My college senior essay was about Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory. The main argument and the thing I most wanted to explore was how places can hold patterns that collapse time. Nabokov would return somewhere and the past became present. Just like butterflies can only exist in unique environments (Nabokov was an avid lepidopterist), certain experiences we have are also singularly matched to certain places. But most crucially, identity and place fuse so completely that to revisit one is to recover the other.

After graduation, I stayed on campus to work the alumni reunions, hefting folding chairs and ten-foot round tables for Newport Tent Company. My friends were gone. During off hours, I wandered into my residential college courtyard and sat beneath the gingko tree in the late May light, my chest tight with the feeling that I wasn’t ready to leave. College was one of those special places that fostered experiences I didn’t think I could have anywhere else.

Many of those experiences were wonderful, and some were more complex. In my Hidden Forces series, I traced how the campus fused achievement culture with the drive for spiritual fulfillment. My bright college years taught me a vision of the good life I spent fourteen years living inside before I noticed its features and could start to critique them.

Place is still a very important way I think about my life. The very first piece I wrote for this newsletter was about leaving Kauai to come home to Brooklyn. My family had the chance to stay another year with monk seals napping on the sand, enjoying another pineapple season, in weather so perfect time dissolved. We said no because our community wasn’t there, and Brooklyn as a place creates the potential for experiences I wanted for myself and my family. Kauai offered a different range of unique experiences, and I mourn that I can’t have both. But Brooklyn has people who’ve known me for decades and carry dimensions of me that someone new can’t access right away.

But the people I’ll see this weekend knew me before I’d ever knocked a door for a campaign, before the years inside nonprofits, before consulting, before my child came along, and before I’d written a word of any of this. They knew the version of me who worked at the Yale Farm with dirt under his fingernails and hair past his shoulders. Some knew me as the kid who had stripped every unrankable thing from his life in pursuit of the highest score.

I am an environmentalist in no small part because of Nabokov. I believe his beautiful view about our beautiful world. This weekend, the gingko tree in the courtyard will be as enormous as ever, and I’ll be standing in the same spot where I once sat with no idea what I was about to become. I like the idea of reclaiming memory by returning to a place. I also like how I’m different, even if the place and the memory are the same.

Strategic Agility Reboot Turns 6 Months Old

Speaking of standing in a familiar place and noticing how much has changed: the Strategic Agility Reboot series that Susannah Hook-Rodgers, Emily Berens, and I have been writing together turned six months old. Seventeen articles is enough to lose the thread if you weren’t reading from the start (or even if you were), so I put together a guide to the full arc on what we’ve covered, where the key tools live, and where we’re headed.

You, your calendar, and your inbox (Nov–Dec 2025)

The first six pieces focused on personal strategic practice: how you operate when chaos and urgency are conspiring against your clarity.

New Co-Author, New Series: Strategic Agility Reboot introduced the Pause Protocol, which is a 60-second ritual for creating space between stimulus and reaction. One of the first steps in strategic agility is retraining our minds!

You Cannot Strengthen a Muscle You Have Not Located gave us the Strategic Operator Self-Evaluation, a tool that turns “I’m struggling” into “I scored 6/20 in Strategic Discipline, which means I rarely know my priorities.” In fifteen minutes you get a baseline and one thing to focus on for 30 days.

Why That Meeting Probably Does Not Need to Exist introduced the Strategic Time Audit: a week of tracking where your time actually goes and whether any of it connects to the outcomes you care about.

Why Smart People Keep Making Decisions They Regret Later laid out two toolkits: the Anticipation Toolkit (trade-offs, inversion, second-order thinking, root cause analysis) and the Navigation Toolkit (contingency planning, distinguishing sustainable wins from depleting ones). The connecting thread is most bad decisions don’t feel bad at the time.

Long-Term, Not Just This Month went deeper on the distinction between wins that build capacity and wins that deplete it.

Making Better Decisions Under Uncertainty was the capstone: four tools (the Uncertainty Audit, the Reversibility Test, the Pre-Mortem, and the Cheap Test) that work together as decision-making infrastructure. Waiting for certainty it is its own form of strategic failure.

People: hiring them, developing them, firing them (Jan–Feb 2026)

If a strategic operating system runs on strategic operators, you need to know how to find them, grow them, and move them out when necessary.

Is Your Hiring Process Filtering Out Strategic Thinkers? argued that standard behavioral interviewing rewards polished storytellers over rigorous thinkers. The signals of a strategic brain—hedging, clarifying questions, comfort with “it depends”—are exactly what most hiring processes screen against.

Plot Twist: Telling Someone to Think Strategically Is Like Trying to Teach Them to Swim by Describing Water and its companion piece Math Problem: What We’ve Been Doing Isn’t Working tackled developing people in two parts. Strategic thinking requires exposure, frameworks, coaching, and reinforcement infrastructure that keeps it from eroding under daily operational pressure. Without that infrastructure, your promising strategic thinker reverts to reactive mode within weeks.

Save Democracy, Cancel the Word “Smart” was the sleeper of the series. Every time a leadership team calls a decision “the smart play” without defining the criteria that would make it strategic, they’re papering over the operating system they never built. “Smart” is a conversation-ender disguised as a compliment.

The Brown M&M Test used Van Halen’s famous contract rider as a diagnostic for firing infrastructure. Your ability (or inability) to fire someone fairly and cleanly reveals the state of your role clarity, feedback systems, discipline processes, and institutional trust. It is one small, visible failure that reliably predicts larger ones.

Management infrastructure and original research (Feb 2026-present)

Emily Berens joined us as a co-author in late February, and the series shifted into its current focus: management as the transmission system between strategy and execution.

Having Managers Isn’t the Same as Having Great Management opened with a metaphor: a car’s engine generates power, but the transmission converts that power into motion. Strategy is the engine, and management is the transmission. Committed, skilled managers operating without management infrastructure are being set up to fail, and the fix is a written, deliberate framework, not more training.

Every Organization Has a Management Layer. How Is Yours Doing? introduced the three domains of management infrastructure: Structural Clarity (do managers know what the job actually is?), Collective Leadership Function (do managers operate as a team?), and Management System Continuity (does the system survive personnel changes?). Ten diagnostic questions to find out where yours stands.

A Meeting Worth Having zoomed in on one high-leverage piece of that infrastructure: the monthly manager meeting. A structured hour where managers solve real problems together and leave feeling supported rather than depleted.

And in April, we released the results of our State of Strategic Fitness survey in two parts. The People at the Top Think Everything Is Fine reported the headline finding: Executive Directors rate their organizations’ strategic fitness 8.0 out of 10; senior leaders one level down say 4.83; consultants say 4.91. We called it the perception gap. Why It Keeps Getting Worse explained the structural dynamics that sustain and widen it, and introduced the concept of Reactive Sophistication: organizations that are externally perceptive but internally undisciplined, responding to everything, subtracting nothing, and gradually losing the thread of what they were trying to do.

Want to get involved?

The management infrastructure sub-series is still in progress, with more coming on what excellent management looks like in practice and how to build toward it. We’re also assembling a small design cohort of senior leaders to pressure-test these frameworks against live organizational challenges. We want to create the kind of room where an ED can say “my team doesn’t experience my organization the way I do” and get help figuring out why. If that’s a conversation you want to be part of, let us know.

I used Claude Code for most of it. If you haven’t heard of it, Claude Code is a command-line tool from Anthropic that lets you give Claude instructions in plain English from your terminal, and it writes and runs code on your machine. You describe what you want, and it figures out how to build it.

(I wrote about AI-assisted writing last year. This is the next step in applying this technology to other facets of a consultant’s work.)

This piece is about five workflows I actually used for client work in the last month, with the prompts I gave Claude Code so you can adapt them for your own projects.

A quick note before we start: Claude Code requires a paid Anthropic API account. The cost depends on usage, but for the kinds of tasks below you could expect to spend $5–15 per project. Whether that’s worth it depends on what your time costs. For most of us, it pays for itself on the first task.

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Pull real data from free public APIs

ProPublica maintains a free Nonprofit Explorer API that contains financial data from millions of Form 990 filings: revenue, expenses, executive compensation, net assets, you name it. It’s public data that the IRS has released since 2013, and it’s available to anyone.

The problem is that “available to anyone” and “usable by anyone” are different things. To actually do something with an API, you normally need to write code: loop through search results, parse JSON, handle pagination, export to a usable format. That’s a couple hours of work for someone who knows Python, and an impossible wall for someone who doesn’t.

I used Claude Code to pull data on every food bank in the Feeding America network. The result was a spreadsheet with 140 organizations, including total revenue, contributions, fundraising expenses, net assets, total salaries, and officer compensation pulled directly from their most recent 990 filings. What would have taken me days of manual searching on ProPublica’s website took about 20 minutes.

Here’s the prompt I used (with placeholders you can swap for your own research):

I want to research nonprofit organizations using ProPublica's 
Nonprofit Explorer API (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api).

WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "Every food bank in the Feeding America network"
# Example: "Community foundations in the Southeast with revenue over $5M"
# Example: "Environmental organizations in California"
[Describe the organizations you want to research]

WHAT DATA I WANT FOR EACH ORGANIZATION:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION  
# Example: Name, city, state, EIN, total revenue, total expenses,
# contributions, fundraising expenses, net assets, total salaries,
# officer compensation, filing year
[List the specific fields you want]

HOW TO DO IT:
1. Use the ProPublica API search endpoint to find matching organizations
   - The search endpoint is: /api/v2/search.json?q=[search term]
   - You can filter by state with &state=[XX] and by NTEE code with &ntee=[code]
2. For each organization found, pull detailed filing data using:
   /api/v2/organizations/[EIN].json
3. Extract the most recent filing data for each organization
4. Export everything to an Excel spreadsheet with clean column headers

Save the output as an .xlsx file. Sort by total revenue descending.

A few notes on this. ProPublica’s API is free and doesn’t require an API key, which makes it a perfect starting point. The data comes from IRS filings, so it’s as reliable as the organizations’ own reporting. And once you have the spreadsheet, you can score, rank, filter, and analyze however you need to.

I’ve since used the same approach to pull data on community development organizations, environmental groups, and arts nonprofits. Each time it takes about 20 minutes, and each time it produces a dataset that would have taken me a full day to compile by hand.

Build client deliverables

There’s a page making the rounds among developers called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML. The premise: instead of handing someone a wall of markdown or a static document, you build a single HTML file with collapsible sections, sortable tables, small charts, and tabs. It’s the same information, but structured so people actually engage with it instead of skimming past it.

This idea translates directly to consulting. We spend a lot of time making recommendations that live in slide decks or Google Docs. Some of those recommendations would land differently if the client could interact with them: sort a list by different criteria, toggle between scenarios, or click into the detail on the items that interest them.

I took the food bank dataset from the first workflow and turned it into an interactive HTML report. Instead of a spreadsheet with 140 rows and 21 columns, the client got a single file they could open in any browser: a ranked list with the top targets highlighted, expandable detail cards for each organization, and filters by state, revenue range, and scoring criteria.

Check it out, it’s pretty cool: https://feedingamericaanalysis.netlify.app/

The prompt:

I have a spreadsheet [attach or describe your data file] that I want 
to turn into a polished, interactive HTML report.

THE AUDIENCE:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "A client's leadership team evaluating partnership targets"
# Example: "A board of directors reviewing program performance data"
[Who will read this, and what decision are they making?]

WHAT IT SHOULD INCLUDE:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "A ranked list of organizations with key metrics visible,
# expandable cards showing full detail, filters for state and revenue 
# range, a summary section at top with key takeaways"
[Describe the views and interactions you want]

DESIGN REQUIREMENTS:
- Single self-contained HTML file (no external dependencies)
- Clean, professional design — not developer-looking
- Works in any browser, looks good when shared as a file
- Mobile-friendly if possible
- Use a simple color palette: [your brand colors or "professional blues and grays"]

Build this as a single .html file I can send directly to the client.

One important caveat: the first version Claude Code produces almost never looks right. I usually go back and forth a few times: “make the cards narrower,” “add a total count at the top,” “the filter isn’t working on mobile.” This is normal.

Turn your Excel model into something a client would actually use

I keep a stable of Excel models for different kinds of client work like financial projections, unit economics calculators, and scenario planners. They work but they’re ugly, they’re hard for clients to navigate, and they only model the variables I thought to include when I built them.

I took one of these—a basic business plan financial model with revenue projections, cost assumptions, and a five-year summary—and gave it to Claude Code with a simple instruction: make this better.

What came back had scenario modeling (optimistic / base / pessimistic), sensitivity analysis on the key variables, a cleaner layout with input cells clearly separated from output cells, and several assumptions I hadn’t included like churn rates by customer segment and a funnel velocity variable that modeled how long prospects take to close. It thought of things I wouldn’t have, and it built them faster than I could have built the parts I did think of.

The prompt:

I have an Excel model [attach the file] that I use for 
[describe the purpose].

WHAT THE MODEL CURRENTLY DOES:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "Projects revenue over 5 years based on subscriber count,
# pricing tiers, and growth rate assumptions"
[Describe your existing model]

WHAT I WANT IMPROVED:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION  
# Example: "Add scenario modeling (optimistic/base/pessimistic), 
# improve the layout so input assumptions are clearly separated 
# from calculations, add any variables or analyses you think 
# would make this more useful for a founder presenting to investors"
[Describe what you want, AND ask Claude to suggest improvements]

IMPORTANT:
- Keep it in Excel (.xlsx format) — my client needs to open it in Excel
- Use clear cell formatting: blue font for inputs, black for calculations
- Add a summary dashboard tab if the model is complex enough to warrant one
- Include brief cell comments explaining non-obvious formulas

The key phrase in that prompt is “add any variables or analyses you think would make this more useful.” You’re explicitly inviting Claude to go beyond your brief. It won’t always suggest things worth keeping, but it often surfaces dimensions you hadn’t considered, and at minimum, it’s a useful check on your own assumptions.

Write talking points for a presentation you already have

This one probably saves me more time per use than anything else on this list.

I had a 50-slide deck for a conference presentation at the Ohio Arts Council. The slides were done. The content was solid. But I still needed talking points for each slide — the actual words I’d say while the slide was on screen, the transitions between sections, and the places where I’d pause for a question.

Writing talking points for 50 slides is one of those tasks that takes longer than you think it will, because you’re not really creating. You’re translating visual content into spoken content, which is a different kind of tedious.

I gave the deck to Claude and asked for talking points. Five minutes later I had a full speaker’s guide. I edited maybe a third of it, cut some sections that didn’t sound like me, and added a few personal anecdotes it couldn’t have known about. But the structural work of making sure each slide’s key point was articulated, transitions were smooth, and timing was realistic was done.

The prompt:

I have a slide deck [attach the file] for a presentation I'm giving.

CONTEXT:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "A 45-minute keynote at a state arts conference for 
# nonprofit arts administrators and board members"
[Describe the event, audience, and time slot]

WHAT I NEED:
- Talking points for each slide (2-4 bullet points of what I'd 
  actually say out loud, not a script)
- Transition sentences between major sections
- Notes on where to pause for audience questions or reactions
- A timing estimate for each section

TONE:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "Conversational and warm, not academic. I tell stories 
# and use humor. I don't read from notes — these are reminders 
# of what I want to hit, not a teleprompter."
[Describe how you present]

Output as a document I can print and bring to the podium.

Build a send-ready survey

Our community’s rate-setting survey—the one that produced the most-read piece we’ve ever published—was built using Claude’s connector to Jotform. I described what I wanted the survey to accomplish, what questions I needed to ask, and what format the responses should come back in. Claude built the survey.

It was not perfect on the first pass. I edited questions, reordered sections, and rewrote several items to be clearer. Claude couldn’t get the conditional logic for reasons that I still don’t fully grasp. But it handled the tedious structural work.

The prompt:

I want to build a survey using [Jotform / Google Forms / Typeform].

PURPOSE:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "Collecting rate and pricing data from independent 
# consultants in the nonprofit sector for a published report"
[What are you trying to learn, and what will you do with the data?]

QUESTIONS I KNOW I WANT TO ASK:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# List your questions here, even if they're rough
[Your questions]

ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "Group questions into logical sections. Add conditional 
# logic where it makes sense (e.g., if they select 'hourly rate,' 
# ask follow-up questions about hourly billing; if 'project-based,' 
# ask about project scoping). Include a mix of multiple choice, 
# rating scales, and short open-text fields. Keep it under 10 minutes."
[Your structural preferences]

TARGET RESPONDENTS:
# ← CHANGE THIS SECTION
# Example: "Independent consultants with 1-15+ years of experience 
# across strategy, fundraising, communications, and operations"
[Who is taking this survey?]

Build the survey and make it ready to send. I'll review and edit 
before publishing.

If you’re using Claude.ai rather than Claude Code, you can use the Jotform connector directly in the chat interface with no terminal needed. Ask Claude to create the form, review what it builds, and iterate from there.

Speaking of, please take the survey!

Wrapping up

Every one of these workflows started with decisions only I could make: which organizations to research, what scoring criteria mattered, which variables belonged in the model, and what questions to ask in the survey. The AI handled the the parts that are time-consuming but not intellectually demanding.

People either dismiss these tools because the output isn’t perfect on the first try, or they over-rely on them and skip the thinking that makes the output useful. The sweet spot is in between: you do the strategic and creative work, then hand off the build.

For independent consultants especially, that trade is significant. We don’t have a junior analyst to delegate the spreadsheet work to, or a developer to build the interactive report, or an admin to set up the survey. We just have ourselves and whatever tools we can figure out. These are the tools I’ve figured out.

