About Us

Dave Macdonald is Yupana’s Principal Consultant. He founded Yupana in 2010 after helping several start-ups develop and grow into thriving organizations.

As a Certified Management Accountant, he has helped small businesses manage financial positions and grow into multi-million dollar organizations. He joined WPCG, now one of Vancouver’s premier IT and finance recruitment firms, a few months after it started and over 8 years worked as finance manager, compensation designer, strategist and business development specialist responding to government proposals. Dave was also one of the founders of Renaissance Bicycle Company, now Grin Technologies, that has grown into an international leader of customized electric bicycle components and technologies.

The companies Dave has worked with have gone on to flourish and have been backed by solid strategies and robust financial systems and processes. Dave’s subsequent focus on healthcare has led to successful turnaround of a medical practice and been essential in delivering the first balanced budget in several years for a non-profit clinic serving marginalized patients. Following a week-long trip to the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation in 2010, Dave has been developing business models and best practices for the business of healthcare in Canada.

Why Yupana Exists

Yupana Consulting exists because nearly 4-out-of-5 of organizations don’t make it to their 5th anniversaries.  This means that 80% of those creative, innovative, well-meaning projects that people are often so excited about simply aren’t getting where they need to go.  Yupana exists to ensure that clients become the 1-in-5 business that make it.  Long-term, we look forward to being one of the forces that reduces the number of good organizations that fail by at least half. We believe this is done by increasing organizational effectiveness.

What’s A Yupana?

A yupana is a device used by the Incas as a counting tool.  When most people think of ancient counting tools, they think of an abacus, but the yupana was exceptional in terms of sophistication, speed and accuracy, but required an equally sophisticated operator.

In November 2010, the Journal of Mathematics and Culture published apaper by two mathematicians at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.  Molly Leonard and Cheri Shakiban published the most in-depth and technical account of “la yupana” I’ve encountered to date and is a great resource for technical people interested in how to operate a yupana and learn about its history.