Over the next twenty years Manning continued to work as a management consultant using his firms – M and M Systems Research Ltd. and Manning Consultants Ltd. – to pursue projects of political relevance. These included the development of strategies to prevent investor owned utilities from being nationalized by their provincial governments; developing a model of federal provincial negotiations which enabled his firm to predict the outcomes of federal provincial conferences; and assisting energy companies to increase their hiring of aboriginal workers and purchases from aboriginal owned and operated companies. In an effort to stimulate economic growth in the depressed region of north central Alberta, Manning served for almost twenty years as the President and CEO of a duel objective – social and economic – enterprise named Slave Lake Developments Ltd (later renamed Spruceland Properties Ltd). When the company was finally sold in 2016 it distributed over $55 million in dividends to some 300 local shareholders – illustrating Manning's belief that economic development could be more effectively stimulated in a depressed region by "a better distribution of the Tools of Wealth Creation" than by income redistribution schemes.