We are Frank. Honest. Bold. No nonsense. No guff.

With a healthy sense of humor.

WHO IS FRANK

Jane Francisco
CEO + Founder

Jane is a brand builder, entrepreneur and transformation leader who has spent her career seeing change coming, moving early and reinventing businesses for what comes next — first through ventures of her own, then inside some of North America’s largest media corporations.
In just over a decade at Hearst, she restructured the business eight times as markets shifted and new opportunities emerged. Across leadership roles at Hearst, Rogers and Transcontinental, she led and reinvented iconic brands like Good Housekeeping, while launching new initiatives, merging businesses, building shared-resource models and creating new revenue streams. Along the way, she built major commercial partnerships with Walmart, Samsung, L’Oréal, Microsoft, Miele, P&G and many others — from emerging brands to global businesses.
At FRANK, Jane brings commercial instinct, a practiced ability to read change early and a knack for seeing what’s on the other side — what to preserve, what to rethink and what needs to be built next.

Barbara Dirks
COO + Founder

Barbara is a business builder, operator and investor who has spent her career moving between scale and possibility — leading complex businesses, reshaping organizations and turning strategy into something that actually works.
At BMO, she spent fifteen years in senior roles across Canada and the U.S., including COO of the North American commercial banking group and leadership of its renowned Institute for Learning. At RBC, she led strategy for a 26,000-person sales force. She went on to launch Silicon Valley Bank in Canada, become a venture capital partner and lead a SaaS company as CEO.
At FRANK, Barbara brings deep financial and operational fluency, a sophisticated read on talent and organizations, and an investor’s instinct for separating a promising idea from a business that can actually work — and scale.

Dr. Kelley Gurley
Digital Transformation

Kelley is a technology executive and growth advisor who has operated at both ends of the business spectrum — running the full tech stack and transformation agendas inside global pharmaceutical companies while helping founders scale from $1 million to $100 million and beyond.
With a PhD in Human-Centered Computing, she combines technical depth, enterprise scale and founder-side pragmatism — understanding that tech is only part of the equation; the real work is redesigning the business around it.
At FRANK, Kelley separates AI possibility from AI theatre — finding where technology can create genuine advantage and what it takes to make that advantage real.

Johnathan Jennings
AI + Growth Strategist

Jonathan is a product builder, operator and investor who turns AI from talking point into operating advantage. He has built the product, backed the company and now redesigns real business functions around the technology.
At Clio, Jonathan leads strategy and operations for the AI Centre of Excellence. Previously, he helped scale an a16z-backed AI platform to 200,000+ users and, as a venture investor, deployed $70 million across 13 Series A/B companies that went on to raise more than $800 million.
At FRANK, Jonathan brings a builder’s urgency and an investor’s discipline to the question that matters: where can AI actually change the business — and how quickly can we prove it?

We’ve built, transformed and scaled businesses inside global corporations, venture-backed companies and high-growth startups.

Growth. Disruption. Reinvention. Restructuring. New business models. We bring the pattern recognition that comes from having lived through it.

We bring that experience to mid-market and founder-led businesses — where senior insight can change the trajectory, without the corporate machinery.