And the anniversary hook is irresistible, so here I am: what would I tell the version of me sitting in that apartment, two months into a pandemic and on the verge of a new career as an independent consultant, if I could go back?

Write something that isn’t for a client

I was lucky to find consulting work early that met my financial needs without consuming all my time. So I did something I hadn’t planned: I started writing a memoir about my 14 years in nonprofit work: what I’d seen, what I thought the big advocacy organizations were getting wrong, and what I wished I’d done differently. I spent a solid year on it. It ended up at 294 pages with a bibliography spanning over 100 entries.

That manuscript never turned into a book. I never submitted it anywhere or tried to find an agent. After a few trusted friends read it, I realized I didn’t have the stomach or stamina for the revisions it would need.

But the writing changed me in ways the consulting work alone couldn’t. It stretched skills I cared about, and forced me to develop frameworks for thinking about social change that later became central to my client work. And it diversified my professional identity, which I hadn’t been looking for but realized was quite valuable once I obtained it. My old nonprofit job was totalizing in that it took all that I had to give (and more), so when I left, I lost my network, my community, and my whole professional self-worth. Spreading that identity out, which is something consulting already affords but passion projects multiply, has become a must-have for me.

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I stumbled into this by dumb luck, but I’ve since learned to maintain it deliberately. This newsletter is now that project for me. It keeps my thinking from getting stale, introduces me to people I wouldn’t otherwise meet, and exercises muscles my client work doesn’t.

The first thing I’d tell myself at year one: keep a passion project in your life. It will make you a better consultant than any amount of additional billable hours.

Speaking of, stop billing by the hour

Sam from 2020 would have replied to the previous piece of advice with a predictable objection: Cool, but how do I make time for a passion project when I need to fill my day with billable hours?

Sam from 2026 would say: stop billing hourly. If you’re tracking your time in 15-minute increments, you will struggle to find financial security or professional success.

I took plenty of hourly contracts back then. I told myself they were a foot in the door, and if I did good hourly work, the client would eventually bring me into something bigger. They didn’t!

Hourly billing, for the kind of work I was doing, slotted me into the hired-help category rather than the strategic-partner one. The client thought of me the way they thought of their accountant: someone who showed up when called and billed for the time. Not someone whose judgment they sought out.

Amy (my partner) told me this from day one. (She is usually right about these things, and I am usually slow to listen, and most of the time she tolerates me.) I’d heard the case for value-based pricing plenty of times before, but I needed to feel the difference in my own practice before I believed it. The contracts where I scoped a deliverable and quoted a project fee were the ones that led to real relationships. The hourly ones just led to clock-watching and restrictions on what I could really do.

The anxiety trap (and watch out for cleanup jobs)

I took pretty much any work I could find in those early days. I’m not sure that was wrong, exactly. Financial security matters to me, and turning down paid work when you’re new feels foolishly optimistic.

But so much of what I took on was stuff I didn’t care about. Worse, the client often didn’t know why they were hiring me, and I couldn’t clearly articulate what I offered that was valuable. I’d find myself caught in a three-way bind: I wanted to do excellent work; I suspected the work itself wasn’t that important; and I knew it probably wasn’t even what the client most needed. That combination produces the awful dread I always have at the start of every new engagement, a tightness I eventually recognized as the feeling of being about to be found out as the wrong person for the job.

I don’t know how to fully solve that dynamic. Earning enough money is bedrock for me. But I would go back and give myself more perspective on it, because those anxiety-riddled early weeks of each new project were genuinely hard, and they didn’t need to be quite so hard.

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What I would tell 2020 Sam with conviction: watch out for cleanup jobs. I took an engagement as a fractional CFO with a nonprofit. I thought I’d be helping with financial strategy and planning, which is the kind of work that gets my brain going. Instead, I spent nearly all my time picking up the failed implementation of an ERP system the organization had been paying for but wasn’t even using. I was debugging software adoption, not thinking about strategic planning.

So many projects a consultant gets hired for are some version of this: someone else started it, it stalled or went sideways, and now you’re the person holding the mop. Cleanup stinks. I’m not saying to 2020 Sam never to take those projects, but go in with your eyes open about what you’re actually signing up for. I would also give myself skills in the form of discovery meetings (pre-contract) to ascertain if a cleanup job is lying in wait.

The money I wasted and the time I’ll never get back

My biggest financial regrets are mundane. I used LegalZoom for my corporate setup instead of working with a real lawyer, and it cost me more than it should have plus I couldn’t get answers to basic questions, which led to a series of avoidable mistakes. I paid QuickBooks $25 per invoice for bill pay when a small-business-friendly bank could have done it for free. I bought Adobe subscriptions I didn’t need for e-signatures when simpler free tools existed. In sum, I should have looked harder for free stuff, because all of those expenses came out of my pay.

My time regrets are worse. I started a newsletter early on, but I had no idea how to build an audience. I wrote a few articles that just sat on my website, unread. (And now this newsletter exists, so the instinct was right, even if the execution took years to catch up.)

And the worst time regret is I never—not once in my early engagements—did an intentional end-of-project wrap-up. By the time it occurred to me that I should be collecting testimonials, building case studies, and documenting examples of my work, I had already forgotten the details. I left years of social proof on the table because I was always too focused on the next engagement to properly close the current one. Such a waste!!!

Find your people (even when you can’t leave the house)

I started consulting at the beginning of a pandemic. Traveling or meeting people in person was not realistic. I didn’t know how to build a professional community online. And so I went for a long time with no one to talk to about consulting, by which I mean the experience of doing it. I was by myself wondering if my pipeline would hold and setting my schedule while having no one notice whether I showed up.

I wish I’d figured this out sooner. It took me years to find the communities and relationships that now feel essential to how I work. If I could go back, I’d tell myself to treat building that network with the same urgency I brought to finding clients.

If I’m looking for a thread that connects all of this, it’s probably something like: the early version of me spent his energy on the wrong things. I optimized for billable hours instead of project fees. I said yes to work that didn’t fit because the money was reassuring. I paid for convenience when patience would have been cheaper. I skipped the relationship-building and the documentation because they didn’t feel urgent.

Everything that actually mattered — the passion project, the pricing model, the community, the wrap-ups — felt like a luxury at the time, but they were the infrastructure.

I’m not sure any amount of advice would have changed my behavior in year one. I probably needed to learn most of this the slow way. But if there’s a version of me somewhere in 2020, sitting in that apartment, reading this on a laptop between walks, I hope he at least takes notes.

That colleague is Allison Ehrich Bernstein, a writer, editor, and strategist who helps mission-driven organizations communicate what they do better, from annual reports to message development to executive communications and more. Allison has also been one of the moving forces behind our community library, Working with Consultants: A Guide for Mission-Driven Organizations. She’s been a solo nonprofit consultant for nearly a decade, a parent for more than half of that, and she makes a compelling case that the flexibility and autonomy of this work aren’t just tolerable alongside parenting but might be what makes parenting manageable. I’ll let her take it from here.

Allison’s Counterpoint

I’ve been a solo nonprofit consultant for nearly a decade and a parent for more than half of that, so Sam’s recent essay on the particular ways this line of work makes being a parent challenging obviously piqued my interest.

Honestly, I relate to a lot of his struggles—but I disagree with the premise. Parenting is challenging, but I have no idea how I’d be doing it as anything other than a nonprofit consultant.

As parents, partners, professionals, and people, we try to balance multihyphenate identities that we never really get to shut off. That’s difficult regardless of industry: I hear the same lament from friends with “real” jobs, whether they’re on site, remote, working shifts, never offline, or as flexible as I am. Even my own spouse, a college professor whose in-person day job is highly social and about as self-directed as it gets, agrees this shared challenge might be more about the acute realities of being a parent (especially of young kids) in a mission-driven career.

Our kids are recently five and almost two, so there’s a lot more journey ahead for my family. This season of life is a daily challenge, full stop. But so far, the consulting life has made parenting work for me, and self-employment is consistently a real saving grace in the harder moments.

Parenting is hard—so is nonprofit work.

That multihyphenate identity isn’t always easy to wear or balance, and its parenting elements are still something I wrestle with. It can never be said enough: Parenting is hard! My kids are the greatest, but they’re also young and need hands-on care. Every minute with them is a treasure, but so is my well-being. I definitely struggle with doing things purely for myself, outside of my household and client base—but consulting has allowed me to seek intentional balance, set boundaries, and make time and mental space for what I need as a person. That’s thanks to the built-in flexibility also but because I gladly wear a lot of professional hats, too.

I launched Allative Communications in 2017, well before having kids or even getting a dog. My previous job had been at a political consulting firm operating on a hybrid model before that was a “thing,” so I already knew how to work effectively for different clients from my kitchen. Owning every aspect of my business was a different animal, though—and one of many things I loved about that quickly became the freedom to both set my hours and use them meaningfully.

Working as a self-employed freelancer, I found no one was asking me for extra time, open-ended availability, or free deliverables. Those once-normal bad habits sapped my energy and bandwidth with no benefit, because I’m not an employee with a supervisor to impress, and my fee structures are usually flat-rate.

So I learned to execute my contracted scope of work—and then close my laptop.

Freelancing can make it manageable.

That substantial mindset shift has proven invaluable, especially following my first career working on campaigns. Being able to let go of what my colleague Shannon Parris calls “vocational awe” in favor of the inherent opportunities of self-employment was a particular lifeline after the churn of the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath. Fast-forward through a puppy, COVID lockdowns, several moves, and two pregnancies, and that lesson is still with me on a daily basis.

As long as my tasks get done, I have the sole and final say in how. If a client needs more, or faster, or sooner, I can usually deliver because my setup can absorb a lot of disruptions, which is in turn because I manage my own contracts, deadlines, and expectations. What’s more, personal time and household to-dos are simply part of my workday; that now includes much of the time-consuming infrastructure that comes with parenting young kids, like my daughter’s kindergarten applications or dealing with the county agency that manages my son’s physical therapy.

Being a working parent means tradeoffs, no question, but I disagree with Sam that it’s necessarily a zero-sum game. Freelancing lets me very purposefully fit my work into my life, not the other way around. That additive approach gets things done, at home and professionally, and just as importantly it preserves my peace.

It’s never perfect, and there’s never enough coffee, but mostly it works. True, I’ve needed to become more efficient with my workdays since becoming a parent, and my schedule is much more time-sensitive than it used to be. But I’m also able to choose a structure and adapt it, so if my kids need an early pickup from preschool, or if they wear the stuffing out of me in the course of bedtime such that exhaustion precludes my working on this essay at 9pm on a Wednesday, well, tomorrow can handle it.

The mission still matters.

It’s not only the autonomy that leaves me wondering how the heck anyone else manages both business and parenthood. I’m simply a better parent for doing this job, specifically.

My consulting work—and the ability to define exactly what that entails—keeps me challenged and curious. I can chase projects that interest me, learn from smart and experienced people, and maintain a day-to-day that is substantively dynamic and ever-growing, even in slower months. Most mornings, I’m genuinely excited to open my inbox or talk to someone new.

Plus, by and large, nonprofit people are great! I’m happy not being in-house, but it’s fun getting to consistently work with passionate people who know and care so much. I’ve been so lucky to find clients whose organizations live their values and whose people treat their vendors accordingly—hardly a given in any industry, including this one.

I was even jazzed to return twice from the maternity leave I designed for myself—in part because it meant that naps and feedings were someone else’s responsibility (thank you, daycare) and I could generally feel more human post-postpartum. But it was also wonderful both times to get to switch my adult brain on and be back in society. That little newborn bubble has its charms, but so does contributing to the world my kids will grow up in.

They get a better parent specifically because I’m not only their parent.

I should note that, like Sam, I’ve got a wonderful spouse who’s a deeply present co-parent and also has a very flexible job he loves, which supports my own ability to make choices. Andy is also a labor economist who among other things studies “gig” work and self-employment—our jointly filed taxes with my 1099s are somewhere in the data he’s published with—so he understands how I work better than most. Even so, we’ve each got our own careers and work to do, and as parents we’ve had to find balance and revise our identities, individually and together.

Self-employment supports self-care.

I do agree with Sam about “what consulting gets right”—although that balance was absolutely something that appealed to me before I had kids. I’ve always loved not being beholden to a specific employer or boxed into a single function, as well as getting to vary what my work looks like with every project and over time.

And like Sam, I am “still at it” and glad he started this conversation to begin naming the very real challenges that arise even amid “so much good.” Working solo and remotely can be isolating, and I’m as guilty as anyone of reflexively checking my phone in between rounds of finding Waldo. Therapy has helped me, too, as well as building peer communities in person and virtually. I continue to find a lot of solace in knowing others are just trying to figure it all out along the way.

I also stay inspired by contributing to missions that I truly believe make the world I’m raising my children in a little better. That would hopefully still be true had I stayed in politics or worked in-house. But the diversity of causes I’ve contributed to as a consultant—from equitable urban planning to workers’ rights to land conservation—feels meaningful. I believe it is, and that it’s just as important as bringing up kids who agree.

As with almost any parent working from a home office, my kids have each joined their share of Zoom calls, and there will surely be more. They regularly get asked to wait while I respond to emails, and I’ve had more than one work-related epiphany while lying on the floor with plastic dinosaurs in hand. But those kids are thriving, and so is my consultancy—even when I put my phone down. Getting to choose and control and define the latter makes my life sustainable in the most fulfilling way I can imagine.

So, for me, working as a nonprofit consultant may actually be one of the easiest parts of parenting. Explaining my work to a preschooler? That’s another story.

The headline numbers, for the curious: 1,274 unique visitors, 3,551 page views, and 138 new members. That’s so freaking cool. My collaborators and I thought this site would be of interest to the broader community, but getting this response is incredible. We’re so excited folks are finding it useful. If you’re one of them, thank you!

But one thing stood out.

The site has 25-plus pieces across five sections: finding consultants, budget and pricing, setting up for success, managing engagements, and what good looks like. Going in, I had no real prediction about which section would draw the most interest.

Allison Ehrich Bernstein’s “Budgeting and Pricing Models“ was the most-viewed individual piece in week one — 302 visitors — and the single biggest driver of new signups, bringing in 41 members on its own. My “Market Rate Benchmarks for Nonprofit Consulting“ came in second on both metrics, with 171 visitors and 26 new members. The Budget & Pricing tag page itself had 107 visitors. Three of the top six pages on the site were about money.

The next-most-read individual post — “When Should You Hire a Consultant?“ by Michele Levy — pulled 84 visitors. After that, the long tail flattens fast.

This is one week of data and I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

But the pattern is loud enough to act on. The pieces that turn visitors into members are the ones that answer the question nonprofits feel awkward asking out loud: what is this supposed to cost?

This is something I’ve been hearing in our consultant community for a while. Rate-setting is one of the topics most under-served by what’s publicly available, and nonprofits walk into the budget conversation with very little to anchor on.

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The data behind that piece is a year old

The Market Rate Benchmarks piece — the one that just spent a week pulling traffic — is built on a survey we ran in our community about a year ago. It’s still useful and the headline findings haven’t gone stale overnight. But “a year ago” is starting to feel like a long time, and the v1 had real gaps.

We didn’t ask anything substantive about travel: when consultants pass costs through versus build them in, what hourly rate (if any) they charge for travel time, how site visits get scoped into a project budget. That’s a real question on both sides of the table, and we left it unasked.

Others surfaced after we published. Respondents told us they wanted finer-grained sector breakdowns than we collected — strategy/planning vs. digital vs. coaching is too coarse to support the comparison most consultants want to make. They wanted concrete examples of how peers actually pitch retainer relationships, not just the headline that 46% of us use them. They wanted more on value-adds: how to structure them, when to bill for them, and what to call them on an invoice.

So we’re going to do another one soon. I want to think carefully about what to ask, and to draw on what this past week has taught us about which questions nonprofits and consultants actually want answered. The plan is to field a new survey later this spring and publish a new report with better questions, more sector specificity, a real chapter on travel, and the things our last respondents wished we’d asked the first time.

If there’s a pricing question you’ve been waiting for somebody to put real numbers on, reply and tell me. I’m collecting them for the survey design.

The other thing the data argues for is more case studies in the budgeting and scope-negotiation territory. If you’ve got a budget conversation that went sideways — or one that went right because somebody set it up well — reply to this email. Those are the case studies we don’t have yet, and the data says people are looking for them.

Imagine it’s the third Thursday of the month. All of the people managers across your organization gather for an hour together, conference room or a Zoom, take your pick.

One of them, Abigail, has been stuck on a management challenge for the last few weeks: a team dynamic that she’s been turning over and over in her head. Today she puts it in front of the group with three minutes of context, then a flood of clarifying questions, sharing of lessons learned and new ideas from her colleagues in the room, the people who best understand the context of her job and the job itself.

By the end of the hour, Abigail leaves with three things: a clearer picture of what’s really going on, a concrete next step, and a confidence that comes from feeling the depth of support she just received from her colleagues on the management team.

Every other manager leaves the hour with something too. Terin is going to try a different approach to a 1:1 structure they heard about. Ayal finally realized why the new campaign rollout kept feeling off. Kidashi figured out that she and Kate had been sending their teams mixed signals about a shared process and within 4 minutes they had a plan to get everyone aligned and moving in step.

Norah, two weeks into her first management job, leaves feeling calm and confident. She just saw real support and practical tools traded across the room, and she can see that leadership is serious enough about management to build systems and structures around it.

