Truthfully, the question of whether and how to use tools like LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT or Claude by Anthropic) for our consulting work is still a big source of debate in our community. This newsletter is for all independent consultants, but it is specifically tailored to those serving mission-driven or social impact organizations like nonprofits, charities, and socially-conscious businesses. Folks in that world are wrestling with a wide range of concerns when it comes to LLMs, from authorship to environmental impact to data security. I don’t think we’ll settle any of those debates today or anytime soon, but I wanted to share some thoughts about it and invite further discussion.

I have addressed AI a few times over the course of this newsletter. (I’ll be using AI to refer to consumer LLMs from here.) When I informally asked our community if they use AI and how, many independent consultants reported they do, but they also wondered if they should tell their clients they do. Robin Engle said she has an AI-disclosure and policy document for new client engagements so everything is transparent and above-board. Other folks mused about whether they were obligated to tell clients if they use AI, as long as their data was secure. “Would you tell your client that you use a Mac or a PC,” one person asked.

It does seem to me that AI tools are slowly moving into just another IT or Cybersecurity realm to assess. I know there are some organizations and consultants who have an ethical or principled position about using AI, but in my experience, that group is shrinking as these tools become more commonplace. Whether that’s good or bad is a separate question. My observation from experience would be that most organizations accept that these tools will be used, and their primary concern at the moment is ensuring their data security policies are being met.

That’s the state of play as I see it.

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Personally, I do use some AI tools for certain projects or tasks. The main one is building spreadsheet models. I love a good Excel model, and I have to build them frequently for my consulting engagements. To toot my own horn, I rate my skills highly for thinking through the logic and end goal of an Excel model. I know what a model should accomplish and what variables should be used and how.

The thing I find tedious is the formatting. When I make a model for myself, it’s just numbers and text, with no borders or colors. I am not a designer by nature, and my wardrobe is mostly just black or blue because I have no sense of style. Good design is really important, though, for a model that will be used by numerous people. There need to be visual cues, guides, and features to help someone learn how to use a model they didn’t build themselves

Beyond that, scenario modeling can be a real chore. Let’s say we’re assessing how different fundraising outcomes will affect an organization’s growth plans in a few years. It’s valuable to put a few options side by side – it’s also a pain to make them! That’s another place where an AI tool comes in handy to save time creating different scenarios from a base model I have created.

For me, this is an acceptable use of AI. Authorship isn’t as much of a concern, since it’s really just iterating from a base I created. My clients haven’t minded this use, either. (I am setting aside the energy, water, and data center issues, to be clear!)

About a year ago, I wrote about AI-assisted writing, but writing is a place I’ve moved away from using AI tools for two big reasons.

Reason #1: I don’t like how it affects my thinking. Writing something out (ideally longhand, but at least typing it myself) is how I think. The first idea I have when I start writing something is never actually the valuable idea. I get to that valuable idea through the writing process. In the past, when I used AI to assist with writing, I would give it an outline or a set of notes and ask it to write a first draft. My experience was that the first draft was just a rehash of what I’d already written. If what I had already written was almost a finished product, that was sometimes workable. But it almost never was, so the AI gave me back something that seemed polished but was mediocre on the ideas front.

Reason #2: Despite some effort, I can’t get AI assistants to sound like me – they always sound like AI. I’ve written style guides and put instructions into the AI memory, but no matter what I try, it always sounds the same. Perhaps a day will come when we’re all so habituated to AI writing, or where it’s blended so much with original authorship, that we can’t tell the difference. But for me, today, I think I can usually spot AI writing. There are a few things I really hate, but I won’t enumerate them here. You probably have your own list of pet peeves!

That said, I will sometimes use AI to read a draft I think is close to final to make sure I haven’t left anything out, and to provide a final copyedit. It’s always better when a person does this, but I have a lot I’m trying to do and, well, I’m a solo consultant! So you take the help you can get.

Ok, back to a big ethical question around environmental impacts of AI. I got my start in this world exactly 20 years ago, when I graduated from Yale and started learning how to do environmental campaigning and organizing with Green Corps. My very first campaign, I lived in Morgantown, West Virginia from September-December 2006 to work on mercury pollution from a chemical plant on the Ohio River. I spent 13 years after that within nonprofits and largely working on other environmental issues. So: I care a lot about them, and I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about them!

