About
Institutional discipline. Lived credibility. Under one roof.
Ace & Spade Group exists to close the gap between how good our clients are at their craft and how little support they have ever had running it like the business it already is.
Founder
Carlene Langridge
Principal & Founder · MBA
Carlene spent more than a decade inside a boutique Calgary wealth advisory, growing from Executive Assistant to VP Wealth and Senior Advisor alongside the founder. She built the client experience from the inside out, intake, onboarding, service cadence, and the quiet infrastructure behind 150-plus households and $160 million-plus in assets. That work taught her what it actually takes to run a small, high-trust practice well: clear structure, disciplined follow-through, and the humility to keep the client, not the advisor, at the center.
Her formal training, an MBA from the Haskayne School of Business, a Bachelor of Management, and an Equine Science diploma, sits underneath the work rather than in front of it. What matters is the lens it produced: a professional, not institutional, way of looking at a business. Rigorous, but built to fit the size and shape of the operation in front of her, not a template borrowed from somewhere much larger.
She has competed as a non-professional reiner for six years and has been in and around the horse community for far longer. That gives Ace & Spade Group something most advisors cannot offer western and equine business owners: someone who understands the seasons, the standards, and the cost of the craft, and who respects the way these operations are actually built. The values that hold up in a training barn, patience, precision, doing the work when no one is watching, are the same values she brings to every engagement.
The parallels run deeper than aesthetics. A well-run barn and a well-run advisory practice share the same fundamentals: earned trust, consistent standards, and systems quiet enough to disappear so the craft can lead. Carlene's role is to build those systems underneath western and equine businesses so the owner can spend more time on what only they can do.
The discipline of a boardroom. The fluency of the arena.
Mission
We build the strategic, financial, and client-experience systems that let western businesses run with the same precision their craft demands.
Vision
To become the advisory standard for the western lifestyle economy, proving an industry built on instinct and grit deserves, and can sustain, the same caliber of counsel as any other business.
Values
The five standards we hold ourselves to.
Precision
Every recommendation is built on the specific mechanics of the business in front of us. Precision is the only way this work holds up under pressure.
Earned Trust
Nothing here is transactional. Client relationships are built the way a good horse is built, over time, through consistency, one correct rep after another.
Fluent, Not Fond
Western-fluent, not western-adjacent. That fluency was earned in the industry, and it shows up in what we notice and never have to have explained twice.
Ahead of It
Good advisory does not wait for a crisis to open the books. We track the season before it turns and bring the answer before the client knew to ask.
Respect for the Craft
Building real infrastructure underneath a craftsperson's business is a way of telling them their work is worth protecting.
Why Two Practices
The same discipline. Two industries that deserve it.
Strategic Consulting and Equine Advisory are not separate businesses. They are the same standard applied to two audiences most advisors never learn to serve well at once. Our clients gain from a firm that has already done the translation.