Founders Coffee: Jose Manuel – By Design, Not by Accident

The Speaker

Jose Manuel Castellon Alvarez is the Founder & CEO of IB7 Consulting Ltd., a Winnipeg-based firm building an AI-powered foreign direct investment intelligence platform for companies entering Canada and Canadian companies expanding into Latin America and Europe. His 20-year career was engineered on purpose — from steel and electronics manufacturing to senior aerospace roles at Honeywell and Boeing, followed by a deliberate pivot into IT Service Delivery and an MBA from Audencia Business School in France. He is now Lead Instructor of IT Service Delivery at Red River College Polytechnic and a mentor in PMI Manitoba’s Level Up Mentorship Program. Trilingual in Spanish, English, and French, Jose Manuel founded IB7 to solve a problem his MBA thesis uncovered: most foreign SMEs never apply for the incentives available to them — not because the money isn’t there, but because the information is broken.

The Talk

For 20 years, I engineered the path that led to IB7 Consulting — one industry at a time, one skill at a time, one deliberate move at a time. Steel mills taught me how heavy industry decides where to invest. Electronics and aerospace at Honeywell and Boeing taught me how multinationals choose one country over another. Then I made the move that surprised everyone: I left a senior aerospace role for an entry-level IT job. Everyone said it was a step backwards. I knew it was the foundation I needed. An MBA at Audencia Business School in France gave me an outside-in view of global trade — and a thesis topic that changed everything. I researched why foreign SMEs entering the United States rarely access available state incentives. The data told a clear story: Canada attracts over $35 billion in FDI every year, but most foreign SMEs never apply for the incentives they qualify for. The problem isn’t money. It’s information asymmetry. That gap became IB7. Today, IB7 Consulting helps companies cross borders with intelligence — not intuition. We deliver market-entry analysis, regulatory navigation, corridor expertise across Canada–Latin America and Canada–Europe, and soft-landing partnerships with on-the-ground country managers. And we’re building the next layer: an AI-powered FDI intelligence engine that combines data, machine learning, and a proprietary scoring algorithm to productize what consultants have traditionally done by hand. In this talk, I’ll share what I learned engineering a 20-year career, why I left Boeing, what my thesis uncovered, and how every deliberate move added up to a platform built on purpose. You’ll leave with three principles for building your own business on purpose — and the reminder that comfort is a tax on ambition.