This one word loses you the nonprofit client

Niculas, thank you for inviting me.

Well, you know, in some ways this started when I was a teenager. My mother ran a nonprofit for thirty years, and my very first job was in that nonprofit, pushing a broom and cleaning toilets, all for a very glamorous minimum wage of four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. and now that I look back, I see a pattern because as an adult, I've worked in nonprofits for more than twenty-five years. I was a nonprofit employee for little over 20 years. And then I set up nonprofit CFOs about six years ago because I saw that there was a tremendous need among nonprofits for just good financial and accounting type acumen that so many of them needed. And without it they were getting into trouble. And there were others that maybe they weren't in trouble, but they also had lots of missed opportunities. And I wanted to do more to help them get out of trouble and ideally to go from good to great and a part of that is having a strong back office.

Well, yeah, there there was something of a bet, and you know, a part of it was I I was ready to do something different. I've I come from a family of educators. My grandmother was an educator, my mom was an educator, my brother, my sister, my dad. and I you know, there are different personalities in the world, different kind of we feel drawn to different things and certainly I personally feel drawn to move the needle to make change happen. And that's easier to do in a consulting role or for a small organization when you are there, rather than as an employee, to be there really driving the change for maybe 10, 20, 30 hours a month, something like that. And I just yeah, saw there was a tremendous need and opportunity and also an opportunity for me to really do more to make the kind of change that I wanted to see in the world, which is go Help lots of organizations go from struggling to being strong because when a nonprofit does have its finance and accounting functions running smoothly, the mission can happen so much better. And vice versa. If you've seen an organization that is struggling with its programs, that is struggling to deliver on its mission, almost always the finance and accounting functions are also struggling. There's a there's a strong connection there. Between those. You need you need one to be strong for the rest of it to be strong.

Yeah, well certainly if you have a spouse, if you have kids, like be be sure that you have a financial pro a personal financial situation that you can go for at least twelve months and not be losing sleep. Because most people that I know that go into consulting, it takes about twelve months, give or take, to really replace what you are making as a full-time employee. And so, you know, have the savings, have the support of your spouse and and your kids and your family. Those are really important. Also, if you can, like the ideal world, especially if you don't have lots of money in the bank, would be, can you negotiate with your current job so that maybe you start only working 30 hours a week? And then as you build up your practice, you slowly ratchet down. A a good employer should help you with that, but sometimes there are some employers who they want all of your time and they either want all of it or none of it. In which case, yeah, that that's gonna be hard. But certainly, yeah, having a part time job while you're building up your consulting practice can really make a big difference and help you mitigate your your risk.

You know, I've not done a whole lot of work with the private sector, so I can't speak authoritatively to that, but I I can say that I personally really like the nonprofit sector. They're it feels good to work with people who I share values with. It feels good to work with people who are driven to do good things in the world or exciting and beautiful things in the world. that that really speaks speaks to my heart. It gives me a lot of satisfaction. And so that's definitely where where I've wanted to to be. There and so certainly if for anybody who might be thinking about the nonprofit sector, get some experience before you jump into it with both feet because the culture it's definitely different from the the business world. And People inside there are a lot of nonprofit people. If you don't speak the nonprofit language, if they feel like you don't understand them, that you don't share their values, that you don't share their their culture, th it's gonna be really hard to get them to hire you to be their consultant.

Yeah. Well sometimes it's literally words. for example, I've seen this happen many times where somebody wants to work with nonprofits, maybe it's you know, to get a full-time job or maybe it's to consult. And they say something like, Well, you know, in your business, blah blah blah, or in your company, blah blah blah, no nonprofit calls themselves a business. No nonprofit calls themselves a company. And so if you use those two words to talk about the dog rescue organization, they immediately know that you don't understand them. Or at least they're going to think that you don't understand them. Because you don't even know what makes them different from a grocery store or a petroleum company. Because they certainly feel like they're different from a grocery store or a petroleum company.