None of this is magic. It’s just what happens when organizations build infrastructure to support managers as a team.

Where we are in the series

That scene is what management infrastructure looks like in practice. This article is about how to build one piece of it — but first, a quick orientation to where we are in the series.

In the first two articles in our series, we made the case for management infrastructure: the systems and structures that support a strong management layer, the strategic transmission system of your organization; and talked about what excellent management actually means and how to define it for your team.

In our most recent article, we laid out the three domains of management infrastructure (Structural Clarity, Collective Leadership, and Management System Continuity) and the specific elements within each, and encouraged you to pick any of those elements to make your current infrastructure stronger.

This article is dedicated to getting you set up to take advantage of one of the highest leverage points within infrastructure: a regular monthly manager meeting for all of the people managers across your organization or your team.

Whether you’re already doing management team meetings and know you could be getting more out of them or this will be your first go, we’re confident there’s something in here for you.

What a regular monthly manager meeting actually does

The regular monthly management team meeting sits squarely inside the Collective Leadership domain: the one that asks whether your managers operate as a coordinated layer or just a set of individuals who happen to share a title.

A consistent shared forum is a key part of that: it’s what lets managers align, calibrate, coordinate, and solve problems together — working from a common playbook instead of improvising in parallel. It’s where they sharpen their skills, build shared vocabulary and tools, and learn from each other’s real situations. Over time, it helps managers build stronger relationships so colleagues become trusted resources, and tensions that might have lingered get surfaced and resolved before misalignment spirals.

It’s also where the senior team shares organizational decisions and updates — ensuring every manager gets the information they need — and where the senior team collects meaningful input from people who have valuable insight and expertise to share.

There’s something else worth naming: a good manager meeting signals that it’s okay to not have all the answers. A meeting that models learning out loud, and treats real challenges as material for collective thinking rather than evidence of failure, is one of the most powerful culture signals you can send.

If you want an active learning culture in your organization, start here.

Monthly Management Team Meeting: Quick Start Guide

Your managers have a lot on their plates, and some likely already feel fully loaded. Asking them to spend an hour together every month means pulling their focus away from things that may feel more urgent. It also means bringing together a set of people with enormous collective potential — but to unlock that potential you have to do the work to make that hour each month worth their time.

Here are the steps:

1. Name why the team matters: give it a mandate

If your managers don’t already see themselves as a team with a shared purpose, lay the groundwork for that shared purpose as you launch the meetings. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. A handful of bullets or a couple of short paragraphs that answer two basic questions: Why does this group exist as a structured team, and what are we accountable for achieving together?

Here’s a mandate you can use as is or tweak as needed:

As a management cohort, we exist to…

• Make sure that management across our organization is consistent, strong, and working well for everyone — so that every person on our team has what they need to thrive and make their biggest impact

• Learn from and support each other in doing the work of management

• Coordinate across teams so we’re building together, not working in silos

• Make sure the organizational strategy reaches every team as clearly and directly as possible

• Give meaningful input on decisions that affect the organization

• Understand the context for organizational decisions so we can support them, even if they weren’t the ones we would have made

• Create and model the shared culture we want to build across the organization

You may not need all of these. You may have others. And it’s OK if this is a working draft. The point isn’t perfection, it’s to have a solid picture of “What we’re responsible for as a group” going into the first meeting.

2. Clarify the purpose of the meetings overall

The mandate says why the team exists. The purpose says what the monthly meeting is for – what you most want this hour to do for the organization and the managers in it.

Start with yourself: What would make this the best use of everyone’s time? What issues or opportunities could an hour with all managers help you solve or maximize?

Then ask your managers. A short note or survey is fine. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. What are they finding hardest? What would help them do their jobs better? What would make this hour not just worth their time, but as valuable as possible? (Sample email here.)

Treat the first four months as an experiment, and say so explicitly. Tell managers you’ll collect input officially at the end of that stretch, and let them know how to share feedback along the way. Put a four-month check-in on your calendar now.

Before the first meeting, collect what you heard, decide what to integrate, and share back your plan. Getting managers’ input up front makes it clear these meetings aren’t (just) another obligation handed down from above. They’re genuinely built to set the team up for success.

Here’s a sample email you can use.

Finally, collect what you hear, decide what to integrate, and share back what you’re planning before the first meeting. Put a reminder on your to-do list or calendar to collect input three months in, and then follow up on that. Getting managers’ input makes it clear from the start that these meetings are not (just) another obligation handed down from above, but are genuinely intended to help set the team up for success.

3. Prep each meeting — POP it

Great meetings don’t happen by accident, they’re intentionally designed. The framework we use is POP: Purpose, Outcomes, Process. (The POP framework was developed by Leslie Sholl Jaffe and her colleague Randall Alford. Leslie was a brilliant strategic thinker and leadership coach who passed away this year.)

• Purpose is the overall intent of the meeting (why it exists). Use what you noted above as the purpose for these meetings overall.

• Outcomes are the concrete objectives that you want to walk away from this meeting having accomplished. Not “we discussed X” but what will people have, know, or be able to do coming out of this meeting?

• Process is how you’ll get there: the agenda, the prep, and how you’ll manage any dynamics in the room you need to plan for.

The outcomes are the biggest load-bearing element, so we’ll focus on that here. You can also see more details about each piece in this tool for using the POP model and sample POP for a management team meeting.

Clarify the outcomes

When you’re clear about the outcomes you want to achieve, you have a clear guide for what goes on the agenda and what needs to happen ahead of time, and a real way to assess whether the meeting worked and adjust for the next month.

Here are some example outcomes. The point of the list is to give you a sense of the range, not a checklist.

• [Manager] has concrete next steps and new clarity on the challenge they’re bringing

• Each manager leaves with one new tool or approach to try in their own management this month

• Everyone has a clear understanding of what’s happening across teams and what’s coming up

• I get thoughtful input on X decision, and everyone’s clear about the next steps for me to make the final call

• We’ve made decisions and are aligned on how we’re setting expectations with our teams about X

• Managers leave knowing each other better and trusting each other more

• Managers practice thinking out loud about real challenges, and see that not having the answer is normal

Each month you’ll likely focus on two or three outcomes rather than trying for all of them. Before every meeting: what will be true at the end of this hour that isn’t true right now?

Design the process

Once you’re clear on the outcomes, the process is what you build to reach them. There are three elements to process design:

• Agenda. What happens in the hour, in what order, to move you toward the outcomes?

• Prep. What do you need to do before the meeting? What do other people need to do, know, read, or think about before the meeting?

• Dynamics. How do you set the meeting up so everyone can participate fully?

In the example at the top of this article, we described a meeting where our manager, Abigail, brought a specific real challenge to dive into as a case study. The case study format is one of the most valuable things you can do with this time – it can give managers real insights and concrete next steps, and gives them practice thinking through hard situations collectively, builds genuine trust, and starts to shift the culture toward we figure things out together instead of each of us figures it out alone.

But it’s not the only option. Some months you’ll use the time for skills training, or troubleshooting from a previous session. Others for getting real input on an organizational decision. Others for calibrating expectations across teams that have started to drift.

4. Wrapping up

Taking the time to make sure take-aways and next steps from each meeting are clear and communicated makes it more likely that the take-aways will be incorporated and the next steps will happen. It’s also an important way to communicate that the organization values the time and energy managers brought to the meeting. When the person running the meeting circles back on what participants are taking from the meeting, captures themes, and follows through on next steps, it tells the group that what happens in the room matters.

Before people leave the room

• Make sure every next step has an owner. Don’t leave the room with any task un-owned. Any next step that doesn’t have an owner is unlikely to happen.

In the days after

• Capture cross-cutting themes. What came up that points to a skills block, a decision that needs to be made, or a conversation worth picking up next month?

• Note individual follow-ups needed. A check-in with a manager who was quieter than usual, a promise you made to share something, a connection worth making between two people in the room.

• Follow through on any next steps you committed to share. Modeling follow-through on your items helps build momentum for the others.

• Plan to circle-back on the case study. When it’s useful, give the manager who presented a few minutes at the next meeting to share what they tried and what happened.

Simple, consistent follow-through can help turn a good meeting into real change over time.

Your next steps: Checklist for launching (or resetting) your Monthly Manager Meetings

Before the invitation goes out:

☐ Mandate drafted — why this group exists and what you’re accountable for together

☐ Draft your Purpose for the monthly meeting

☐ Note sent to managers asking what would make the hour valuable to them (Sample here)

☐ Four-month experiment framing communicated, three-month check-in on your calendar.

☐ Finalize the Purpose and share it out before the first meeting

Schedule the meetings:

☐ Four meetings blocked on the calendar

(You may not be able to get the first meeting on the calendar right away. That’s fine. Pick the soonest available time and book the four meetings starting then.)

Before the meeting itself:

☐ Clarify the Outcomes for the meeting (Purpose is set in “Before the invitation goes out.”)

☐ Design the Process

☐ Agenda – What happens, in what order, to move you toward the outcomes?

☐ Prep – What do you need to do before the meeting? What do other people need to do, know, read, or think about before the meeting?

☐ Dynamics – How do you set the meeting up so everyone can participate fully?

☐ Send the agenda and any prep materials out a few days ahead of time

Wrapping up:

Before people leave the room:

☐ Every next step has a clear owner

In the days after:

☐ Cross-cutting themes and individual follow-ups captured

☐ Your own committed follow-through completed

☐ Circle-back on the case study scheduled into next month’s agenda

What would be most useful next?

We’re building this series to be as practically useful as possible, and we want to hear from you.

Help shape what we build. What do you most want us to cover next?

• A template for the very first manager meeting

• A topic list to help you map out your first few months of meetings

• How to build reliable information flow across the management layer

• Who should be taking all of this on in the first place

• More low-lift moves: small things that punch above their weight

• Something else entirely

Let us know by emailing Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting or submitting here.

Independent consulting in the social impact space has a client-side gap. Most of the consultants I know spend real energy improving our own craft: how we scope, price, run projects, and communicate. There are newsletters for that (hi!). There are communities and surveys and reports.

For the nonprofits hiring us, the support system is thinner. Most executive directors hire their first consultant the same way: they ask around, get a recommendation, skim a proposal, sign it, and figure out the rest on the fly. No one taught them how to scope an engagement, write clear deliverables, set up a decision-making structure, or close out well.

That’s the gap a group of us set out to fill.

A new (and free!) resource

Today we’re launching Working with Consultants: A Guide for Mission-Driven Organizations. It’s at working-with-consultants.ghost.io, and it’s free.

Just use your email address to sign up. Lest you cower in fear, I promise we will not harrass you! We will send an update roughly monthly or so as we add new stuff to the site.

The contributors are Emily Berens, Allison Ehrich Bernstein, Amy Chen, Jasmine Daly, Izzy Goodman, Susannah Hook-Rodgers, Michaela Howard, Danielle Lemi, Michele Levy, and me. Every piece was written by a named author drawing on actual engagements. We peer-reviewed each other’s drafts, argued about framing, and tried to write the resource we wish our clients had before they ever called us.

How to use it

The library is organized the way an engagement actually unfolds:

• Finding & Selecting Consultants — when to hire, where to look, what to watch for, how to run a process that surfaces the right partner.

• Budget & Pricing — what consultants charge and why, how to negotiate scope inside a budget, the hidden costs organizations don’t plan for.

• Setting Up for Success — scoping the work, writing a good contract, getting the right people involved, establishing communication from day one.

• Managing the Engagement — staying aligned once the work is underway, what to do when things go off track, how to wrap up and prepare the team to carry the work forward.

• What Good Looks Like — real stories from real engagements.

You can also browse by content type. Guides are the essays — the thinking behind good practice. Templates are the grab-and-go tools: checklists, conversation scripts, planning worksheets. Case Studies are the stories.

For those of you on my side of the table

This is a resource you can point your clients toward. A few ways I’m thinking about using it:

• Linking the Organizational Readiness Self-Assessment in my outbound emails, which does some of the qualifying work before a discovery call.

• Sending the Scope Negotiation Conversation Guide to prospects who want to hire me but haven’t figured out for what.

• Pointing newer engagement owners — the nonprofit staff who will actually manage me day to day — toward the Managing the Person Doing the Work guide, because nobody taught them either.

• Sharing the whole site with folks in my network who run or sit on the boards of nonprofits. The next consultant they hire will do better work if the engagement starts from a more informed place.

We’ll keep adding to it with new templates, new case studies, and probably a few things we haven’t thought of yet. If you find something valuable, use it. If you’d improve something, tell us. If you want to contribute something to this community library, write it up and send it over.

A better resource for the people hiring us is, in the end, a better resource for us. Engagements go better when both sides start with the same words for what they’re doing.

Visit working-with-consultants.ghost.io →

Today: two more findings that explain why the gap persists, and why, left alone, it gets worse. Then: what we’re building to do something about it.

3. The Biggest Organizations Are the Most Broken

Growth doesn’t solve for strategic discipline; it buries it.

You would expect, reasonably, that larger nonprofits with bigger budgets, more staff, more Board infrastructure, and more years of operational experience would score higher on strategic fitness. They have more resources to invest in systems. They can hire for strategic roles. They’ve survived long enough to have learned something.

The data says the opposite.

Organizations above $25 million in annual budget rated their overall fitness at 3.0 out of 10, which is the lowest of any budget category in the sample. Their governance composite was 1.6 out of 5. Their willingness to stop or scale back low-impact programs: 1.0 out of 5.

The $10M–$25M band wasn’t much better: 5.0 on fitness, 2.91 on governance. Meanwhile, the lone under-$500K organization in the sample rated itself at 9.0, with behavioral and outcome composites above 4.5. The $500K–$1M band averaged 6.5.

The pattern suggests that as budget increases, strategic fitness decreases. The relationship isn’t perfectly linear—the $5M–$10M band sits slightly above the $1M–$5M band on some measures—but the overall trend is consistent.

Why? The data doesn’t tell us directly, but the behavioral scores suggest a hypothesis. Large organizations score worst on exactly the disciplines that require saying no: prioritization, willingness to sunset programs, and reviewing leading indicators that might force uncomfortable conversations. They score better on the outward-facing, additive behaviors like stakeholder anticipation and environmental sensing that let them respond to new opportunities without subtracting old commitments. In other words, they’ve gotten good at adding, but they’ve lost the ability to subtract. Every new grant, every new Board priority, and every new political moment layers on top of what already exists, and no one has the mandate or the mechanism to take anything off the pile.

The smallest organizations, operating without this accumulated sediment, can still turn. They haven’t yet built the institutional inertia that makes strategic discipline so hard to maintain at scale. The question for growing organizations—the ones moving from $1M to $5M, from $5M to $10M—isn’t whether growth will test their strategic infrastructure. It will. The question is whether they’ll notice the erosion before it becomes the culture.

The pattern also shows up across mission areas. Environment and climate organizations score lower than any other mission area on nearly every dimension: behavioral composite of 2.6, outcomes average of 2.6, overall fitness of 4.2. Civic engagement and advocacy organizations score meaningfully higher: 3.2 behavioral composite, 3.3 outcomes, 5.8 overall fitness. The difference is infrastructure.

4. Below the Director Level, Governance Is a Black Box

When staff experience strategy as something done to them rather than something they shape, strategic execution becomes brittle at best, and when the pressure hits, strategic coherence is the first thing lost.

The survey includes a seven-item governance section: questions about whether Board meetings address long-term direction, whether decision authority is clear, whether leading indicators get reviewed, and whether there’s a regular strategy cadence.

The single non-leadership staff member in our sample—someone who identified as “Other role,” working at a $10M–$25M civic engagement organization—couldn’t answer any of them. Every governance question came back “Unanswerable.”

One person is an anecdote, not a finding, and we know that. But as a signal, it’s worth sitting with, because it’s consistent with everything else in the data. The further you move from the C-suite, the less visible governance becomes. Senior leaders (VPs and Directors) could answer the governance questions, but their scores were low: 2.6 on whether Board meetings spend enough time on long-term direction, 2.2 on reviewing leading indicators, and 2.0 on decisions being clearly communicated afterward. They know enough to know it’s broken. The person one tier below them couldn’t even tell you whether it exists.

This reframes the perception gap in an important way. The information architecture of most nonprofit organizations does not carry strategic context downward. Strategy gets decided in a room. It may or may not get communicated in a meeting. By the time it reaches the people actually executing the work, it has become a directive without a rationale, a priority without a framework, or a change without a story. Staff experience strategy as something that happens to them, not something they’re part of shaping. Sixty percent of respondents disagreed that staff feel meaningfully involved in setting direction, and only ten percent agreed.

The compounding problem is leaders often hesitate to bring staff into strategic conversations precisely because staff aren’t equipped to engage strategically. They’ve never been given the context, the data, or the decision frameworks to do so. It’s a self-sealing loop: the less you share, the less people can contribute. The less people contribute, the more you believe they can’t.

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What These Four Findings Mean Together

Taken individually, each finding has its own implications. Taken together, they describe a system.

The CEO or Executive Director thinks the organization is healthy (Finding 1). That confidence is reinforced by item-level self-assessments that diverge sharply from everyone else’s experience (Finding 2). The organization grows, and growth erodes the very disciplines—prioritization, subtraction, governance rigor—that would surface the problem (Finding 3). Meanwhile, the further people sit from the leadership table, the less they can see of how strategy actually works, which means the signals that might correct the Executive Director’s overconfidence never reach them (Finding 4).