Most of my experience has been treating environmental issues as systemic or political problems, not personal ones. I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons, I compost, blah blah blah, and I think those choices matter, or else I wouldn’t do them. But I also believe the only way to solve the big problems is to engage in them systemically or politically. Me deciding not to use an AI product has zero impact on whether a data center gets built. Everyone reading this newsletter and everyone we know not using an AI product also has zero impact. Massive banks, financial institutions, and trillion-dollar corporations are making those decisions, aided and abetted by the US government and spurred by international power competition.

We can do something, but I think it has to be done through our political process. That’s dispiriting, I know, because our political process seems pretty broken. We have to fix it along the way.

In the meantime, if you’re curious about using AI tools but want to ease some of the ethical conundrums, check out Change Agent. They’ve built an LLM product for the social impact space while taking into account environmental considerations and being pro-worker. It’s pretty cool!

The Headline Number

The average hourly equivalent across the beefier sample is $207. Do you remember what it was when we first issued the report?

If you guessed it was $206 or $208, you’d be wrong. It was $207.

Sixteen new people joined and the average didn’t move a dollar. The median ticked up from $188 to $189. The most common rate is still $250. The full range of hourly equivalents still runs $60 to $400, and the middle half of respondents still lands between $150 and $250.

I guess our survey data was right!

Some Things Never Change (Frozen 2 reference)

The fee-model ladder stayed constant even with more folks taking the survey. An hourly pay model is still the lowest-earning structure with an average hourly equivalent of $173 (down by $6), then project-based at $196 (up by $1), then ongoing retainers at $227 (up by $5), then time-limited

monthly fees at $250 (down by $25).

Consultants who absorb tools and subscriptions as overhead still out-earn those who pass them through, $218 (up by $1) to $166 (down by $5). Ten-plus years in your field still averages $216 (unchanged). Confidence in pricing strategy is still 3.4 out of 5. That’s exactly the same with a third more people. Huh.

The reasons we raise rates are still overwhelmingly internal, with increased experience and expertise leading at 64%.

[Why a Frozen 2 reference? Because my 3.5 year old sings it all the time and insists we play it in the car. So now I hear it in my head, even while writing this newsletter. And misery loves company. Sorry.]

What Did Change

Value-based pricing is still the only rate-setting input associated with higher pay, but the premium it provides narrowed. Consultants who use this technique for price setting are now +$29 versus +$37 in the original report for those who didn’t use it. Every other input still is negatively correlated with your average hourly equivalent. I’d expect some of the original gap to be from the smaller sample, but the direction stayed the same even with 16 new responses, so I’m feeling more confident in the finding.

One finding you might recall from the earlier report is that consultants who don’t adjust rates by client type average higher hourly equivalent rates than those who do. The figure is $227, whereas those who adjust rates “depending on the project” average $20, and the client-by-client adjusters average $196. The top-to-bottom gap is $31 now instead of $50. Annual rate-reviewers still lead that table at $235, but their edge over the every-few-years crowd down from $59 to $42. Directionally, I’d still make the argument from the first edition of the report, which is that consultants who are less flexible on rates seem to have a higher hourly equivalent.

Two new things showed up. Among the 46 respondents who travel to client sites, passing costs through at cost is now the choice of a slim majority at 52%. We didn’t have enough data last time to identify what the majority position was (the various groups were all below fifty percent).

And <sigh>, more data that retainers are great. Boring, I know, but true.If you get more than 50% of your revenue from retainers, the average hourly equivalent is $237 vs. $189, but the folks with no retainer revenue at all now sit at the very bottom, averaging $172.