Does that make sense?

You know, it for a lot of small and mid sized non profits. Many of the the top leaders inside of them don't have a lot of experience before they become the top leader. They don't necessarily have a lot of previous experience leading an organization that size. And most of the time they don't have much finance and accounting experience. And that's that can be okay. That's not necessarily a problem, but just like anything. When you don't have knowledge and experience, you need to f find the help and support to help cover those gaps so that you don't make big, embarrassing, expensive mistakes. Right? and so certainly, yeah, I that's a a tricky thing for for those leaders where if they if they've Don't have much experience with finance, accounting, bookkeeping, but they need to hire somebody to do that for them. How do they even know what questions to ask? How do they evaluate those answers? Because even if they have all the right questions, like and you can get AI to give you a bunch of great questions, but you're not going to sit there with AI and plug in that person's answer and see if it comes back as being a reasonable answer or not. so that that part can be can be really a a challenge. And so, you know, to those leaders, I would say, yeah, certainly try to have somebody in the room with you who knows accounting and finance when you're interviewing for those positions. And as the CEO, you absolutely you can be doing a lot with your emotional intelligence. And be listening to the for those kinds of cues. Like, is this person loyal? Is this person telling the truth? Is this person compatible with your organizational culture? Do they play well with other people? Those are all things that most CEOs should be able to really bring to the table, but then have somebody else helping you with those skills-based questions. Those hard skills, like Does this person really understand how to build a cash flow projection? Does this person understand what makes grant accounting so much different from standard business accounting?

It it's it's more complicated, but for me, I've enjoyed it a lot. you know, like when I had two or three employees working for me and we had when I was in a nonprofit employee and I would have like a department of two or three or four, there would be job needs that would come up, tasks that needed to happen, and like one of us had to do it. And it might be that none of us wanted to do it, but when you have a larger team. There's almost, you know, you you get people who want to do this stuff, even that most of you don't want to do it. Like I've had somebody working with me who loves to do bank reconciliations. Most people on my team hate doing bank reconciliations. It's boring for them. It's tedious. They make they they don't want to do it. They hate it. But I have this one person who like if I went there and said, Hey, Marcy, here's a hundred hours of bank reconciliations. Like she would do a little happy dance because she loved it. I don't know why she loved it, but she did. And I have people on the team, like I have a couple of people on the team who are really great with Excel. They're like wizards with Excel. We need that, right? Almost everybody on the team has at least good Excel skills, but somebody you need somebody who can make magic happen with Excel. Great. I got a couple of people that can do that. Or we have somebody on the team, like, and also everybody on the team has experience with audits. But I have somebody on the team who used to be an auditor. And if we have a client who is dealing with a complicated, difficult audit and they need some help, like it's really great to say, hey, why don't we have this former auditor work with you? Because if you're if you're the auditor that's doing your audit is maybe not being helpful, not being flexible, like let our person go and kind of help help you get it all straightened out because Some auditors are reasonable and some aren't, but they need they need to hear it from another auditor who's gonna go to them and say, you know, this regulation, CFRE 200, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is why we need to do it this other way. But if you can't quote the exact chapter and verse of the regulations to them, they're gonna say you're doing it wrong. Does that make sense?