Confidence at the top. Erosion at scale. Invisibility at the bottom. And no feedback mechanism connecting them.

The overall fitness average across the full sample was 5.2 out of 10. The behavioral composite was 3.07 out of 5. In a stable operating environment, that might be survivable: adequate if unimpressive, the organizational equivalent of a C+. But the organizations in this sample are advocacy groups, climate organizations, civic engagement operations, and more. They work in volatile political and funding contexts where the ground shifts fast and often. Mid-functioning isn’t a stable state for them; it’s fragile. One significant external disruption—a funding shock, a political reversal, a leadership transition—and the infrastructure that was “good enough” yesterday becomes the thing that breaks today.

The strongest behavioral predictors of better outcomes in this sample were Learning Integration (r=0.78) and Decision Momentum (r=0.66). Organizations that examine what’s working mid-effort and act visibly on what they learn—and that keep decisions moving rather than letting them stall in consensus limbo—report markedly better results. The fact that they’re the strongest differentiators in the dataset says less about their inherent power than about how rarely they’re practiced.

The gap between high-fitness and low-fitness organizations bears that out. The largest differences show up on Decision Momentum (+1.62), Scenario Consideration (+1.55), Leadership Modeling (+1.49), and Learning Integration (+1.42). High-fitness organizations move faster and learn more. Low-fitness organizations are stuck and, critically, are not learning their way out of being stuck.

What the sector has, in abundance, is strategic awareness. The two highest-scoring behaviors across the full sample are Stakeholder Anticipation (3.71) and Environmental Sensing (3.35). These are the outward-looking muscles, the ability to read the room and anticipate reactions.

What the sector lacks is strategic discipline: the internal systems that translate awareness into prioritization, learning, and subtraction. These organizations are sophisticated scanners of their environment. They are not, by and large, disciplined governors of themselves.

We can call this pattern Reactive Sophistication: externally perceptive but internally undisciplined. High responsiveness plus low structural discipline equals strategic drift. The organization responds to everything, subtracts nothing, and gradually loses the thread of what it was actually trying to do, because no one made the decision not to do something.

What Comes Next

We want to end where we started on Tuesday: with that 3.17-point gap.

Because the most dangerous finding in this dataset is that the people with the most power to fix these problems believe, sincerely and with conviction, that they don’t exist.

If you’re reading this as a CEO or Executive Director, the data’s invitation is not to feel defensive. It’s to get curious about whether your team’s experience of the organization matches yours. Ask them, not in a town hall or a survey with your name on it, but in a way that makes honesty costless.

What you hear might close the gap, or it might widen it in useful ways. Either outcome is better than the alternative, which is leading an organization you don’t fully see.

We’re building something to help.

The findings in this report describe a structural problem: leaders operating inside systems that limit their visibility, reward addition over subtraction, and don’t carry strategic context to the people who need it most. You don’t solve structural problems by working harder or reshuffling priorities. You solve them by building the infrastructure that makes visibility and discipline possible.

We’re assembling a small design cohort—ten to fifteen senior leaders with direct authority over how their organizations operate—to do exactly that. This won’t be a training or webinar series, but rather a working group that pressure-tests frameworks against live organizational challenges, builds the tools the sector is missing, and shapes resources for wider distribution. The kind of room where an ED can say “my team doesn’t experience my organization the way I do” and get help figuring out why.

If that’s a conversation you want to be part of, let us know here.

If you’d rather follow the work as it develops, make sure to subscribe to the Strategic Agility Reboot series.

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Methodology Note

This survey was administered in Q1 2026 with nearly a 50-50 split of respondents between independent consultants assessing client organizations and nonprofit staff and leaders assessing their own. Respondents rated organizations on twelve strategic behaviors (1–5 frequency scale), seven governance items (1–5 agreement scale), eight outcome items (1–5 agreement scale), and one overall fitness rating (1–10). The sample skews toward environment/climate and civic engagement/advocacy organizations. Budget bands range from under $500K to above $25M. All correlations reported are Pearson’s r on the full sample. Given the sample size, all findings should be understood as directional signals warranting further investigation, not definitive conclusions.

That’s the gap (on a ten-point scale) between how Executive Directors and CEOs rate their organization’s strategic fitness and how everyone else does. EDs gave themselves an average of 8.0 out of 10. Senior leaders one rung below them said 4.83. Consultants who advise these same organizations said 4.91.

This is a chasm wide enough to suggest that the people running these organizations and the people working inside them are describing two entirely different places.

Earlier this year, we ran a survey of nonprofit practitioners and the consultants who advise them, asking them to rate nonprofit strategic behaviors, governance mechanics, and perceived outcomes across the organizations they know best. The sample is small and weighted toward environment and climate organizations, with advocacy and civic engagement as the second-largest cluster. It’s a pilot, not a census, but pilot data can be revealing precisely because it hasn’t been sanded smooth by scale, and what this data reveals is not comfortable.

We went in expecting to confirm a thesis we’ve been circling for a while. The strategic challenges nonprofits face are less about talent or vision and more about infrastructure: the decision architectures, meeting cadences, and prioritization systems that make strategic behavior the default rather than the exception. The data confirmed that thesis. It also surfaced four findings we didn’t anticipate.

This is the first of two pieces. Today: what the people at the top believe, versus what everyone else sees. On Thursday: what makes it worse, why no one catches it, and what we’re doing about it.

1. The People at the Top Think Everything Is Fine

The leaders most responsible for closing these gaps are the least likely to believe they exist.

Start with that overall fitness rating. The EDs in our survey rated their organizations at the top of the scale: an average of 8.0 out of 10. The senior leaders (VPs, Directors) averaged 4.83. The consultants averaged 4.91. One “Other” staff member said 6.0.

The behavioral composite tells the same story. EDs rated their organizations at 4.29 out of 5 on strategic behaviors. Senior leaders: 3.03. Consultants: 2.77. On perceived outcomes (the section that asks whether strategy actually produces results people can feel), EDs said 4.56, senior leaders said 2.77, and consultants said 2.88.

There are caveats: CEOs are optimists by professional necessity; the view from the top is always rosier; it is a small sample. All true.

But the pattern runs in one direction only, across every dimension we measured, without exception. And it tracks what practitioners describe anecdotally all the time: EDs who believe their organizations are executing well while their teams are quietly drowning, confused about priorities, unclear on who owns which decisions. The boss thinks the ship is on course, but the crew can see water coming in below deck.

Not a single respondent—zero out of twenty—rated leadership modeling at “Always.” The ceiling was “Often.” Leaders are asking their teams to think strategically while not consistently demonstrating it themselves. The ED who rates their organization an 8 out of 10 has also never, by their own account, always modeled the behavior they’re assessing.

This isn’t a failure of intelligence or commitment. It’s a failure of systems.

Leaders making resource decisions, hiring decisions, and Board-facing decisions based on their own assessment of organizational health are almost certainly making those decisions from a position of overconfidence. And the gap shows up in exactly the places where honest self-assessment matters most.

2. They Don’t Just Disagree in General. They Disagree on Everything That Matters

The perception gap isn’t a matter of perspective. It shows up on every specific behavior, and it’s widest exactly where honest self-assessment is most consequential.

If the perception gap were limited to a general vibes check—”how’s the organization doing overall?”—you might chalk it up to optimism bias and move on. But the divergence shows up at the item level, in the specific behaviors the survey measures. The spread is largest on exactly the questions that require the most honest self-assessment.

Prioritization Discipline

The ability to explicitly decide what the organization will not do and protect those boundaries is where the gap is most striking. EDs rated their organizations at 5.0 out of 5. Senior leaders rated the same behavior at 2.67, which is closer to “rarely.” Those are two incompatible descriptions of reality, not a difference of perspective. The CEO says “we always decide what we won’t do.” The VP says “we almost never do.” Someone is wrong, and the data suggests it isn’t the VP.

Systemic Diagnosis

Tracing how problems are interconnected before jumping to solutions shows a nearly identical split: EDs at 3.0, senior leaders at 2.83. Closer, but still, the EDs’ self-assessment exceeds their teams’ on every behavior we measured.

Learning Integration

Examining what’s working and acting on it lands at 4.5 for EDs and 2.83 for senior leaders.

Strategy-Operations Connection

EDs said 4.5. Senior leaders said 3.33. Consultants, who see the same organizations from outside, said 2.27.

The consultant numbers deserve a separate note here. On nearly every behavioral item, consultants score their client organizations lower than the internal staff do.

• Prioritization Discipline: 2.27 (consultants) vs. 2.67 (senior leaders).

• Learning Integration: 2.18 vs. 2.83.

• Strategy-Operations Connection: 2.27 vs. 3.33.

When the people advising on strategy and the people doing the work both disagree with leadership, and disagree in the same direction, the signal is hard to ignore.

This pattern has a name in organizational psychology: the CEO disease. This is the tendency for information to get filtered, softened, and optimized for palatability as it travels upward. Bad news slows down while good news speeds up. The person at the top gradually starts inhabiting a version of the organization that doesn’t match the one people actually work in.

On Thursday

The perception gap tells you the problem exists. It doesn’t tell you why it persists, or why no one catches it.

For that, you need to look at what happens as organizations grow and what happens to the people furthest from the room where strategy gets made. The data has answers on both, and they’re connected in ways we didn’t expect.

Part 2 comes Thursday. We’ll also share what we’re building to do something about it.

Is it a zero sum game

Any parent knows the math: anything I do is taking away from something else, because there is no spare time. If I go for a run, that’s time I’m not spending with my three-year-old Marlow. If I meet a friend to see Project Hail Mary (which I recently did, and it was an awesome movie — thanks for going with me, Charles), that’s an evening I’m not spending with my partner, Amy, or helping get our family ready for Passover, or doing any of the million small things it takes to keep everyone fed, clothed, and reasonably happy.

That’s everyone’s story. But for an independent consultant, those same minutes are income. I don’t get paid by existing. I know that’s not quite how salaried work functions, but it can feel that way from the other side. The only way I get paid is if I do the work; the only way I have the work is if I build the pipeline. So the zero-sum game cuts in a second direction, and now I’m balancing being a parent, a partner, a person, and a business owner — all at once, all the time.

I struggle with guilty feelings about this, because all of it is my choice. I can’t offload my guilt and convert it into anger at a boss who made me stay late at the office. When I stay late, it’s because I chose that over pretending for the 500th time that I’m Elsa and Marlow is Anna. (Actually, maybe I will stay late. (I hate Frozen so much.))

So instead it’s a series of trade-offs that are all — every one — on my shoulders. If I leave at 5pm to be home for dinner, bath, and bedtime, I think about the client work that didn’t get done, and I wonder if I’ve damaged the relationship. When Amy and Marlow go to the playground and I stay home to get ahead on a project so I’ll have time for new client outreach later in the week, I think about the fun they’re having and I feel the absence. I wonder if Marlow is sad I’m not there.

So much good

For the first few years of having a kid, I took stock of my life and liked what I found. I loved my child more than anything, and spending time with her was the best part of every day. Amy is an amazing person. She has the courage I wish I had, a way of seeing things that constantly gives me new perspective, and an emotional intelligence that makes me feel like I just put on my glasses (my eyesight is very bad). Work was full in a good way: I loved my clients, my projects, and my day-to-day activities. I was challenged and stretched.

It wasn’t all roses, of course. I don’t think my heart rate got above resting for the first 18 months of being a parent (unless inadvertently). I barely saw friends. My semi-regular board game night went out the window. I hardly watched any Liverpool soccer matches with my buddies, I didn’t see many new movies.

I told myself this was fine, because my life was filled with nothing but good things. My days were engaging, novel, full of love and joy. How could a stretch of days with so much good in them be anything other than perfect?

In retrospect, there was a trap here, and I could not see it. Because the things being pushed out were being pushed out by other things I loved, I didn’t register the loss. Every time I checked, all I saw was good. How could so much good be bad?

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the whole picture. Aristotle (I studied Ancient Greek language and literature in college) described the Golden Mean: a well-lived life involves many things, not just one thing, even if that one thing is incredible. The Golden Mean is about balance and moderation. The parts of me that weren’t being nurtured — the friendships, the body, the solitude — needed attention.

It didn’t become a crisis. But it’s been a long, slow project to reintroduce some balance.

One thing consulting gets right

One of the things I appreciate about consulting is that it builds in a version of this lesson by default. Because I spread myself across multiple clients and projects, my professional identity isn’t a single thing. That’s different from my previous life as a Chief of Staff and de facto COO/CFO of a large nonprofit, where I threw myself into the role so completely that it became my whole sense of professional worth. My social network, motivations, and beliefs about what I was doing all rested on one foundation. When it ended (as everything eventually does), the transition was wrenching. It was healthy in the long run but harder than it needed to be.

Consulting has built-in bulwarks against that kind of collapse. The work is spread out. No single client or project carries the full weight of my identity. I didn’t expect to need that structural resilience in my personal life, too, but here I am trying to apply the same principle to fatherhood, partnership, friendship, and the rest of it.

Still at it

I have a therapist. I meditate. I write. And these are still hard things, every day — the guilt, the trade-offs, the nagging feeling that I’m always taking from somewhere and giving to somewhere else, and always coming up short in at least one direction.

I’d love to hear from anyone wrestling with some version of this. These are the kinds of things that get easier when you talk about them with people who understand the particular shape of this life.

I didn’t have the answer, either, but I had a method: break the question into smaller pieces. How many doors per day can one canvasser knock? How many contact attempts does it take to get a completed conversation? What’s the realistic knock rate in urban versus rural areas, and what’s the split across those three states? How many working days are in the timeline? None of these sub-questions were hard to estimate. Combined, they gave us a staffing range that held up well enough to build a budget around.

I do some version of this on most engagements. A nonprofit wants to know whether a revenue target is realistic. A campaign director wants to know if there’s enough time to hit a persuasion goal before Election Day. An executive director wants to know how many staff a new program actually requires versus how many she wishes it required. I almost never have clean data for these questions. What I have is the ability to take the big unanswerable thing and decompose it into a set of smaller, answerable things.

It turns out this has a name. Enrico Fermi, the physicist, used to pose problems like this to his students, like “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” No one actually knows the real answer to this question — it’s not tracked anywhere, and they checked! But you can get in the ballpark if you estimate the population, the percentage of households with a piano, how often a piano needs tuning, and how many tunings one tuner can do in a year, and suddenly you’re close. The technique doesn’t produce a precise answer , but it does produce a range, and a range is almost always more useful than a pure guess.

I learned about Fermi problems from Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s book Superforecasting, which I want to spend some time on here because it reframed how I think about almost every part of the consulting relationship.

The forecasters who weren’t supposed to be good at this

Tetlock ran a large-scale research project called the Good Judgment Project that tracked thousands of people making predictions about geopolitical events over several years. A small subset of forecasters were consistently more accurate than the rest. They outperformed not just average participants but intelligence analysts with access to classified information. Tetlock called them superforecasters.

What set them apart was a set of habits: comfort with probability rather than certainty, a discipline of breaking problems into estimable parts rather than reasoning from gut feeling, willingness to update beliefs in small increments as new information arrives, and the humility to treat their own confidence as something to be calibrated rather than trusted.

That last one is the one I think about often. Superforecasters are people who maintain a more accurate picture of what they don’t know. They hold their beliefs loosely enough to revise them, and tightly enough to act on them. That balance — conviction without rigidity — is the posture I’m trying to maintain every time I walk into a client’s organization and start forming a diagnosis.

The Good Judgment Project’s website has a solid overview of the research (not paywalled). The book is a better read than most popular science. Gardner is a skilled co-writer and the narrative moves. But the framework itself is what I want to pull on here, because once I started seeing consulting through the lens of estimation under uncertainty, a bunch of other things I’d been reading clicked into place.

Why organizations can’t do what they know they should

One of Tetlock’s findings is that knowing the right approach doesn’t mean people will use it. Superforecasters have to fight their own cognitive biases constantly: the pull of overconfidence, the comfort of early conclusions, or the temptation to stop updating once you’ve landed on a view.

This dynamic is the subject of one of a great article, Alec Lewis’s piece in The Athletic, “NFL teams know the best way to draft, so why aren’t they doing it?” (gift article so you can get through the NYT paywall). Researchers including Nobel laureate Richard Thaler demonstrated nearly twenty years ago that NFL teams systematically overvalue high draft picks and would be better off accumulating more picks by trading down. The probability that any given pick outperforms the next player chosen at the same position is barely better than a coin flip. This research is well known, but most teams keep doing the opposite.

Lewis interviews fourteen general managers, coaches, scouts, and analytics staffers, and what emerges is a portrait of organizational decision-making that will be painfully familiar to anyone who consults with nonprofits. The GM is focused on job security more than long-term roster building. The coach believes he can develop raw talent better than the data suggests. The scouts want to justify the months they spent evaluating a prospect. Ownership understands the logic intellectually but can’t resist the emotional pull of a big, exciting pick. And there’s a culture-wide reluctance to admit that outcomes are more random than anyone wants to believe, because admitting that means admitting that your expertise is less predictive than you thought.

I’ve been the consultant holding a well-supported recommendation and watching a client choose the opposite. For a long time I interpreted that as a failure of persuasion on my part, or stubbornness on theirs. This article helped me see it differently: as a system of competing pressures that makes the irrational choice feel rational to the people inside it. The Fermi-style decomposition can produce the right answer, but the right answer still has to survive the organization.

Where good analysis goes to die

Which brings me to a piece I think every consultant should read: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy,” originally published in Harvard Business Review in 1997.