By discipline (a little more)

The most requested breakdown, by far, is by discipline. At 56 responses I mostly couldn’t do show much, but we can start to with more survey respondents

Strategy/Organizational Planning is now the biggest group at nineteen respondents. The average is $199, the median is $181, and the range runs $100 to $325. A few high earners are pulling the average up, because the typical strategy consultant sits closer to $180. The fee-model ladder shows up inside the discipline too, with a twist: strategy consultants on retainers or monthly fees average $240, hourly billers average $167, and project-based billers average $145. Project fees paying worse than hourly is an inversion of the overall ladder. It’s only four people, so take it with a grain of salt. I wonder if this is the empathetic discount coming home to roost. You see the nonprofit’s budget, you know what a strategic plan “should” cost them, and you take a haircut before showing them anything. The value-based finding is also here: the eight who price to value average $239; the ten who don’t average $166.

HR/Talent, at seventeen respondents, tells a similar story with different numbers: average $212, median $182, range $95 to $375. HR folks on retainers or monthly fees average $228 versus $176 for hourly.

A few of you have asked whether the discipline differences are really just experience differences in disguise. Among consultants with ten-plus years in their field, Strategy averages $214 and HR averages $215. Coaching leads at $251 (but only four people); Finance/Operations sits at $192 and Communications at $187. Some of the gap in the big discipline chart is composition for sure, but maybe some of it is a real finding.

Every other group has too few respondents to pull out averages like this.

Keep it coming

The survey is still open, and this update is the argument for taking it: the data visibly improves as more of you participate, and your discipline can the Strategy treatment when enough of you are in it! The thinnest cells right now are Program Design/Evaluation and Fundraising, at three respondents each, and Digital at five. If that’s your world, or you know someone in it, five to ten minutes would help.

If you know a consultant who’s still guessing at their rate, forward this along.

But I do remember the restaurant was called Ten Tables. It had ten tables.

The light in the room was at a low level, and it felt small and intimate, befitting a place named for its small size. We sat close enough to the party beside us that I could hear their conversation without making out specifics. I don’t recall anything we ate, though in my memory it was a toothsome meal. I’m pretty sure you could see into the kitchen from the floor, and the staff seemed comfortable and happy.

Sixteen years later Amy and I are still together. Ten Tables served its last dinner on New Year’s Eve.

Krista Kranyak opened the place in 2000, when farm-to-table restaurants were a pretty new concept. Ten tables was the literal number of tables, with the sign visible from Centre Street before you ever opened a menu. Announcing the closing twenty-five years later, Kranyak described what she had spent more than two decades doing as “cooking simply, seasonally, and as close to the farmers and makers as possible.” The quote captures what this piece is about, which is that you cannot be that close to the farmers if you expand to fifty tables.

Every table you add shifts your attention from the food and the people to the apparatus required to deliver it. Fifty tables entails a produce supplier, a delivery schedule, and someone whose whole job is managing those relationships. With ten tables, you can be at the market yourself on a Saturday morning picking out the seasonal veggies for the menu that evening. Fifty tables means hiring, training, scheduling, and a big payroll, so big some people will always be strangers to you. Ten tables means you know what is going on in everyone’s life.

That doesn’t mean the small room is the right room. Salim Shariff built Radicle Digital into what he calls a collective of solopreneurs, and when the two of us wrote about the solo-versus-team crossroads, he made a persuasive case that scale puts more people in contact with what is in your head. Each client gets a smaller slice, but it reaches further. In our sector, the constraint is almost never good ideas and almost always the capacity to act on them. So growing your consulting business is an important consideration for social impact entrepreneurs.

But for me, after more than a decade in a very big nonprofit restaurant, as it were, I just wanted my hands on the food when I started consulting.

The Ten Table Practice

A ten table practice is a business deliberately capped below the size at which you would have to spend time managing the apparatus instead of just doing the work. Most independent consultants are already running one (hence the “independent”), and also most of us have already left a fifty table restaurant on purpose.

As a proprietor of one, here are three things that have had to be true for me to run a ten table practice.

The first is precision. You need one thing you can describe in a sentence that is specific enough that not many other people do it. When I talked with Jamie Cerretti last summer about how she found her niche, she had landed on state charity registration filings for organizations that wanted to work with an individual instead of a corporate firm. She told me she found the process weirdly fascinating, which let her go narrow enough that almost nobody else does that exact thing for the exact organizations she supports. The market for compliance paperwork is small, but that is kind of the point of a ten table restaurant: you need only enough people who want your particular thing. Clients hire consultants to solve specific problems, whereas the generalist who can do a bit of everything is often someone already on staff.

