We started in rural Alberta. Rural development is our passion.

Ground Floor Labs was built on the work of supporting organizations, entrepreneurs and economic developers in communities where the problems are real, the resources are thin, and the margin for a misdirected program is zero. We've done disaster recovery work in Wood Buffalo. We've supported Indigenous women entrepreneurs, New Canadian business owners, BIPOC entrepreneurs, and disabled entrepreneurs in communities across the province. We know what it looks like when a program is designed for a problem that wasn't properly understood because we've seen what it costs the people it was supposed to help.

That experience is where Build With Validation came from.

With a background in Community Economic Development, we've sat across from Economic Developers navigating real pressure from funders who need outcomes, boards who need defensible decisions, and critically, communities who need something that actually works. We built the BWV methodology because the gap we kept seeing wasn't execution. It was a problem definition. Organizations were building good solutions to the wrong problems, and there was no structured way to catch that before budgets were committed.

BWV is that structured way. The knowledge and skills are transferred permanently to the teams we work with. That's intentional; the goal was never to create ongoing work for GFL. It was to leave every community, organization, and team better empowered and equipped to run their next initiative on their own.

We still work primarily with rural and peri-urban communities, EDOs, and organizations serving entrepreneurs who don't always fit the template that most programs are designed for. That hasn't changed. What has changed is that we now have a methodology that works and a track record to demonstrate the benefits of working with Ground Floor Labs to Build With Validation.