Their central finding: people will commit to a decision they disagree with if they believe the process that produced it was fair. And they will sabotage a decision they agree with if they feel the process was unfair.

Kim and Mauborgne identify three principles at play in group processes: engagement (people affected by the decision had input), explanation (they understand why the decision was made), and expectation clarity (they know what’s expected of them going forward). The article includes a case study where identical changes were introduced at two manufacturing plants, one with fair process and one without. The plant that skipped it nearly fell apart, and the plant that practiced it transformed successfully.

This connects to the Superforecasting framework in a way I didn’t see at first. Tetlock’s superforecasters are good at getting to the right answer. But the right answer, deployed without fair process, often produces worse outcomes than a mediocre answer that everyone helped develop. I’ve delivered strategies that gathered dust, and when I look back at why, the explanation is almost always here: not in my analysis, but in how I presented it, who felt consulted, and whether the people responsible for implementation understood the reasoning behind the recommendation or just received the conclusion.

We wrote about the organizational mechanics of this in our Strategic Agility series. The management layer between strategy and execution is exactly where fair process lives or dies. (I think you can get the HBR article if you sign up for a free account. You get a few articles for free each month that way.)

The decisions that don’t deserve this much anguish

One more dimension of the uncertainty problem. Jeff Bezos, in a short section of Invent and Wander called “Disagree and Commit,” makes a distinction I now use with clients often: one-way doors versus two-way doors.

One-way doors are irreversible, high-consequence decisions. They deserve slow deliberation, multiple perspectives, and careful analysis. Two-way doors are reversible. If the decision turns out to be wrong, you can walk back through. Bezos’s observation is that as organizations grow, they start applying the slow, heavyweight one-way-door process to everything. The result is not better decisions but rather paralysis.

This maps directly onto the Fermi mindset. The Fermi approach says: I don’t need perfect data, I need a useful range. The Bezos framework says: I don’t need certainty about this decision, because if I’m wrong I can reverse it. Both are about calibrating the amount of deliberation to the actual stakes, and both require an honest assessment of how much you know and how much the decision actually costs if you’re wrong.

Most of the decisions I watch stall nonprofit organizations for weeks are two-way doors being treated like one-way doors. We built on this in our Strategic Agility piece on decision-making under uncertainty, where we turned the distinction into a practical tool called the Reversibility Test.

The room where it happens (badly)

There’s one more reading I want to mention, because it addresses the place where all of this thinking actually has to happen: the meeting.

Antony Jay’s “How To Run a Meeting,” published in Harvard Business Review in 1976 (I know), has aged better than almost anything I’ve read on the subject. Jay wrote a theory of what meetings are for — why human beings need them, what functions they perform that nothing else can replace, and how a chair should think about the role.

His most useful contribution is a taxonomy of what every agenda item is actually trying to accomplish: is it informative (share and discuss), constructive (generate something new), executive (assign responsibilities), or legislative (change the operating framework)? I’ve started mentally categorizing agenda items this way before meetings, and it clarifies why some meetings go nowhere, because nobody agreed on what the conversation was supposed to produce.

This matters for the Fermi problem, too. The moment of estimation and the moment of diagnosis almost always happen in a room with other people. The quality of the estimate depends not just on the thinking but on how the room is structured: who’s in it, whether junior voices are heard before senior voices anchor the conversation, or whether the chair has sorted out what each discussion is supposed to produce. Jay gives a structure for that. Susannah and I touched on some of this in our piece on why most meetings don’t need to exist.

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One more, for the bookshelf

Chris Zook and James Allen’s The Founder’s Mentality doesn’t connect to the Fermi framework as directly, but it’s worth including because it gives a diagnostic vocabulary for the organizational contexts where all of this plays out. Their argument: growth creates complexity, complexity creates internal dysfunction, and internal dysfunction kills the very thing that made the organization successful. They identify three predictable crises — overload, stall-out, and free fall — and most of the nonprofits I work with are somewhere in the first two without a name for what’s happening.

Having that name changes the engagement. Instead of solving symptoms, I can point at a pattern and say: this is overload, and here’s what usually comes next if we don’t address it. (The introduction and first chapter are enough to get the framework. The rest is case studies — useful but skippable if you’re short on time.)

The skill underneath all of it

What connects everything on this list is a single problem: how do you think clearly when you don’t have the information you want?

Fermi problems teach the method — decompose, estimate, combine. Superforecasting teaches the disposition — hold your beliefs loosely, update them often, calibrate your confidence. Fair process teaches the delivery — the best analysis in the world fails if the people who have to implement it don’t feel the process was legitimate. Bezos teaches the triage — not every decision deserves the same amount of anguish. Jay teaches the container — the meeting is where thinking either sharpens or falls apart. And Zook and Allen teach the context — the organizational dynamics that make clear thinking harder as organizations grow.

None of these were written for consultants. All of them describe what I actually do for a living more accurately than any consulting book I’ve read.

If you’ve come across something recently that changed how you think about the work — a book, an article, a paper from some other field entirely — reply to this email and tell me what it is. The best recommendations will show up in a future issue.

I have an office slash guest bedroom, a dual-monitor setup, noise-canceling headphones, good coffee within arm’s reach, and a door that closes. I have everything a person could want for focused work, and yet I routinely lose hours to the gravitational pull of Slack, email, finishing a half-read article, the sudden compulsion to check LinkedIn, or whatever else floats across my screen.

None of that exists on an airplane. My phone is in airplane mode. There’s no second screen. Nobody can reach me and I can’t reach anybody. Delta is always gassing up their free wifi, but I find that it rarely works or it works so bad that checking anything feels like punishment. I’m in a metal tube with a laptop, a tray table, and nowhere to be for the next few hours. And every single time, I land having written more, thought more clearly, and accomplished more real work than I would have in a full day at home.

The research backs up what the airplane already taught me

Angela Duckworth, the psychologist behind the concept of grit, published a piece in the New York Times late last year arguing that willpower is overrated (that’s a non-paywalled link, so check it out!). The people who are best at staying disciplined, she wrote, rarely rely on inner fortitude. Instead, they arrange their lives to minimize the need for willpower in the first place. She calls it situational agency.

An Olympic triathlete buys a house near the trails where he trains. A writer keeps off social media by not owning a smartphone. A teacher tells students to put their phones in their lockers, not their backpacks, and suddenly the lunchroom gets louder in the way lunchrooms should be.

Emily Berens and I wrote a few weeks ago about building a self-management system as an independent consultant: structure, prioritization, forcing mechanisms, the whole architecture. That article was about the system, and this piece is the daily-texture companion to that one. This one is about the Tuesday afternoon when you’re supposed to be writing a client memo and you’ve opened your inbox for the fourth time in twenty minutes.

This stuff applies to anyone who works from a computer, but it’s an acute problem for independent consultants specifically. When you worked in an office, the environment did a lot of this for you without anyone noticing. The commute created a transition between home-brain and work-brain. The physical office was a space designed for working, not for living; your novel and your laundry and your kid’s toys weren’t sitting in your peripheral vision. Colleagues provided ambient accountability, by which I mean the social reality that someone might glance at your screen or notice you’d been scrolling for twenty minutes. Meetings happened in a different room, which meant you physically moved between modes of work.

Independent consulting from home strips all of that away. You’re in the same chair, the same room, often the same screen, all day. The transitions that used to happen automatically now have to be built on purpose, and most of us don’t realize that until we’ve spent a year wondering why we can’t concentrate.

The airplane taught me that my focus problem is not a willpower problem, it’s an environment problem. And once I started treating it that way, things changed.

Return to W2, or the plan I didn’t think I needed

When I first went independent, one of the things I celebrated was the end of planning rituals. I was so glad not to have Monday morning check-ins or hourlong planning meetings. I didn’t have to report reporting what I was working on to a supervisor. I was free. I could just do the work.

What I actually did was meander. I’d start Monday with a vague sense of what needed to happen that week, pick up whatever felt most urgent or most interesting, and arrive at Friday wondering where the time went. I was doing stuff every day in the way that felt like productivity — lots of email, lots of tabs open, lots of meetings — but I wasn’t getting the important things done. The compounding work Emily and I wrote about, the work that builds a practice rather than just servicing it, kept sliding into next week.

So I went back to making a weekly plan, because I’d learned the hard way that my brain can’t hold a week in working memory and make good decisions about priority at the same time.

Here’s how it works now. Every Friday morning, I build my plan for the upcoming week. It’s actually a spreadsheet where each column is a day. At the very top, I have my personal things that are the non-negotiables I do every day, like get in some physical activity and play with my three-year old child. Below that, I have my non-recurring personal to-dos, like yesterday I needed to drop off a package at USPS and do the laundry. Then I have my work meetings for the day in order, and finally my work projects that I want to get done that day. I also get specific, so it’s not “work on the client report” but “finish sections 2 and 3 of the client report and send to Maria for review.”

Note this is not a calendar. A calendar is useful because you need to see your day and make sure things don’t overlap. But a calendar is a schedule, not a plan. A plan is a set of decisions about what matters and in what order.

Then I keep that plan open in front of me all day. It’s the first thing I go over in the morning after I make coffee, and I check it frequently as I get through things so I can cross them off. Crossing things off a list is a small pleasure, and everything I said I would do that day, I need to check off. If I don’t finish something, I don’t just let it float. A very important ritual is at the end of the day, I look at the rest of the week and revise my plan: what moves to tomorrow, what gets pushed, and what gets dropped. This five-minute reconciliation is where the real value lives, because it forces me to confront tradeoffs instead of pretending I’ll magically find more time.

The Friday planning session also includes a longer-term view: what do I care about this quarter, what’s the trajectory of my pipeline, and where am I investing in things that compound. That context is what prevents the weekly plan from becoming just a to-do list of whoever yelled loudest for my time.

Move the book

I love reading. I keep a book going at all times, and having it nearby for my late-morning coffee break or for clearing my head between long sessions is one of the genuine pleasures of working from home. But I learned the hard way that “nearby” can be a trap!

If the book is on my desk, it’s in my line of sight. And if it’s in my line of sight, I’m going to pick it up. Not for a full reading session, I tell myself, just to see what’s coming up in the next chapter, or to finish the page I stopped in the middle of. Then fifteen minutes vanish. This is the Duckworth argument: the problem isn’t that I lack the discipline to ignore a book. The problem is that the book is sitting three feet from my keyboard, and asking my brain to override that temptation fifty times a day is a losing strategy. So the book lives in another room until I’m ready for a break.

My general rule of thumb is if I don’t want to do something during my workday, I remove it from the space where I work. This sounds simple, but it works better than other productivity hacks I’ve tried. That also goes for things on my computer or on my phone.

Change the scenery

I don’t fully understand why this works, but when I’m stuck — when the deliverable isn’t coming together or my attention keeps fragmenting — moving to a different physical space often unlocks something. From my desk to the couch, from my apartment to a coffee shop, or from the coffee shop to a library.

It’s not about finding a “better” workspace. The couch isn’t objectively more conducive to writing than my desk. But the act of moving resets something in my brain. Maybe it’s that the new environment doesn’t carry the associations of the old one: the half-finished email I was going to get back to, the tab I left open, the mental residue of whatever I was doing before. I sit down somewhere new, and for a little while, the only thing in front of me is the thing I moved to do.

I think this is also why the airplane works. It’s not just the absence of distractions. It’s that I am in a completely different physical context, and my brain responds to the novelty by actually paying attention to what’s in front of it.

Unplug the second screen

This is another way to reverse-engineer the airplane.

I have a second monitor at my desk, and it’s essential for anything involving spreadsheets, comparing documents side by side, or building out a complex deliverable with lots of source material. But when I’m writing or thinking through a strategy or doing any kind of work that requires sustained attention, that second screen is trouble. It’s showing me something: my Gmail inbox, a Slack channel, or a browser with tabs open with interesting articles I saved to read later. Even if I’ve minimized everything, the screen is there, glowing in my peripheral vision, pulling a tiny thread of attention away from the main task all day long.

So when I need to focus, I unplug the monitor and move to a different spot. I take my laptop to the kitchen table or the couch or the coffee shop down the street. One screen, one task, and no ambient noise from the digital world. This is the airplane, minus the Biscoffs and the person reclining into my knees (I’m 6’3” tall, so it’s tough).

The key insight is that the second monitor isn’t a distraction because I’m weak-willed. It’s a distraction because it’s there. Duckworth’s research on phone placement and student grades found the same thing: the further away the phone, the better the grades. The students who moved their phones were not more disciplined people, but they’d made the temptation physically harder to act on, so they were more successful in avoiding distraction.

Kill your notifications

You’ve heard this before. I’m saying it again because you probably haven’t done it yet, or you’ve done it halfway.

Turn off all notifications on your computer. All of them: Slack, email, social media, texts, calendar reminders, everything. Every notification is a tiny interruption, and every interruption carries a recovery cost. Research suggests it takes over twenty minutes to fully regain deep focus after a distraction. If you get pinged six times in an hour, you haven’t had an hour of work. You’ve had six ten-minute fragments with no connective thread.

I know the objection: what if something is urgent? What I’ve found: almost nothing is. The things that feel urgent turns out to be urgent at the speed of an hour. Check your email and Slack on your terms, at intervals you decide. I do it roughly every ninety minutes or between finishing one project and starting a new one. Nothing has ever caught fire because I took ninety minutes to respond.

Virtual meetings (sob)

Everything I’ve described so far is about solo work: protecting your focus when you’re writing, building, and thinking. But a huge portion of most consultants’ weeks is spent in meetings, and virtually all of those meetings are now virtual. Consultant life means you’re staring at the very machine that houses every distraction you own.

This is a problem that didn’t exist in the same way ten years ago. When meetings happened over the phone, I could pace in my apartment and look out the window. The physical movement did something for attention that I didn’t fully appreciate until it was gone. Now I am pinned to a chair and a screen, watching a grid of faces while my email sits one alt-tab away. I find it genuinely hard to sustain attention on Zoom, because my body wants to be doing something else and my screen is offering a hundred alternatives at all times. (Oh how much I miss in-person meetings.)

A few things help. First, I try to abide by the same principle from earlier: I unplug my other screens before a virtual meeting starts. If I am on a laptop with no second monitor glowing in my periphery, there’s less to wander toward. Second, I push for phone calls when video isn’t essential. Not every conversation needs to be a Zoom. When I can take a call on my phone and walk around my apartment or step outside, my listening improves noticeably. I ask better questions, and I catch things I’d miss if I were sitting at my desk watching myself in a tiny rectangle.

Third — and this was the biggest change for me — I went back to handwritten notes. For years I took meeting notes on my computer because it was better for search, better for organization, and easier to share. All of that is true, but it was also destroying my ability to listen. When my hands are on a keyboard and I’m looking at a screen, I am one reflex away from checking something. The note-taking becomes a cover story for being on my computer, and my attention fractures.

When I switched back to a notebook, the difference was immediate. Writing by hand is slower, which forces me to listen for what actually matters rather than transcribing everything. My eyes are on the page and the person, not on a screen full of temptations. And the physical act of writing seems to anchor my attention in a way that typing doesn’t. There’s research on this, but I didn’t need the research. I could feel it.

If you need your notes to be searchable later, a product like the reMarkable splits the difference. I get the feel and focus benefits of handwriting without losing the digital archive. (Thanks to for the recommendation!) But even a plain notebook you never look at again is worth it if it keeps you present during the conversation.

Track what you want to do more of

There’s an old management adage: what gets measured gets done. I’ve found this to be true.

I track my Substack newsletters in my own spreadsheet — when I sent each one, the open rate, the click-through rate, the likes, the shares, and the new subscribers. I track every consulting engagement I’ve ever had: what I produced, how many hours I worked, what I delivered, what I got paid.

The tracking creates the same effect as a manager glancing at my weekly report. It crates an awareness that I said I’d do something, and here’s whether I did it.

If you don’t know where to start, pick one category that matters to your practice and start recording it. Revenue by client. Hours by project type. Business development outreach per week. Proposals sent versus proposals won. The specific category matters less than the act of making your work visible to yourself.

It’s still hard, though!

I have not conquered distraction. I am a person who has built an environment that makes distraction slightly harder and focus slightly easier, and the gap between those two states turns out to be worth a lot.

But the system fails regularly. When I’m tired, my complete lack of willpower can overwhelm even the best system. It fails when a project is in the murky middle — past the excitement of starting but nowhere near the satisfaction of finishing, so I just don’t feel like heading down into the boring salt mines.

On those days, I still check my email when I said I wouldn’t. I still pick up the book that I moved to the other room because I walked in there to get water and there it was. The system hasn’t made me into some kind of focus monk, but I have attained some more-than-marginal gains on most days.

The Emily Berens piece ended with a great line: if a task matters to your practice but you keep postponing it, stop debating willpower and change the environment instead. This is what that looks like in practice for me: it’s a weekly plan on a Friday morning, a book moved to another room, a monitor unplugged, and a phone silenced. These are small rearrangements of a physical space that add up to a fundamentally different workday.

Nobody is going to protect your focus for you. That’s the deal we made when we went independent. But you don’t have to rely on discipline alone to keep the deal. You can build the airplane on the ground.

Priorities get interpreted differently across teams. You’re losing too many great people. Issues surface late — or not at all.

Nothing is broken enough to force a reset, but you have the sense that your organization, as strong as the people are, isn’t making the impact it could.

This is not a strategy problem. It’s a management problem.

