Carter Powis is the Office Manager for Spencer Stuart’s Toronto Office. He leads the firm’s professional services business in Canada and also is a member of the global Consumer Goods & Services Practice. Since joining Spencer Stuart in 2001, he has recruited senior executives to organizations such as Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Sobeys, Forzani Group, Campbell Soup, Blockbuster, PwC, Virgin Mobile, Tennis Canada, Hewlett Packard, Hay Group, IBM, and TELUS. Carter is a winner of Spencer Stuart’s Lou Rieger Quality Award recognizing the quality of his work on behalf of the firm’s clients.
Carter brings more than 10 years of experience in a variety of general management and marketing positions in the packaged goods, foodservice and technology industries in addition to five years as a management consultant. Prior to joining Spencer Stuart, Carter was president and chief operating officer of Targetnet, a small, privately held company that specialized in building strong permission-based relationships with consumers through the use of innovative Internet advertising technology.
Before working at Targetnet, Carter was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he spent five years serving a number of consumer, retail and financial services clients in North America. Carter also acted as a faculty member for many of McKinsey’s training programs and as a recruiter for the company’s analyst and associate recruiting programs. Prior to McKinsey, Carter spent four years in marketing with PepsiCo’s Pizza Hut division — two years in Toronto followed by two years in Wichita, Kansas, as director of international marketing responsible for Latin America — and three years in brand management with Colgate-Palmolive.
Carter earned an M.B.A with distinction from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a bachelor of business administration with honours from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.