One ask started all of this: Help me step into the role, and help me with my board.
Four lines of work grew from it.
Helping a small board do its best work, from strategy to oversight.
An annual board education day is often the simplest first step. It gives directors shared footing, surfaces the real questions, and shows quickly where deeper help would pay off.
Ten Questions For You takes five minutes on your own, about your own work as a director. Twenty Questions For Your Board takes twenty minutes together, about how your board actually works. Neither one scores you. They point you at the one thing worth doing next.
For the executive director in the hardest stretch of the job.
The first 90 days set the tone for the next three years. You do not have to work them out alone.
Being known before you need to be.
Most organizations meet their community when something is already at stake. A change people did not expect. A decision that affects a neighbourhood. A funder or a government asking questions. The work is far easier when the relationships are already there.
Doing good work and being known for it are two different jobs. Most organizations only have capacity for the first. We make the second one manageable. Whether you are a settlement agency preparing for a community meeting, or a business association whose members need to be heard by the town they operate in, the craft is the same. Listen first. Accept what you hear. Build from there.
Who Knows You Before You Need Them is a fifteen-minute self-check on the relationships outside your organization’s walls, and whether the right people would take your call before you needed something. It ends with three things you could do this quarter.
Straight, trusted counsel for the moments you would rather not handle alone.
The conversation you keep putting off. We help you get it right.
Most people are not. That is what the first conversation is for.