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Good strategy fails too often. Not because the plan was wrong, but because there was no reliable way to carry it through the organization. When teams are spinning their wheels or getting stuck, it is almost always because the management layer doesn’t have the systems and support it needs to function well.

If you’re new to this series, we’ve previously covered why management infrastructure matters and what excellent management looks like in practice. Both are worth your time.

This piece shows you the whole system, and the rest of the series will give you practical, low-lift ways to strengthen each element of your management infrastructure.

Here’s what we’ll cover. Management infrastructure has three distinct domains, each solving a different problem. Structural Clarity is about whether managers actually know what the job is and have what they need to do it consistently. Collective Leadership is about whether managers operate as a coordinated layer or just a group of individuals who happen to share a reporting structure. And Management System Continuity is about whether your management strength holds when people leave, roles shift, and the organization evolves…or resets every time. For each, we’ll lay out what strong looks like, what happens when it breaks down, and a few diagnostic questions to help you figure out where you stand.

What Management Infrastructure Actually Is

Strategy is the plan for how you’ll win. Execution is the work that gets you there. Management is everything in between — the mechanism that converts intent into action, across teams, over time.

When that mechanism is strong, strategy travels. When it’s weak, it gets lost in translation, reinterpreted by each manager, filtered through each team, and diluted by the time it reaches the people doing the work.

Infrastructure is what makes the mechanism strong. Not just individual managers but the system they operate within.

Management infrastructure is a system, built deliberately, operated collectively, and strengthened over time.

That system has three parts. Each solves a different problem.

Domain 1: Structural Clarity

Structural Clarity is about the role itself. Do managers actually understand what the job is, and do they have what they need to do it consistently?

Strong structural clarity means four things are true:

1. There’s a shared definition of what excellent management looks like (and it’s used consistently)

2. Managers understand their job is to own team outcomes, not to be high-performing individual contributors who play a largely administrative role with direct reports

3. Decision boundaries are clear enough that managers know when to move and when to align

4. Core practices — 1:1s, feedback, performance conversations — are defined and used consistently.

When this breaks down: expectations vary by team, accountability weakens, and managers fill in the gaps — each in their own way. And over time, those differences become the system.

Quick check:

• Do you have a shared, explicit definition of excellent management and management goals and are they regularly used to guide, support, and make hiring and promotion decisions?

• Do your managers fully embrace their role of owning team outcomes, or are they still doing too much of the work themselves?

• Are decision boundaries clear? Do managers know when they can act independently vs when they need to align or get sign-off?

• Do managers have access to the core practices of strong management, and are they using them consistently?

Domain 2: Collective Leadership

Collective Leadership is about how managers operate together. Do they function as a coordinated leadership layer or as a set of individuals who happen to share a reporting structure?

This is a domain organizations often skip entirely.

When managers operate as a team, their impact can multiply — and the management layer becomes more than a collection of individuals doing the same job in parallel.

Strong collective leadership means three things are true: managers have a consistent shared forum to align, calibrate, coordinate and solve problems together; they are getting the context they need to lead and have clear pathways to surface what senior leaders need to hear with a consistent information flow across the management layer — downward with context, upward with signal; and there is one person with explicit responsibility for owning the health and strengthening of the management layer.

When this breaks down: Managers often receive information too late, without context, or inconsistently. Teams move in different directions. Decisions conflict and alignment is hard to find. Issues that cross team lines fall through the gaps — and senior leaders lose the signal. Cross-organization learning happens sporadically at best, and managers are left to navigate through challenges alone. The responsibility for addressing any of this doesn’t quite belong to anyone, so it persists, and even the strongest managers can struggle.

Quick check:

• Do your managers have a consistent, shared forum for alignment, collaboration and shared problem-solving?

• Does information flow reliably in both directions, with managers receiving the context they need and having clear pathways to surface what senior leaders need to hear?

• Is it someone’s actual, explicit responsibility to manage the management layer and do they have capacity dedicated to strengthening it and tools to do that?

Domain 3: Management System Continuity

Management System Continuity is about durability. Does management strength hold as people change, roles shift, and the organization evolves — or does it reset every time someone leaves?

The pattern is familiar. A strong manager builds a strong team. That manager gets worn down without a system built to support them. They leave.The team struggles. The senior team scrambles. A replacement is found and the cycle starts again. This isn’t a talent problem. It’s a continuity problem, and it’s entirely solvable.

Strong continuity means three things are true: Manager support and development is ongoing and embedded in the work, not understood as solely a one-time training; managers have the time and capacity to manage well, not just carry individual workload with a new title; and potential new managers are identified and have opportunities to build their skills before they’re promoted, not starting after.

When this breaks down: Management quality fluctuates with individuals and there’s no consistent path for improvement. Strong managers build strong teams and when they leave, team performance drops and resets. Development is episodic. New managers are underprepared. Managers don’t have enough time or capacity to manage as well as they want to and need to, so the work may still get done, but performance issues go unaddressed, development conversations don’t happen, and team problems compound. Some of your top staff start to leave. Organizational effectiveness becomes dependent on whoever happens to be there at the time.

Quick check

• Is manager development ongoing and embedded in the work — or treated as a one-time event only, with minimal follow-up?

• Do your managers have the time and capacity they need to manage well?

• Do you know who your next managers might be — and are you supporting them to build their skills now, before they’re promoted?

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Where to Start (No Overhaul Required)

You very likely have many of these elements in place already and others that are missing or not as strong as they could be. If you see gaps in more than one domain, that’s normal.

You don’t need to fix everything at once (and we encourage you not to). Strengthening even one part of the system makes the whole layer stronger.

If you don’t yet have a written, shared definition of what excellent management looks like, that’s your foundation. Start there. (See Article 2.)

If you have that, look at the three domains and pick something that won’t take a ton of effort, but will move things in the right direction — strengthen something that already exists or begin building where the gap is sharpest.

Just make one deliberate move. A single structural fix, a clear decision boundary, a consistent 1:1 practice, a manager forum that meets and is useful — any one of these will make a substantive difference and add strength to the system.

Management infrastructure isn’t built in a sprint. But it also doesn’t require a total overhaul. It requires someone deciding that the management layer is worth investing in as a system and then doing that systematically and consistently.

Making that decision gives you a lasting advantage — a deeper impact and the ability to hold up when things get hard.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is to make the system you have stronger than it is today.

From here, we’ll focus on the how — practical ways to make real improvements that fit inside the work you’re already doing.

I wanted to hear from the other side. Sasha Rosen and I have been friends since 2006. We have two decades of working in overlapping corners of the political and organizing worlds, trading notes, pushing each other, and watching each other build things. Sasha is the CEO of The Outreach Team, which she has grown it into a national force in civic engagement, running grassroots campaigns on clean energy, reproductive freedom, democracy reform, and more across 25-plus states. Before that she built and led two other field companies from the ground up, and along the way has employed well over a thousand people.

Sasha is one of those leaders whose ambition is quiet and whose judgment is loud. She is the kind of person who hires a consultant to help her figure out whether she needs a full-time CFO, and then trusts the answer when it's no. Over the past six years, her team has brought on somewhere between 40 and 50 independent consultants. In 2024 alone, they hired about 15 business development consultants, plus a fractional CFO, DEIJ consultants, and others. I don't know anyone on the client side with more firsthand experience hiring, managing, evaluating, and yes, firing independent consultants.

So I asked her: how do you decide you need one? What do you look for? And what makes the difference between someone who earns more work and someone who quietly gets let go?

When a Full-Time Hire Isn’t the Answer

Sasha’s team first turned to consultants in a serious way in 2023, when they identified business development as a strategic weakness. They were strong at running campaigns but lacked access and influence in enough places. The initial instinct was to hire someone in-house. That didn’t work, because the problem itself didn’t have a single-employee shape.

“We realized it’s not that we just need one person,” Sasha told me. “We need multiple people with different expertise in different states with different networks.”

The same logic applied when the team identified a gap in their financial systems. They considered hiring a full-time CFO or controller and even talked to a headhunter. But the headhunter asked what they were looking for, and the answer was: we’re trying to figure that out. So they hired a consultant to define the need itself, build the systems, and serve as a stopgap while they determined whether a full-time role even made sense. In the end, it didn’t, and that same consultant remains as fractional CFO.

The pattern Sasha described comes down to three categories. First: project-based work with a defined timeline, where you need outside expertise to solve a specific problem. Second: strategic or structural questions where an external perspective — someone who knows how other organizations operate — is the whole point. Third: highly specialized access, where the consultant provides on-the-ground intelligence and relationships in a specific geography or field. In that third category, Sasha hired someone in Maine who provides access to key decision-makers and real-time intelligence on what’s happening across C3 and C4 tables — the kind of knowledge that would otherwise require a full-time state director, but then that person wouldn’t have enough else to do.

What struck me is how specialized these needs have become. A generalist business development hire was never going to work, given how narrow and varied The Outreach Team’s work is across different states. Consultants allow for diversification of expertise in a way that a single full-time role never could.

The Networking Tax

I asked Sasha how she actually finds these consultants. The answer was immediate and unsurprising, but still worth hearing from the client side: it’s all relationships.

Almost every consultant her team has ever hired came either from someone they already knew or through an introduction from a trusted contact. They’ve issued an RFP exactly twice, and even those went out through networking. “There are no good listservs for consultants,” Sasha said. “I always feel bad about that, because if I were trying to sell myself, I don’t know where I’d go. It’s just networking. That’s all it is.”

This tracks with the research we published last summer, where consultants reported sourcing essentially all of their engagements through their personal networks. But hearing it from the buyer confirms something important: the networking isn’t optional, and there is no alternative channel waiting to be discovered.

Sasha did add a nuance, though. Most of the time, her team isn’t even actively looking for a consultant. Someone pitches an idea during a conversation, and the team decides to bring them on for a discrete project. The business development consultants were the one exception — a genuinely intentional search, where they even hired a separate consultant to identify the right people in specific states.

So the hiring process, most of the time, is less like a job search and more like a relationship that crosses a threshold.

What Gets You Hired (and What Gets You Kept)

When Sasha evaluates a consultant, she’s not usually comparing three candidates against each other. She’s evaluating one person against the job. The two things she looks for: previous experience doing the kind of work needed, and trusted people who vouch for the person. That second one is less about formal references and more about knowing someone real in the world who says this consultant is legitimate and won’t waste your money.

Sasha was candid about the hit rate. Of the eight business development consultants hired in 2024, about five — roughly 60% — actually delivered business. The rest didn’t produce. One consultant demanded a high upfront retainer and high referral fees. In retrospect, Sasha sees that as a red flag. For business development work, the ideal structure is a low retainer and high referral fees, tying compensation directly to the consultant’s ability to produce. Asking for both signals that the consultant wants to get paid regardless of whether they deliver.

What determines whether the relationship continues is simple and unsentimental: short initial contracts, clear deliverables, and observable results. Consultants who deliver often get extended to ongoing contracts. Those who don’t are let go. “If you just do your job, there’s usually more money and work to be had,” Sasha said. “The problem is when you don’t do anything.”

Pricing Negotiations

The most revealing part of our conversation was about pricing, and it centered on a consultant who has become something of a model engagement.

Sasha first hired this consultant on a three-month contract for $12,000 total, which she considered an excellent deal. Based on this person’s performance, the next contract was six months at $5,000 a month. When the third negotiation came around in December, Sasha had mentally budgeted $8,000 to $10,000 a month and was ready to nearly double the consultant’s rate. Then they proposed $12,000 a month.

Sasha negotiated down to $10,000. She now regrets it. “This person is worth way more than $12K a month,” Sasha told me. She plans to give the consultant an additional bonus at some point as a retroactive thank-you.

The lesson for consultants: ask for what you’re worth. Sasha’s words, not mine. “If you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. People will just say no if they can’t do it.”

Sasha expects consultants to cost more than an equivalent in-house person — that’s built into her mental model. She’s covering less of the consultant’s time, so the hourly or monthly rate should be higher. What she doesn’t want is to feel gouged.

Sasha’s strong preference is for retainers or lump sums over hourly billing. She doesn’t want to monitor how much time someone spends on a task. She wants the job done, within the agreed-upon timeframe, for the agreed-upon price.

The Mistakes That End Contracts

I asked Sasha about the most common mistakes consultants make. Three came up repeatedly.

The first is failing to communicate about availability. Consultants have other clients. Sasha knows this and accepts it. But she needs to know when someone will and won’t be responsive, especially for time-sensitive work. The consultants she values most are the ones who proactively flag their schedule and set expectations. The ones who annoy her most go quiet without explanation.

The second is more basic than you’d think: some consultants get hired and then never reach out. No meeting set up. No check-in. Sasha has had consultants who were on a retainer and simply didn’t initiate contact for two months. By the time they circled back asking what she needed, the answer was: nothing anymore.

The third ties pricing to attention. One consultant on a $1,000-a-month retainer never did much of anything. Sasha suspects the fee was too low for the consultant to prioritize the relationship. The lesson cuts both ways: if a retainer is so small that you’re not going to pay attention, don’t take the money. The retainer exists so you pay attention. If it doesn’t accomplish that, the whole arrangement is pointless.

The Advice

I asked Sasha what she’d tell any consultant who wanted to work with a firm like The Outreach Team. She was direct: don’t send cold pitches, understand the organization’s actual business and whether your services are relevant, and connect through an existing relationship.

And then the part that most consultants need to hear: don’t get discouraged by slow responses. Sasha acknowledged that her team often recognizes the value of what a consultant is offering but doesn’t have the bandwidth to act on it. The issue is timing and capacity, not disinterest. Consultants who stay in touch and nurture the relationship — without being pushy — are the ones who are top of mind when the timing finally aligns.

“Nine out of ten of the most important factors are just timing,” I said to her. Sasha agreed. “So that when the timing is right, they think of you.” That’s the whole game.

Which brings us back to the truth that runs through every conversation we have in this community—there is no substitute for relationships, and the work of maintaining them never stops. Sasha, who hires consultants all the time, described her own business development process in almost identical terms: go meet people, get on their radar, and reach out when you hear something relevant. It’s just as hard for the buyer as it is for the seller. The only difference is who’s sitting on which side of the table, and even that changes more often than you’d think.

Some people miss the paycheck cadence. Some miss the camaraderie. Some miss the simplicity of “I’m here; I’m doing the thing.”

But the sneaky one—the one almost nobody names—is management. We blame Office Space! (Yes, children of the 80s here.)

Not “being managed” in an infantilizing sense or check-the-box performance reviews or corporate rituals. We mean the invisible scaffolding: the steady rhythm, the expectation that you’ll do what you say you’ll do, and the moment someone asks “How did that go?” and your brain magically finds traction.

Independent consulting strips that away. And in the social impact ecosystem—where many of us didn’t become consultants because we dreamed of running a business—it can create a specific kind of drift: you can get excellent results for clients and still feel oddly unmoored. The story we keep coming back to in this Substack is simple: social impact consultants want sustainable, fulfilling practices with autonomy and impact, but they lack the built-in professional development resources and peer support that employment often bundled for free.

So here’s the angle I wanted to think about with my friend and longtime colleague and collaborator Emily Berens. Emily runs Trellis Strategies, where she coaches executives and leadership teams at social impact organizations through their hardest management challenges. Before that, she spent nearly a decade as a Partner at The Management Center, coaching leaders of major social change organizations and—as TMC’s first-ever talent lead—rebuilding their hiring systems with equity at the center while the organization tripled in size. She is, in other words, a person who has spent her career thinking about what makes management actually work, and then helping people do it. I wanted her brain on this because independent consultants face a version of the same problem her clients face inside organizations: the systems of great management are missing, and nobody is going to install them for you.

By management, we mean the system that helps a person keep expanding their impact while getting consistently excellent work out the door. It’s a set of functions. And independent consultants are missing those functions right when they need them most.

Thesis: Independent consultants don’t need a manager, but they do need management. We can deliberately recreate the most valuable parts of management, and that’s what this article is about.

The Missing Layer You Only Notice When It’s Gone

Most consultants we know are highly accountable to their clients. They deliver. They respond. They show up prepared.

But there’s a second kind of accountability that employment provides and consulting often dissolves: accountability to your own practice and the work that compounds over time.

Emily put it bluntly: she feels highly accountable to clients for getting them results, but basically no accountability to anyone other than herself for the work that builds the business or the craft over the long run.

That distinction matters because a consulting practice has two engines:

• The delivery engine (current clients, current work, current revenue)

• The compounding engine (pipeline, positioning, reusable assets, skill growth, relationships, leverage)

Well-run organizations give you compounding-engine support by default: managers, peers, recurring meetings, training budgets, mentorship, and feedback and reflection loops. Independent consulting asks you to build that infrastructure yourself while still doing the delivery work that pays the bills.

This is a systems problem. If you feel stuck, it’s worth asking: what was your old environment doing for you that you now have to do on purpose?

What Great Managers Actually Do (That You Can Steal)

In our conversation, Emily broke the missing pieces into five buckets that independent consultants can recreate:

1) Structure and regularity

Organizations create rhythm automatically: weekly check-ins, planning cycles, clear milestones, and recurring reviews. When you go independent, you have to provide the rhythm, so it often disappears first.

By structure, we mean a repeating cadence that reduces “reinventing the week.” It’s the calendar and rituals that make progress more likely than procrastination.

2) Prioritization

Great managers help you figure out what actually matters right now—and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. They force the question: of everything you could be doing, what are the three things that will move your practice forward most?