that's an interesting question. so that that community you're referring to, it was called Philanthro Force. It got acquired three years ago by Consultants for Good. It's been beautiful to see how Consultants for Good took the work that my friend and I did and really multiplied it. I was just looking at it their website an hour ago, and it that community has grown to more than 1700 nonprofit consultants. And it's just Tremendous the way that they've built community and are really helpful to people, especially at the early stages of nonprofit consulting. But what have I brought with me to nonprofit foot CFOs? you know, certainly. There it's interesting to see how how the whole ecosystem works. and there are some specialties in nonprofit consulting that like everybody says everybody, like half of the consultants out there for nonprofits say they will do strategic plans for you. That's a really, really like large number. It's a crazy large number of people that do strategic planning. And I know so many people that that have that as a service they provide. and it just it's so many people that say that that it really drove home for me the importance of you need to be sure that you are standing out. Because if a nonprofit is looking for a for somebody to do their strategic plan and they have a hundred choices, that's overwhelming. They need to be able to find somebody who like is going to stand out in the crowd. And so what are you going to do if you're in a crowded field so that you can stand out? and it's not using lots of fancy words because all of the consultants use fancy words to describe what they're doing. And so you need to do something else. And so that for me really drives home the importance of finding a niche, finding A narrow specialty where you are one of the very best, or or perhaps the best, at this thing. And so it's not enough to just be a strategic planner because there are too many strategic planners. And so maybe you can be like my friend Elizabeth Schuster. She does strategic planning, but she does it just for conservation and environmental organizations. That's That's a very small subsection of all of the nonprofits. And yes, she could do a certi really good strategic plan for other organizations, but she does that focus and that lets her really stand out in the crowd. And that to me, that's that's just being smart in your marketplace in in a crowded marketplace.

the the niche that we we do it's nonprofit it's finance and accounting type work and that that field doesn't have that many people in it and so at least up until now we haven't had to go more narrow although we do we do a lot of organiz well we do a a really a broad variety of organizations but you know if the if the if the If it became more crowded, then yeah, we would probably figure out like, are we going to focus on like child welfare organizations, for example, or something like that? Thus far we have not had to do it because there just aren't that many people doing what I do, that what what the team does.

It's it's terrific. Yeah. I think every professional at this point, if you still plan to have a job in five years, you should be using artificial intelligence on a regular basis, at least at least an hour a week, if if not more. and so certainly I'm seeing people doing really exciting things with AI and finance and accounting type work. For that, I'm seeing that a lot of people are going to what's the one that anthropic does Claude they most of my peers to do finance and accounting type work they like using Claude for that but also you know if you're running a small consulting practice you might use a tool like Chat GPT or Gemini to you know help you double check what you're writing or if you're creating a contract like I a friend of mine, he told me like he went he went to a lawyer and asked the lawyer, like, hey, you know what, you need to build this contract. And the lawyer says, sure, no problem. That'll be $10,000. For for a small business, you don't won't need to spend $10,000 to write up a contract. You can get you can get the first draft. You can get a really good first draft and second draft done by using a tool like Gemini or any of the other AI products out there. And then yeah. Read it over, and then you can take that contract that you built in one of them and then run it through a different AI and say, hey, you know, here's who I am, here's what I'm trying to do. What's what is this contract doing right? What did it not do that we need to fix? Those kinds of things. And then maybe if you really want to be sure at the end, if you want a guarantee, sure. Show it to a lawyer at the end, but that way you're spending maybe $500 or $1,000. on a lawyer to just double check your work, not ten thousand dollars for them to create something from scratch.

What's what's that tool called?

Please tell me.

Terrific. leave the world a better place. and yeah, you know, we're last year we worked with about three dozen different nonprofits around the United States. this year I think we're on track to work with forty or fifty, maybe a few more than that. and I'm excited to see how far we can go. Can we get to a hundred? Can we get to two hundred? You know, can And what does it look like to grow the team like that? 'Cause at that point we might need, you know, fifteen, twenty people or more to be able to to handle that. And then, you know, that's that's a just yeah, a different, exciting new kind of adventure.

Yeah. certainly our website, nonprofitcfos dot com. And then as as you noted, I'm very active on LinkedIn. And so yeah, encourage people to to follow me and follow the nonprofit CFOs page. We do have a bi weekly newsletter also that goes out on LinkedIn and yeah, just kind of it's full of different ideas related to nonprofit leadership or nonprofit finances, but especially directed to, yeah, anybody who's really active in the nonprofit world, especially in some kind of leadership role.

Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure.