About Dogwood Field Consulting

Our registered business

Dogwood Field Consulting is the official registered business name of our practice. We have operated from Geelong, Victoria since 2011, serving owners and leadership teams across manufacturing, professional services, retail, and regional enterprise.

How we began

The practice was founded by Margaret Chen and James Whitmore after both spent more than a decade in senior management roles — Margaret in manufacturing operations and James in professional services. They saw a recurring pattern: growing businesses reaching decision points where internal teams lacked the distance to evaluate options objectively, yet full-scale management consulting was disproportionate to the scope of the choice.

Dogwood Field was built to fill that gap — focused advisory for specific, high-stakes decisions rather than open-ended transformation programmes.

What we do today

We work with enterprises typically generating between $3 million and $80 million in annual revenue. Our engagements centre on executive decision support: helping leadership teams frame choices, gather evidence, test scenarios, and commit to a direction with confidence.

We are not accountants, lawyers, or IT consultants. We advise on the business decision itself and connect clients with specialist professionals when legal, financial, or technical expertise is required.

Our approach

Every engagement starts with listening. We spend time understanding your business context, the constraints you operate within, and what success looks like from your perspective — not from a textbook definition.

We favour structured analysis over intuition alone, but we also respect that you know your business better than any outsider. Our role is to bring rigour, an outside perspective, and a process that ensures nothing important is overlooked.

Our team

Margaret Chen — Lead Consultant. Former operations director with 20 years in Victorian manufacturing. Margaret leads Executive Decision Advisory engagements and strategic planning sessions.

James Whitmore — Senior Consultant. Background in management consulting and professional services partnership structures. James specialises in board advisory and succession planning.

Elena Vasquez — Research Associate. Handles data collection, market research, and document preparation across all engagements.

Values we hold

• Honesty about fit — We will tell you if we are not the right people for your situation and refer you elsewhere.
• Confidentiality — Everything discussed in an engagement stays between us unless you authorise otherwise.
• Proportionality — Our fees and scope match the size of the decision, not an inflated consulting model.
• Local grounding — We understand Australian business conditions, regulatory context, and regional market dynamics.

Community

We are active members of the Geelong Business Council and contribute pro bono advisory hours each year to two regional not-for-profit organisations through the Geelong Community Enterprise Network.