Independent consultants can do this for themselves, but most don’t do it with any regularity. Without a forcing function, priorities tend to drift toward whatever feels most urgent or most comfortable, which isn’t the same as what’s most important. A regular practice of stepping back and naming your top priorities—quarterly, monthly, even weekly—is one of the highest-leverage habits you can build into your routine.

3) Accountability

Accountability means “someone will notice whether you did the thing.” We recommend just enough social reality to keep the important work from evaporating.

Clients create accountability for delivery, but they rarely create accountability for business development, sharpening your positioning, or building reusable assets.

4) Forcing mechanisms

Forcing mechanisms mean a constraint that reduces reliance on willpower. It’s a setup where doing the thing you need to do becomes the path of least resistance.

This came up because “I should do business development” and “Why can’t I make myself do business development?” are different problems. The second one isn’t solved by more intention. It’s solved by changing the environment.

A concrete example: as a manager, Emily used simple progress-tracking tables and regular check-ins. The value is not the spreadsheet, it’s that you can’t hide from the question “Am I on track: yes/no?”

5) Getting better (not just getting it done)

This is the layer most consultants never formalize, which is wild because it’s where compounding lives.

Getting better involves creating feedback and reflection loops that improve your consulting craft (how you work) and your expertise (what you know), not just finishing the next deliverable.

A DIY Management System for Consultants

Don’t overhaul your life. Install one layer at a time.

Rhythm: make compounding work non-optional

The delivery engine will happily consume every hour you give it.

So give the compounding engine a protected slot. A small one is fine. The goal is continuity.

Example: a Tuesday 60-90 minute “compounding block” that is not optional. If you miss it, you don’t “make it up sometime.” You reschedule it within 72 hours. That rule is what turns it from aspiration into a system.

This block is where you do the unbillable work that prevents future chaos: pipeline outreach, skill-building, proposal templates, a case study, a pricing page, a reusable workshop deck, or outreach to a referral partner.

Prioritization: decide before you do

Before you fill that compounding block, you need to know what goes in it. Set a brief quarterly check-in with yourself—even 30 minutes—where you ask: what are the two or three things that would most change my practice over the next 90 days? Write them down. Put your other ideas for compounding work on a “not now” list.

Then at the start of each week, pick one compounding task that connects to those priorities. Not five, just one. The discipline is in the choosing, not just the doing.

Accountability: add one human who will notice

Emily’s simplest version is a text message-based pact.

You tell someone, “I’m going to do X, and I will text you by noon on Friday that it’s done.” If it’s not done, they text you Friday afternoon asking where it is.

A next-level version is setting up a regular call—every week or every other week—with an accountability partner. There’s a lot you can do with a regular call, but as part of it, you each say specifically what you’re committing to get done, knowing you’ll hold each other to that on the next call.

Two details make this work:

• The commitment you make should be small enough that you’ll actually follow through. You’re building a habit of keeping promises to yourself, not training for a marathon.

• The partner doesn’t have to be an expert. They do have to be someone whose opinion matters and who you don’t want to let down.

A peer, a former colleague, or a fellow consultant would all work. If you can’t find one, a small group can substitute as long as it stays specific and lightweight.

Forcing mechanisms: stop negotiating with yourself

If you keep waiting to feel like doing something, you’re choosing willpower. If you pre-commit with time, money, or social expectation, you’re choosing a forcing mechanism.

Two forcing mechanisms Emily mentioned (and we’ve both seen work in practice):

1. Borrow the organizing playbook. Say what you’ll do, disappear for a fixed window, report back. It’s boring, but it works.

2. Spend money. Hire someone—designer, editor, coach—for a defined output and deadline. The cost creates momentum and focus.

The point is to manufacture follow-through.

Feedback: ask clients about your delivery, and ask yourself

Most consultants get feedback from their clients when something is broken or when a client is thrilled. That’s a terrible sampling method. Or they get feedback at the end of an engagement through a survey or exit interview. This has its uses, but it means they learn something to improve on that could have been incorporated months ago if they had just asked.

A better pattern: a midpoint check-in that is short, direct, and normalized.

Here are a couple questions we like:

• What am I doing that’s especially helpful and I should keep doing?

• What could I do better in how I’m showing up?

A useful approach is to offer a self-critique first (“Here’s one place I think I could improve…”). It lowers the social risk for the client to be honest.

This feedback improves your craft: communication, facilitation, speed, clarity, stakeholder management, and expectation-setting.

For expertise (the actual domain), clients usually can’t coach you. That’s where peers, mentors, and community matter. Setting up a regular call with another expert in your field, or cultivating a relationship where you can check in when you’ve got a thorny challenge, can be invaluable in helping you continue to sharpen your thinking.

Self-reflection can matter as much as external feedback. One way Emily recommends building this in is keeping a doc called “lessons learned”: after every client engagement, write at least one thing you did well and one thing you could do better. It doesn’t have to be profound — just the act of reflecting in itself has a lot of power. Building this in at the end of every engagement is one natural place to do it; doing it every week (perhaps as the first 2 minutes of your compounding block) is even better.

Client ≠ Manager

A note of caution before we wrap up. If you treat clients as your sole manager, you’ll optimize for their short-term needs, not your long-term practice. But if you can get results that thrill your clients while also managing your own growth, you will be setting yourself up to make an even bigger impact over the long term.

Clients are great at making the urgent feel urgent. But the work that compounds—positioning, pipeline, reusable IP, skill growth—is important and rarely urgent. Without some self-created management, the important work becomes the thing you “get to when you can,” which is another way of saying “never.”

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The Point of All This

Consulting sells autonomy, but it quietly takes away something many of us depended on: a shared container for getting better. Strong management does a few unglamorous things extremely well: it creates rhythm, makes progress strategic and visible, keeps you growing, and forces the important work to happen before it becomes a crisis.

Independence doesn’t remove the need for those functions. It just transfers full responsibility for them onto you.

The good news is that this isn’t an all-or-nothing project. You don’t have to become a different person or build an elaborate operating system. You can start small and still get real lift. Add the minimum viable structure that protects the autonomy you care about. If a task matters to your practice but you keep postponing it, stop debating willpower and change the environment instead.

Pick one thing to try this week:

• Put a recurring compounding block in your calendar with a reschedule rule (not a “skip” rule).

• A quarterly priorities check-in, even if it’s just you and a notebook.

• Add a human who will notice and text you Friday afternoon if you don’t follow through.

• A small financial commitment like a designer or a coach who creates a deadline you can’t ignore.

If we had to compress the whole argument into a single line, it would be this: don’t wait for management to arrive—borrow it. The consultants who sustain long, high-impact careers aren’t just talented; they create the conditions that help their talent compound. Build the minimum structure that keeps your practice moving, improving, and feeling like yours.

A few questions to ponder as we wrap up:

• Where do you feel the accountability gap most: pipeline, ops, writing, skill-building, or something else?

• How do we design community structures that create accountability without turning into constant interruption?

• If you added one midpoint feedback check-in to every engagement, what question would you ask first?

• What would a truly valuable community of practice look like for your specific consulting niche?

Three weeks later, I was knee-deep in a leadership conflict that had nothing to do with planning. The Executive Director hired me to do one thing, but the Deputy Director I was assigned to partner with wanted something totally different. They didn’t even see a problem, and wondered why I had been hired in the first place. The leadership team had fundamentally different visions for the organization’s future and its present needs, and that misalignment was quietly poisoning the nonprofit’s ability to execute.

I should have caught this before my first billable hour. I didn’t, because I’d skipped the part of the process that would have surfaced it.

I wrote a while back about the signals to watch for when scoping new engagements — the red lights, yellow lights, and green lights that help you decide whether to take the work. But I’ve never written about what happens after you say yes. The contract is signed, the start date is on the calendar, and now you’re staring at a blank page wondering how to actually begin.

This is the part of consulting I learned the hard way. The first 30 days of a new engagement will shape whether the whole thing succeeds or quietly goes sideways, and most of us learn that through expensive mistakes.

Before Your First Billable Meeting

I now request documents from every new client before we sit down together for the first time. Strategic plans, board minutes from the past year, financial statements, previous consultant reports, internal planning documents — anything they’re willing to share. I tell them I want to use our first meeting to ask informed questions rather than basic ones.

This matters more than the sum of the documents. When you walk into a first meeting cold, you spend most of it absorbing information the client thinks of at that moment. You’re paying attention to facts but you lose out on the opportunity to also glean dynamics. When you’ve read the board minutes and the last strategic plan, you can listen for what’s not being said. You can notice that the strategic plan mentions “expanding digital capacity” on page three and the person sitting across from you hasn’t brought it up once. You can ask about the gap between the plan’s revenue projections and the actual financials you reviewed. These are the questions that make a client think, “this person has done their homework.” More importantly, these are the questions that surface the real problems.

The document request also functions as an early diagnostic of the client relationship itself. How quickly do they respond? Do they send everything, or hold back certain materials? Is there a document they reference in conversation that they didn’t include? I had one client who sent me a big sheaf of materials, but the most crucial stuff for the engagement never arrived. When I asked about it, there was a long pause. That pause told me more about the engagement I was walking into than the document itself ever could have.

The Questionnaire I Send Everyone

After a few engagements where I realized I was asking the same basic questions in our first meeting that I could have answered in advance, I built a pre-engagement questionnaire. It has changed how I start every new engagement.

The questionnaire covers four areas.

1. Organization background: their structure, size, what makes them distinct in their sector.

2. Project context: what prompted them to seek consulting support, what they’ve already tried, what constraints exist that I should know about.

3. Expectations: specific outcomes they’re hoping for, how they’ll measure success, what timeline they’re working with.

4. Working preferences: how they like to communicate, how they want to receive deliverables, what has and hasn’t worked in previous consulting relationships.

That last section is the sleeper. “What has worked well or not worked in previous consulting engagements?” is the single most useful question I ask. The answers tell me so much that will be useful: whether the last consultant overpromised, whether the client has realistic expectations about what external support can accomplish, or whether they’ve been burned by someone who delivered a beautiful report that sat on a shelf.

One client wrote, “Our last consultant was brilliant but never listened to our staff. They came in with a framework and applied it regardless of what we told them.” I read that and restructured my first month’s plan to center staff interviews.

I send the questionnaire about a week before our first meeting. Most clients complete it within a few days. The ones who don’t are telling me something, too.

The Presenting Problem Is Almost Never the Real Problem

This is the single most important thing I’ve learned about starting new engagements, and I still have to remind myself of it every time. I always feel anxious in those first 30 days because of this dynamic, which I’ve seen in every consultant engagement I’ve ever had.

Clients hire you because they’ve identified a problem. It could be declining donations, staff turnover, a board that can’t align on strategy, or a program that isn’t delivering results. These are real problems, and they deserve to be taken seriously, but they are almost always symptoms of something underneath.

The engagement I described at the top is the clearest example from my own practice, but I’ve seen the pattern dozens of times. An organization tells me they need help with strategic planning, and the actual issue is that two senior leaders have irreconcilable visions for the organization’s future and nobody has named the conflict. A client says they want to build a new program, and the real barrier is that their culture prohibits spending money on anything perceived as non-essential — a norm that made sense during their early years of financial scarcity and now prevents them from investing in growth.

I’ve started keeping what I think of as a diagnostic log during the first two weeks of every engagement. On one side, I write down what the client told me the problem was. On the other side, I write down what I’m actually observing. The distance between those two columns is where the real work lives.

This means resisting the urge to solve things immediately. The anxiety of a new engagement — the desire to prove your value, to show the client they made the right choice — pushes you toward premature solutions. I’ve done it. You show up with a theory and start trying to produce stuff before you’ve understood the terrain. I always want to feel productive, but I am usually being counterproductive. A thorough first few weeks of listening will save you months of rework later.

Running Stakeholder Interviews When You’re the Outsider

I schedule individual conversations with people at multiple levels of the organization during the first two weeks, not just the person who hired me. This is where the richest information lives.

The executive director will tell you one version of the organization’s challenges. The development director will tell you another. The program manager who’s been there for twelve years will tell you a third, and the composite version is usually the most accurate.

These conversations require a specific kind of listening. You’re not interviewing for information you can put in a report. You’re listening for contradictions between what different people tell you, because those contradictions reveal the organizational dynamics that will shape your entire engagement. When the ED says the board is “very supportive” and a senior staffer says “the board doesn’t really understand what we do,” you’ve just learned something critical about the political landscape you’re operating in.

I ask each person the same core question in different ways: “What would need to be true for this project to succeed?” Or put it another way: “If we look back a year from now, what is the most likely reason this works, and the most likely reason it fails?”

The answers vary wildly. One person will talk about resources. Another will talk about buy-in. Another will say something like, “Honestly? The ED would need to stop changing priorities every two months.” That’s not information you’ll get in a group meeting, and it’s not information the person who hired you will volunteer.

After the stakeholder conversations, I write a brief internal document, just for me, summarizing what I’ve heard and where the stories diverge. This document has saved me more times than I can count. It becomes my map for the engagement.

The Early-Win Strategy

I always feel like I’m on a tightrope those early days of an engagement, though, because I want to spend as much time learning as I can, but it can erode client confidence if it goes on too long. You’re asking questions, conducting interviews, and reviewing documents, and the client is watching the clock and wondering when you’re going to actually do something.

So I’ve learned to run two tracks simultaneously. The first track is the deep learning work. The second track is scanning for early wins, which are small, visible problems I can solve quickly that build credibility for the longer work ahead.

A good early win has three qualities: it’s high-visibility (people will notice it got fixed), it’s feasible within the first few weeks, and it aligns with the broader goals of the engagement so it doesn’t feel like a distraction. Maybe it’s streamlining a reporting process that’s eating up staff time, or restructuring a meeting agenda that everyone quietly hates, or producing a simple framework that helps the team talk about a recurring tension they haven’t had language for.

I frame these explicitly as experiments, not solutions. “I noticed X during our conversations, and I want to try something that might help. Let’s see how it works.” This sets the right expectation. I am not claiming to have fixed their organization in week two. But I have demonstrated that I am listening, I am capable, and the engagement is going to produce tangible value.

The early win buys you the time and trust to do the deeper diagnostic work that the engagement actually requires.

What I Do Now That I Didn’t Do at First

I used to treat the first meeting as the beginning of the engagement. Now I treat the signed contract as the beginning and the first meeting as a milestone I’ve already prepared for. The document review, the questionnaire, the reading all happens before the clock starts in the client’s mind.

I also used to schedule a “kickoff meeting” that tried to accomplish everything: rapport-building, information-gathering, expectation-setting, and project planning. Now I separate those functions.

The first meeting is for listening and asking questions informed by my pre-reading. The expectations conversation is a separate session where we collaboratively define what success looks like, how we’ll communicate, and what happens when — not if — the scope needs to shift. The project plan comes after the initial research, not before, because any plan I write before I’ve talked to the people doing the work is a fiction.

And I now end every learning phase with a formal presentation of findings before moving into execution. This is a practice I resisted for a long time because it felt like it slowed things down. It does slow things down. It also prevents the most common failure mode in consulting, which is executing on a plan that was built on incomplete understanding.

The presentation is a short document summarizing what I’ve learned, what I believe the real challenges are (which may differ from what was originally described), and what I recommend as the path forward. The client gets to push back, add context, and correct my misunderstandings. We revise it together, and then we move forward with a shared picture of reality instead of two separate ones.

Beginnings Still Suck

I wish I could say I’ve systematized this so thoroughly that new engagements feel routine. They don’t. The first few weeks of any client relationship still carry a specific kind of anxiety: the awareness that I’m forming impressions that might be wrong, making judgments with incomplete information, and building trust with people who don’t yet have reason to trust me.

What’s changed is that I’ve stopped trying to resolve that anxiety by rushing toward solutions. The discomfort of not knowing is part of the job. It’s actually a signal that I’m paying attention, and that I haven’t defaulted to a framework before I understand the terrain. The engagements that went wrong were the ones where I moved fast to make the uncertainty go away. The ones that went well were the ones where I sat in the uncertainty long enough to see what it was trying to show me.

The first discovery call I ever took as an independent consultant, I talked for most of it. I described my background, explained my approach, and walked through examples of past work. The potential client was polite and asked a few questions. We scheduled a follow-up.

What I understand now is that I had it backwards. A discovery call isn’t a pitch, so your job is not to demonstrate that you’re impressive. The point to understand the problem well enough that you can describe it back to the client better than they can describe it themselves. When you can do that, the proposal almost writes itself.

What are we talking about?

A discovery call is a structured first conversation with a potential client — typically thirty to sixty minutes — where your goal is to understand their problem, their context, and whether there’s a genuine fit before either of you commits to anything. It usually happens after an initial introduction or referral, once someone has expressed enough interest to warrant a real conversation, but before you’ve written a single word of a proposal. Think of it as the difference between a first date and an application: you’re not trying to close anything, you’re trying to find out if there’s something worth closing.

Here’s how I structure them.

Before you dial in

Do thirty minutes of research. Look at recent board decks, annual reports, press, and their job postings. Job postings are underrated. They tell you where the organization is investing and what they can’t get done internally.

Your goal is to come in knowing something specific. It signals that you take the engagement seriously before it’s even an engagement.

The opening (two minutes)

I always start by resetting the purpose of the call. Something like:

I want to spend most of our time understanding what you’re dealing with. I have some questions prepared, but treat this as a conversation. I’m less interested in presenting myself than in understanding whether there’s a real fit here.

This does two things. It gives the client permission to talk, which most people want to do. And it signals that you’re not desperate, which changes the power dynamic in ways that matter later when you’re negotiating scope and rates.

