When everybody owns something, nobody really does. The work that falls between two desks tends to be the work your donors notice first. The Pattern. In a lot of the teams we meet, everything still runs through the founder or the executive director. Their calendar is full and their inbox is full, so they do…
Every time someone leaves, you find out whether the work belonged to your organization or to that one person. Most teams find out on the last day, when it is too late to ask. The Pattern. One person has carried a whole area of the work for years. Now they are moving on or moving…
When someone new joins your team, they should be doing real work within a few weeks. That only happens when the job is written down somewhere they can find it. If it lives in the heads of the people who were there first, every new hire starts over from zero. The Pattern. Most teams we…
A few months into using AI every day, the tools you built start answering with things you retired months ago. Here is how I audited my own AI setup like any other system, and why the cleanup was mostly taking things out.
Every donor engagement model I have been handed looks the same. A circle. Identify, cultivate, solicit, steward, back to the top. I think it looks more like a ski mountain.
Every founder-led firm runs a can-do list underneath it, made of everything the founder is capable of handling. It never shrinks on its own, and most growth plans get written against it rather than the shorter list of work only the founder can do. Here is what that costs, and where to start cutting.
Fall is when this gets decided. Everyone comes back, the calendar fills, and the report you bring to that first meeting sets the temperature for the giving season.
The fix is not complicated, but it is uncommon. Define what done looks like before the work starts, as the actual shape of it, not as a formality nobody looks at again.
Ask a firm leader whether their operations are working, and the honest ones will usually say some version of fine. Ask what is not happening because of it, and the answer gets longer. The 2026 Consulting Almanac asked 86 independent consultants whether operational friction had cost them anything in the last year. Almost none of…
