This article is part of our editorial series with Julia Kassam, a strategy and operations leader who works with early and mid-market companies on growth, partnerships, and investor readiness. This article looks at what tighter budgets are asking of organizations, and the second piece in the series looks at how the same conditions are raising the bar for what companies need to show investors when they go to raise capital.
Investment is slowing, capital is harder to access, and pressure to deliver returns is rising. Budgets now serve as one of the clearest expressions of how leaders set priorities and define what kind of organization they want to build.
Canada’s broader innovation goals make those decisions even more urgent. As the country tries to strengthen economic sovereignty and close its productivity gap, how leaders allocate capital will determine how much progress is possible.
Recent data underscores the point. The Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey found many firms plan to limit investment to maintenance levels. The CVCA’s H1 2025 Market Report shows venture investment down 26% year over year. And the OECD’s Economic Survey of Canada links weak productivity growth to underinvestment and slow technology adoption.
Julia Kassam has spent her career at the intersection of capital, growth, and leadership and she says this moment is a test of how ready leadership teams are to make adjustments.
“It’s all about adaptability now,” says Kassam. “Strong balance sheets are valuable, but they don’t guarantee resilience. The real differentiator is how much flexibility leaders can move resources to meet new realities.”
Kassam helped shape market strategy at the NEO Exchange (now Cboe Canada) and later led strategic growth initiatives for a major Canadian bank as it rapidly expanded its innovation business across Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
She now advises the Ontario Securities Commission’s Economic Growth and Innovation team on strengthening Canada’s capital markets.
I sat down for an interview with her recently and she kept returning to how budgeting exposes the connection between leadership and culture. Each decision, Kassam says, reveals whether a company can align ambition with capacity and sustain progress when resources tighten.
Strong companies treat budgeting as a living system rather than a once-a-year exercise. Done well, it tests assumptions, measures progress, and feeds learning back into the organization.
That loop, Kassam argues, is what keeps innovation alive when conditions are uncertain.
Inside the mindset of strategic leadership
Before our interview, she sent me a three-page briefing outlining the themes she wanted to explore. It was a level of detail I have not had anyone offer ahead of an interview in more than 20 years of reporting.
I came with a plan for what I wanted to explore, but her preparation immediately elevated the conversation. It helped us get deeper, faster, and provided a clear view of how she approaches complex decisions. The document read like a board presentation, framing problems, trade-offs, and priorities with the same precision she expects from leadership teams.
“If you can’t articulate what you’re trying to solve,” says Kassam, “no amount of money is going to fix that.”
That clarity shapes how she evaluates leadership. Budgeting forces choices about what to maintain, what to expand, and what to reinvent.
“Running the business is your day-to-day,” she says. “That’s the first bucket — it’s the work that keeps the lights on and ensures reliability. The second bucket is thinking about what you’re doing to grow the business. The third bucket looks at how we are going to change the business. Growth and change are two different things.”
For Kassam, that third bucket — change — is where innovation lives. It’s about experimentation, testing ideas, and building future capability.
“The best companies make change a permanent line item,” she says. “They review spending and progress frequently so they can pivot toward opportunities and retire what’s not delivering results.”
She recommends leaders use the “run, grow, change” framework as a quarterly pulse check, not an annual ritual.
Ask: Are we ensuring reliability? Are we building measurable growth? Are we funding future capability?
Revisiting those questions more often, she says, keeps innovation alive.
How leaders should think about budgeting
Kassam sees budgeting as a test of how well organizations learn.
“You can see the companies that thrive are the ones that turn strategy into execution and execution into learning,” she says.
She describes budgeting as an operating system that ties decisions, results, and feedback together. It determines how ideas move from concept to action and how resources shift toward what works.
When applied with discipline, the approach helps organizations stay balanced across three priorities:
- Run: Make decisions that protect reliability and sustain performance.
- Grow: Make decisions that build on proven success..
- Change: Make decisions that enable innovation and adaptability.
Kassam says most companies underinvest in the last bucket because running and growing feel safer, even though that’s what keeps them stuck in incremental progress.
“When budgeting becomes a live conversation, it keeps organizations learning and responsive,” she says.
She advises leaders to move away from annual budgeting and toward quarterly or even monthly reviews that ask: What bets did we scale? What did we retire? What did we learn?
That rhythm, she says, separates adaptable organizations from reactive ones. Companies using this approach are already pivoting faster under tighter conditions.
“Your ability to pivot quickly is what guarantees survival,” says Kassam.
In her work with boards, she reframes budgeting as capital allocation discipline and creating a system for translating vision into funded priorities. She calls it an adaptive funding model, one that evolves with markets and learning cycles.
Rather than locking resources for a year, Kassam believes strong leadership teams track leading indicators such as adoption rate, time-to-pilot, or proof-of-concept results. These signals show when to double down or stop.
She also encourages boards to use budgeting to uncover blind spots: What bets did we miss? What assumptions are no longer true? What barriers are slowing reallocation?
The answers often reveal whether a company’s budgeting process enables or limits innovation.
The leadership takeaway
Kassam argues budgeting is one of the few tools leaders fully control, even in downturns. It’s where vision meets execution.
Budgets reveal whether leaders reward adaptability, protect legacy, or create space for new ideas. The strongest executives use them to stay aligned, test priorities, and learn faster.
“Progress depends on how leaders make decisions when growth feels constrained,” says Kassam. “The companies that use budgeting to learn faster will set the pace for everyone else.”
Each cycle offers a chance to realign purpose, evaluate systems, and decide whether the organization is learning fast enough to stay relevant.
For Canada’s competitiveness challenge, clarity in resource allocation isn’t just financial discipline. It’s leadership in action.
To put this into practice, Kassam recommends making innovation a standing agenda item in every budget review and revisiting allocations quarterly to assess what’s scaling, stalling, or stopping. Progress, she says, should be measured by learning as much as by return on investment.
The “run, grow, change” framework should guide operating rhythm, not decorate slides.
Final shots
- Adaptability is built, not claimed. Treat budgeting as a learning system, not a spreadsheet.
- The next phase of Canadian innovation will be defined by how leaders fund experimentation, not how much capital they raise.
- Every line item is a leadership decision. The question is whether it keeps your organization running, growing, or changing.
