Second Cut, by LPT & Co.
LATE NUMBERS, BORROWED BOUNDARIES
The data you are handed about your own community was built for a region too big to be yours, by people who have never walked your main street. And it arrives after the fact.
You are still expected to plan programs, defend funding, and answer to a council or board on top of it. The earlier signals were always there. In what employers post. In what councils publish. In what the official record confirms later. They were just never gathered, cleaned, and read in one place. That is Second Cut.
second cut is intelligence
Second Cut is LPT & Co.’s community data practice, delivered as a managed service.
The name comes from the hayfield. The first cut is bulk. The second is finer, denser, worth more, taken from ground already worked once. Data behaves the same way. Collection is the first cut. What you receive is the second: signals cleaned, resolved to your own geography, and written in plain language decision-makers can act on. You get the intelligence. We carry the infrastructure.
Who we built this for
Second Cut is for the people who answer for a place.
For the councils and administrators who need the number a staff report needs, and what the councils around them decided. For the economic development offices that need to know who is hiring, who is building and who is moving in before an investor calls. For the planners who need growth, permit and demand evidence cut to their own boundary. For the workforce and training boards that need the whole labour market intelligence function run for them, monthly and bilingual. For the community organisations that need "we can feel demand rising" to become a fundable number. If you answer for a place, this was built for you.
IN OUR CLIENTS' WORDS
"We are a small team, and we publish like a much larger one now. Designed, in both languages, out on schedule every month, and data we can rely on."
Martha Rochon, Executive Director, Eastern Ontario Training Board
What lands on your desk
ACCURATE TO YOUR GROUND
Intelligence you can defend.
Most community data is aggregated to boundaries drawn for statisticians. Ours resolves to the township. Behind every answer sits a record we keep ourselves: the agendas, minutes and decisions of 42 Eastern Ontario councils, every meeting since 2018; over 1,000,000 job postings since 2021 from 63,000 employers, cleaned and deduplicated; building permits from 2016; the Financial Information Return for all 444 Ontario municipalities, 2009 to 2025; the taxfiler record, tax years 2017 to 2024. We run the collection, the cleaning and the archive in Canada, on hardware we own. Nothing here is resold. Every number has an address. Ask where any figure came from and you get a straight answer, because we keep the trail back to the source. A person reads every page before it goes out. When a signal is thin, we say so. When a late revision changes a number, we flag it. Our numbers get challenged. They are built for it.
How the work runs
A managed service, scoped to your mandate.
Three steps, and none of them are software. Email us the question, however rough. We build it from the record, checked, and written up with every figure carrying its source. You use it: staff report, council presentation, grant application, board pack, newsletter, yours to publish under your own name. Setup is 90 minutes: 30 minutes on day one and an hour in week one to confirm your boundary. After that your time is 30 minutes a month, and questions come back inside two business days. Tell us what you need to know and we will build one snapshot on your community at no charge, so you see the work before you decide anything.
Know your ground.
