver during the 18 intervening years given how peripatetic he was during the first 30 years of his life.
According to Kyle, his engineer father "got bored easily and changed jobs regularly."
That meant Kyle bounced between Maritime provinces, where he was born, to Ontario, Italy and Florida before graduating from high school in Kitimat.
He started pursuing a math degree at the University of Victoria and then moved to London, Ontario, to finish it at the University of Western Ontario.
Following a stint working in Toronto, he left for Hamilton to complete an MBA that was also part of McMaster University's co-operative education program.
That co-op component enabled him to work for two semesters at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and then stay on after his degree.
But Kyle was restless. He moved back to Victoria and landed a job at Manageering, a small consultancy.
"Mackenzie is always a positive, organized person, and no matter what problems you put in front of him to solve, he just makes things happen," said friend and Firth Group CEO Geoff Freer, who has worked with Kyle on projects such as the Lions Gate Bridge deck replacement.
"A lot of that stems from his expertise as an author and project management practitioner going back to his early days."
Indeed, when at Manageering, Kyle tinkered with a training program for project management work. It expanded and soon morphed into what would become Making It Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management.
Told in the form of a novel, the book's style was inspired by works such as Jeff Cox and Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement and David Chilton's The Wealthy Barber.
"I had about 75 rejections, so I self-published and sold about 1,500 copies," Kyle said as he sipped a health drink made and packed for him by Laura, who is a holistic nutritionist.
A couple of years later, after Kyle's Australian and Hong Kong adventures, U.S. publisher John Wiley & Sons accepted a renewed pitch and did a larger print run.
Daring to be an author was one indication that Kyle has an entrepreneurial spirit.
Another came when he left Arthur Andersen in 2002, months before that former consulting giant dissolved following a scandal surrounding shoddy auditing at Enron Corp.
Kyle launched his own company and, over a bottle of Beringer wine, decided to name it Beringer Group.
"The Beringer name wasn't taken in the province of B.C., and I was looking for a name that [made it sound as if] my company was bigger than it was," he explained. "It had brand recognition so people would say, 'I think I've heard of you.'"
They hadn't, of course, although they might have had fuzzy and pleasant memories of the wines, Kyle joked.
His firm operated for six years before Kyle merged it with MNP.
The mid-market MNP ranks with Grant Thornton and BDO in the middle tier of large consulting companies and is smaller than the big four consultancies in Canada: Deloitte, KPMG, EY and PwC.
It's also a full-service firm in that its B.C. region has about 75 people who work on the advisory side, which Kyle oversees, as well as 375 others who work on tax, audit and assurance matters.
The firm's aim to boost name recognition is also clear given that it plans to put its brand on Oxford Properties' 470-foot, 36-floor MNP Tower under construction at 1021 West Hastings.
MNP plans to lease 72,000 square feet on nine floors of the building wedged between the Marine Building and the Guinness Tower when it is completed this summer.
