Meet Laura A. Gray: The Founder Behind Altevere
Ask Laura A. Gray what she does, and the answer is simple. She finds the people and partners that growing companies need to get where they're going. Ask how she learned to do it, and the story starts somewhere most executives never look: at the kitchen tables of family businesses.
Where it started
Laura began her career in family business mediation, working with owners on the disputes that surface around succession, legacy, and the ordinary friction of running a company together. It taught her early that the hardest problems in any organization are rarely technical. They are human.
She carried that lens into her role as Partner and Chief Partnership Officer at a Canadian multi-family office, stewarding relationships with ultra-high-net-worth families across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. As those families acquired and invested in companies, they increasingly asked her for something else: the leadership those companies depended on.
Relationships that move capital
That work became a career. As a Chief Partnership Officer and later a fractional CPO, Laura has facilitated millions of dollars in capital partnerships across Canada, the United States, and Europe, connecting founders, investors, and strategic partners through networks built on trust. It is where her personal line comes from: relationships that move capital.
She went on to found Gray Executive Search, a retained CxO search firm serving family businesses and family offices in Canada and internationally, placing the executives who reset what a company can achieve.
The insight behind Altevere
Across all of it, Laura kept seeing the same thing. An enormous amount of exceptional female executive talent had stepped back from full-time roles, not because it stopped being capable, but because one full-time seat was no longer the right fit. Women who had led companies, closed financings, and navigated every kind of complexity were sitting outside a system that had no way to reach them.
Altevere is her answer: Canada's premier fractional executive consulting firm for SMEs, built as a team of like-minded senior female executives who take on client work together, share what they know, and hold each other to a high standard. The founding team, known internally as The First 10, brings CEO, CFO, COO, and CPO experience to the companies carrying Canada's economic agenda forward.
Rooted in the Atlantic
Laura is a proud Nova Scotian, and her approach is relationship-first because that is how business works where she comes from: your word and your reputation travel ahead of you. Her great-grandfather, Captain Daniel MacDonald of Newfoundland, spent his life at sea and never lost a single crew member. She thinks about that often. The people who work with you and alongside you are not a resource to manage. They are people you are responsible for.
Beyond Altevere
Laura is also the founder of CanadianPolicy.com, a non-partisan civic platform helping Canadians understand the policy decisions that shape their lives. She serves on the WILL Executive Council Canada, volunteers with Daya Ventures, a female-focused health tech accelerator, and holds a BA in Political Science from Acadia University and an MA in International Policy and Diplomacy from Staffordshire University.
What's next
Her goal for Altevere is clear: to make senior female executive leadership a normal, valued part of how Canada's growing companies are led, starting with the SMEs in defence, energy and critical minerals, and healthcare and life sciences that will shape the country's next decade.
"Every Altevere engagement is personal to me," she says. "Whether you're a company that needs leadership right now, or an exceptional executive looking for a team that matches your capability, this was built with you in mind."
Facing a leadership gap in your business? Tell us what's happening.
Book a Diagnostic