The Founder with a Purpose: How Kandace Swaisland Stumbled into Fixing the Compliance Mess |
Kandace Swaisland never planned to start a consulting company. If someone had told her during her early days at a sprawling construction conglomerate that she'd eventually launch KAKScorp, she probably would have thought they were joking. At that point, she was too busy learning the hard way what it meant to work in systems at scale. Her time at that company shaped her into the leader she is today.
She was assigned to quality control across various projects, including airport projects, civil construction, and composite fiber technology. It was exactly the kind of chaotic, multi-faceted environment that either breaks you or teaches you everything about how organizations actually operate. Kandace learned. She absorbed. She survived. And then she climbed into the auditing side of things, where she watched over 200 companies a year explain their compliance processes—some of them remarkably well, most of them struggling like they were solving a puzzle with half the pieces missing.
That's when the real frustration set in. She had the qualifications. She had the tools. Her team worked year-round, but they still could not seem to get it right. The problem was not laziness or incompetence. The problem was that nobody was speaking the same language.
Here is the thing about compliance and quality systems: they are designed by people who think in spreadsheets and regulations, often implemented by people who think in workflows and outputs. These two groups rarely speak to each other. Auditors—and Kandace learned this the hard way—tend to be stringent, bureaucratic types who do not always keep up with how businesses actually modernize. They ask for........