Understand the problem (ten to twelve minutes)

Start broad, then go deep. The opening question I almost always use is some version of:

Walk me through what’s going on and what made you reach out now.

The word now is doing real work in that sentence. Organizations often live with problems for years before hiring someone to address them. Something has changed: a new ED, a funder pushing for evaluation, a grant that came through, or (hopefully not, but sometimes!) a crisis. Understanding the triggering event tells you a lot about the urgency of the problem and the political dynamics around it.

After they answer, I go deeper with:

How long has this been an issue? What have you already tried?

What they’ve tried (and why it didn’t work) is often the most useful intelligence you’ll gather on the whole call. It tells you about the constraints they’re operating under, the internal politics, and what a realistic solution actually needs to account for.

The follow-up I use most often:

Can you give me a specific example of where this showed up recently?

Abstract problem descriptions are hard to scope, but a concrete recent example is something you can actually work with.

Understand what success looks like (five minutes)

This is where most consultants don’t push hard enough. What does good look like a year from now? is fine, but it’s not specific enough. I push further:

If you looked back six months from now and said ‘that was exactly what we needed,’ what would have happened? What would be different?

Sometimes clients have very clear answers. Sometimes they don’t, and the vagueness is informative. An organization that can’t articulate what success looks like is going to have a hard time evaluating your work, which can create problems downstream.

I also ask:

Who else will have a view on whether this went well?

This surfaces the political landscape — funders, board members, program staff, whoever’s affected — and helps you understand whether the person you’re talking to actually has the authority to define success.

Qualify (five minutes)

You need to know three things before you’ll be able to close any new engagement: budget, decision process, and timeline. A potential client who checks all three boxes is “qualified.”

On budget:

I want to make sure we’re in the same ballpark before we go further. Do you have a rough sense of what’s allocated for this?

Most clients expect this question. If they deflect completely, that’s a signal worth noting.

On decision process:

Walk me through what happens after this call on your end. Who else would be involved in a decision like this?

This tells you whether you’re talking to the actual decision-maker, whether there’s a committee, whether there’s a procurement process you’re not expecting.

On timeline:

Is there a point by which you’d need something in place like a board meeting, a grant deadline, something else?

Timeline pressure is often what separates a real engagement from an exploratory conversation that goes nowhere.

Listen for the emotional charge

This is the part that matters most. As the client is talking, pay attention to which problems they describe with urgency and which ones they describe flatly. Both matter, but the felt ones are what will actually motivate action.

When something comes up that seems emotionally loaded — frustration, embarrassment, real urgency — go deeper. Don’t move on. Ask them to say more. Ask what it costs them when it doesn’t get addressed. That’s where the real scope is.

Close the call (two minutes)

I don’t try to book the next meeting at the end of a discovery call. I say something like:

This has been really helpful. I want to think about what I’m hearing and come back to you with a sense of how I’d approach this. Does that work?

This gives you time to actually think, which means you’ll write a better proposal. It also signals that you’re not going to immediately paper over their problem with a scope of work you wrote in an hour. Most clients find that reassuring.

Then I send a follow-up the same day that reflects back what I heard: the problem, the stakes, what success looks like. Two things could happen. If I got it right, the client feels understood, which builds trust. If I got something wrong, they’ll tell me, and I’ve learned something important before I write anything.

The hidden purpose of a discovery call

The discovery call is also the moment you decide if you want the work. You’re evaluating them as much as they’re evaluating you. Is the problem real? Is the organization positioned to act on your recommendations? Is the person you’re talking to actually going to be a reasonable client?

I’ve left discovery calls knowing the work was real but the engagement would be painful. Taking those projects anyway is almost always a mistake. The call is information. Use it.

As part of the larger Strategic Agility Reboot Series, this sub-series is focused on how to build the conditions for great management across your team: grounded in clear standards, and enabled and sustained by an infrastructure that makes management excellence the default, not the exception.

Today: what excellent management actually means and the first step to operationalizing it, whether you own management for your whole organization, your team, or just yourself.

What does “excellent” actually mean? Our version

Great staff management means setting an organization (or team) up to deliver on its mission long-term by making sure you have the right people in the right roles, each with what they need to make their greatest impact over time.

Excellent management includes four core pillars. Here’s a little more on each.

1. Equity

None of the others matter — they won’t work — if equity isn’t the operating principle underneath all of them. Whether you’re building trust, setting expectations, or investing in someone’s growth — the questions always include: for whom, on what basis, and have I checked for implicit bias? If the answer is shaped more by shared identity and unconscious bias than actual performance and potential, the whole system is compromised.

2. Results focus over the long term

Not just making people feel good. Not just hitting this quarter’s metrics. Real impact, delivered consistently, over time. That requires two things that are easy to deprioritize when everyone is busy:

• Strategic trade-offs. The ability to think several moves ahead and make short-term sacrifices where needed for long-term gain.

• Investment in people’s growth. People leave when they feel that their organization isn’t supporting them and their growth. The ones who stay in those circumstances aren’t set up to contribute at their highest level. That’s not just a retention problem — it’s a results problem.

Excellent managers invest in their people and in themselves. A manager who isn’t growing is a ceiling.

3. Clarity and accountability

Clarity lives in three core places: the role itself, the goals that define success, and discrete projects. It also includes how work gets navigated, like how decisions get made, and how trade-offs are weighed.

Accountability follows: expecting people to do what they said, actively supporting them when they fall short, and making harder decisions when the gap persists.

4. Trust, cohesion, and strategic coherence

Trust is the foundation — relationships strong enough to make candor possible, where people share strategic insights, flag problems before they become crises, and feel genuinely valued. Built on that: team cohesion, the sense that people are in it together, and strategic coherence — where people understand how their work connects to everyone else’s, how decisions ripple across roles, and what it feels like to operate as a unit.

That’s the definition. Now here’s where it gets structural.

What you can do from where you are.

→ If you lead the organization or have org-wide authority over management practice — This work is yours to lead or make sure someone else does. Draft it, get input, and put it in motion.

→ If you manage managers but don’t set the tone for the whole org — You don’t have to wait. Build the framework for your department or division. Define what excellent management looks like for your team and build in the feedback loops and coaching conversations that help your managers actually get there. A draft you can update is infinitely more useful than a perfect one that never arrives.

→ If you’re a manager who isn’t managing managers — Use this for yourself. Take the definition and bring it into a conversation with your own manager. Where do you feel strong? What would help you get there? You’re not asking for a favor. You’re asking for the infrastructure you need to do your best work.

Wherever you sit: You don’t need permission to get clearer. You might need to adjust later. That’s fine. Clarity now beats waiting for the perfect conditions that may never come.

The Next Step: Develop a Set of Baseline Management Goals

This is where you begin building infrastructure.

Baseline Management Goals describe what excellence actually looks like for your organization, and they become goals for every manager, regardless of scope or level.

Expectations that are written down, shared, and checked in on regularly are the first structural layer of a system that makes great management the default.

Managers can add goals specific to their context on top of these, but the baseline applies to everyone.

For more ideas on what additional manager-specific goals could look like, click here.

Example Set of Baseline Management Goals

BASELINE MANAGER GOALS FOR 2026

• All of the people on my team are on track to hit their goals or have a plan to shift strategies

• For each person on my team, I can point to at least 2 indicators that tell me they feel valued — as a person, for their work, and for their input. Indicators could include:

  • they regularly contribute their ideas and expertise in decision-making

  • they have strong working relationships within and outside of our team

  • they’ve given me thoughtful feedback about how I can improve in my own management

  • they’ve told me directly

• Any performance problems have been addressed fairly, thoughtfully, and quickly

• There are no discrepancies by race or gender identity in any of the above areas

If you want to go deeper on the how-to of goal setting, check out this guide.

Questions? Pushback? Requests? Email us at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com.

Your Move This Week: Draft & Get Input

1. Draft your set of baseline management goals — it doesn’t have to be perfect, what you want is a version you can share with other people to get their feedback. You can use our sample above as a starting point or start fresh.

These questions can help you get started:

• When a manager is doing an excellent job, how do you know?

• What results do you see?

• How will you know whether they’re on track?

2. Get some initial input.

If you’re building this for your team, your list includes:

• Your own manager — you’ll want at least quick alignment on your plan and on the first draft before you send it out more broadly.

• All of the managers on your team. We’re serious. You could get to a version by engaging just a small group, but engaging all managers will get you better insights and stronger alignment on the final product. Skipping this step will bite you later.

• Additional individual staff (where useful) — you can do this through: a working group that gives deeper input from early on, managers getting input from their teams once you have a good working draft, an all-staff comment period closer to final.

If you’re building this for your organization, your list also includes:

• Your senior leadership team — you’ll want alignment at the top before this rolls out broadly, both on the definition of excellence and on the plan for implementation.

Balance getting the input you need without creating layers or barriers that aren’t meaningful.

Don’t get stalled out by process overwhelm: Start by thinking through whose input you need first, and send your draft to that person or group.

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Tips for Getting Input

1. Be transparent about what kind of input you’re asking for. Not all feedback is the same, and people give better reactions when they know what you need. Name which mode you’re in:

• Brainstorming — You’re early, open to anything, and want people to think out loud with you.

• Kicking the tires — You have a draft and a theory, and you want people to push back, test it, and make it better. Tear it down if needed.

• Big red flags only — This is mostly baked. It’s gone through real refinement. You’re not looking for a rewrite; you’re asking people to catch anything glaring before you finalize.

Naming the mode upfront saves everyone time and energy — and signals that you’ve actually thought about what you need, which makes people more likely to give it to you.

2. Lay out specific questions. This helps people know you really do want their thoughts, and helps you get the specific input you need.

• Does this definition reflect what you think excellent management actually looks like here?

• What’s missing?

• What’s here that doesn’t belong?

• Is there anything that’s unclear or needs to be defined differently?

And when you’ve gathered input and made changes — tell them. Circle back. This is one of the fastest ways to signal that this isn’t just an exercise. It builds alignment, gets you better input down the road, and marks the beginning of real infrastructure.

Questions? Pushback? Requests? Email us at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com.

Who Responded

The group skews experienced. More than three-quarters have been consulting for 10+ years, with another 15% in the 6–10 year range. Only 8% have been at it for fewer than five years. Primary areas of expertise split almost evenly between strategy/planning and digital work (38% each), with coaching/staff support at 15% and development at 9%.

How They Charge

Retainers are the most common fee model, used by 46% of respondents. Monthly retainer rates range from about $2,500 to $16,400, with most consultants targeting an hourly equivalent somewhere between $150 and $350. Project-based fees come next at 31%, with project rates typically landing between $10,000 and $20,000 (or $1,500–$2,500 per day for those who think in daily terms). About 15% bill hourly, ranging from $100 to $350 per hour. The remaining 8% use short-term monthly arrangements, usually targeting $175–$200 per hour equivalent.

Most consultants don’t stick rigidly to one model. They shift depending on the client, the scope, and the relationship.

What They Earn

Compressing all the responses into hourly equivalents, the average rate works out to $234 per hour. The median and mode both sit at $250. The floor is $100; the ceiling is $350. Most consultants aim for or exceed a $150–$200 benchmark in practice, though they’ll flex in either direction depending on the engagement.

How They Decide What to Charge

More than half the respondents use value-based pricing — pegging their rate to the perceived impact for the client rather than simply counting hours. An equal share relies on experience and previous engagements as their primary benchmark. Client budget capacity is just as common a factor: consultants adjust within a range depending on what the organization can bear. Project complexity matters too, though fewer than half cited it as a primary driver.

Nobody’s using just one of these inputs. Everyone is triangulating.

Do They Charge Nonprofits Differently?

Yes, mostly. Over 45% adjust their rates based on client type, typically discounting for nonprofits or organizations whose mission they believe in. About a third keep rates consistent in principle but negotiate in special cases. Roughly a quarter charge a single rate regardless of sector, guided by project factors rather than client type.

Do They Publish Their Rates?

Almost universally, no. Only one respondent makes rates publicly visible. The rest prefer the flexibility to tailor proposals to each engagement — which makes sense given how many variables they’re already juggling.

How Often They Revisit Pricing

Almost two-thirds reevaluate their rates with every new engagement. About a quarter review annually or every few years. The rest change rates only when forced to by rising costs or new market information. This is a group that thinks about pricing frequently, even if they don’t always act on it.

What Pushes Rates Up

The top drivers for rate increases: client feedback and demonstrated results, tied with market demand (both at 46%). Increased experience and expertise came next at 39%. Improved service offerings and competitive positioning tied at 31%.

How Confident They Feel

On a 1–5 scale, nobody picked 1 or 2 — but nobody picked 5, either. Everyone clustered at 3 or 4, with 4 getting roughly 50% more votes than 3. This is a group that feels competent but not fully calibrated. They know they’re in the right neighborhood; they’re less sure they’re in the right house.

What They Want Next

The recurring requests: examples of what competitors charge, case studies comparing retainer versus project-based versus hourly models, strategies for pitching retainer arrangements to clients, simple negotiation frameworks, and guidance on billing for travel, site visits, and other add-ons. The theme across all of it is that consultants want more comparative data. Pricing in this sector is a private conversation by default, and most people have a nagging suspicion that they’re operating with incomplete information.

They’re probably right.

What This Tells Us

There’s no standard rate for independent consulting in the social impact space — and there probably shouldn’t be. The range is too wide, the variables too numerous, and the client relationships too varied for a single number to mean much. But a few patterns are clear: experienced consultants gravitate toward retainers, most calibrate rates against multiple factors simultaneously, and nearly everyone wants more transparency from their peers about how pricing actually works.

We’re planning an updated version of this survey later this year. If you’d like to participate or have suggestions for questions we should add, let us know.

Appendix

A close family friend who knew what I was going through back then gave me encouragement and support. He said, “Experience is the hardest teacher, because you get the test first and the lesson after.”

At the time, I just felt comforted by his words. I was someone who prided himself too much on always getting things right. Now I had to incorporate this failure into my story, and my friend’s advice gave me a way to fit it in without completely tearing down my identity.

Over time, I’ve thought more about that line — you get the test first and the lesson after — and the other ways it applies. It got me wondering how many experiences I had avoided out of the fear of not passing the test, and therefore how many lessons I never learned.

We have a few big pieces coming up soon here on the Chorus Consultant Community and in the Strategic Agility Series, so the article today is shorter than usual. I want to share some of the tests I failed and the lessons I learned after. Hopefully it can be a small nudge to everyone to embrace the experience knowing full well you might not pass.

Thinking I could persist through a leadership transition

I had a longtime client with whom I had a deep and trusting relationship, including with the Executive Director and other senior leadership. I provided value and went above and beyond many times over the years. Then, they had a leadership transition. I thought for sure my contributions were unimpeachable, and the new ED (who had been on the senior leadership team) would want to retain my services ongoing.

Well, that didn’t happen.

But I learned something. I went into the new relationship trying to just port over the previous arrangement and thinking we’d continue as before. I should have treated it like an audition for a new contract. Maybe I had my foot in the door, but this was a new prospect whose business I had to win. If I could do it all over again, I would have done a discovery meeting, submitted a proposal and SOW, and negotiated brand new terms. I still might not have converted the contract, but I would have improved my chances.

Saying yes to a project I didn’t know how to scope

I had one engagement that started off with general strategic advising on financial planning and Board engagement and communications. Then the client asked me to manage deployment of a large-scale new software solution.

I was excited to take this on and said “yes.” But I had never overseen a project like this before. My time expectations proved unrealistic, and the project went several months beyond my original plan. The problem was that I was due to start my parental leave after Labor Day, but the project wasn’t finished. I didn’t give myself many good options, so I just had to tie things up and transition them to a staffer as well as I could. I am not proud of my work on this.

Next time, I would get some advice from an expert before taking on a big new project. Then, I could do accurate scoping of time and resources needed before committing to the work.

Being too transactional and not having a real plan to stay in touch with people

Raise your hand if I’ve ever sent you an email out of the blue after more than 5 years of no contact asking you for something…

So many hands up. Ack, the shame!

I’ve done this so many times, I can’t keep track anymore. Lately, I made the mistake of assuming as long as I offered something useful in return, folks would want to take me up on it. Wrong. Again.

What I’ve learned is people want to help each other if they have a good relationship. That doesn’t mean we talk on the phone once a week. We don’t really have to be in frequent, regular contact. But we do need to have a basis for our relationship rooted in personal connection, not transaction.

So, I’m trying to be better about this. My barrier isn’t interest or caring, either. It’s just time. Cultivating flourishing relationships (or at least healthy ones) takes time, and that’s always short. However, in a business that’s all about relationships, it has to be a top priority.

There’s a thread running through all three of these. In each case, the version of me who showed up believed he already knew enough. I knew my client relationship was solid. I knew I could figure out a software deployment. I knew that offering value in an email was sufficient to rekindle a dormant connection. The confidence wasn’t arrogance, exactly; it was more like a refusal to feel the discomfort of not knowing. And that refusal is what made the test so much harder than it needed to be.

My friend’s line has lodged itself somewhere permanent in me now, the way the best advice does. I catch myself applying it in real time. When something feels uncertain or exposing, when I notice that familiar tightening in my chest that says you might not be good enough for this, I try to hear it differently. That feeling is the test arriving before the lesson.

I still haven’t fully let go of the board failure, but I no longer try to fit it into a tidy narrative about resilience or growth. It just sits there, a little jagged, reminding me that I learned something I couldn’t have learned any other way.