The second thing a ten table practice needs is regulars. The reason comes down to math. I have never had more than three engagements at once, and that has always been two large anchor engagements and one smaller project running alongside them. Most of the time, I have had one more in the pipeline, but never more than that. Losing an anchor would take out almost half of my capacity, and deep engagements have long sales cycles, so I cannot backfill on demand. A forty-person firm can absorb a client engagement ending because somebody else is out there selling. I am the only one selling, and I am also the one delivering.

This is also where the restaurant comparison stops being useful. A small restaurant turns a waitlist into an asset, like how the rides with the longest lines at the amusement park get the most demand. For Ten Tables, being hard to get a reservation was part of what people were paying for. In total contrast, nobody has ever hired me because I was booked up. There are always other consultants. The only protection is clients who keep coming back because they want my ten-tables focus. I’m proud that I have had four different anchor clients engage me multiple times over the years. That is not unusual, incidentally: when we surveyed this community last summer, 40% of engagements had already led to more work with the same client, and another 35% looked likely to.

The third thing you need is long engagements. With three slots, the only variable I can control is what each slot is worth, which pushes me toward fewer and bigger engagements rather than a steady churn of small projects. Our own survey data bears this out. Among the consultants we surveyed earning more than $150,000 a year, the majority had fewer but higher-value contracts, with anchor clients providing the stable base.

One example. A friend referred me to the CEO of a social impact organization that was considering becoming more of an impact video production studio. They were pivoting to a self-sustaining revenue model and needed someone to help them on the business side. The engagement started as a strategic review. I interviewed stakeholders, researched competitors, and wrote a long assessment. The engagement then turned into building a business plan and a unit economics model for producing social impact video under branded partnerships. They enjoyed their spring tasting menu, but then when summer rolled around, they wanted to see what I could do with stone fruit, tomatoes, and corn!

This client’s scope at the start looked quite different from how it ended. What I take away from that experience (and others) is that nobody ever hired me cold to build a unit economics model in month one. But by month five, I was the only person who could have built it, because I had spent four months learning where the money in that business actually moved. The courses that justify the length of the contract and the price only make sense after the ones that came before them, and ten tables cannot carry a flourishing independent consulting business if the people sitting at them order a single appetizer.

Reservations Only

I have never let a table go empty by accident. When one sat open, it was because I left it open to work on something of my own. I have spent more of my solopreneur career turning work down than looking for it, which is more luck than design, though not entirely luck.

Turning down work still kind of turns my stomach, though. That same impact video studio came back a couple of years later wanting help on a new business plan. I really liked them, and a mission-driven company trying to work out how it actually makes money is a puzzle I find interesting. But I said no, because at a ten table restaurant you cannot seat a walk-in.

Ten Tables expanded to Provincetown and Cambridge. Both of those outposts closed in the 2010s. The original ten-table room on Centre Street outlasted its own offspring by a decade before serving its last dinner this past New Year’s Eve, twenty-five years in.

But twenty-five years of full tables is a long run, and it ended anyway. My own tables have been booked so consistently for so long that I have started to treat it as a fact about the world rather than a condition I have to keep working to maintain. Precision, regulars, and long engagements require tending.

I still cannot remember what we ate, but I remember that everyone working there looked like they wanted to be there.

Sam is a corporate lawyer by training (Yale, then Fordham Law) who now spends her days in the nonprofit world, working with boards on governance, training, and the kind of retreats that actually move teams forward. She’s on the New York City Bar’s Nonprofits Organization Committee, she runs a family office subcommittee for that group, and she participates on the AI task force. Sam presents at social enterprise conferences at NYU, and she’s spent years helping smaller nonprofits get the essential, unglamorous things right. She’s also a native New Yorker and a parent of two, which is what brings her here today.

Back in the spring, my essay on being a parent and a consultant started a great conversation, and Allison Ehrich Bernstein followed up with a wonderful counterpoint. Now Sam carries it into summer. Her question: what if we parent consultants borrowed a little from the kids’ summer playbook? It’s warm, practical, and full of specifics that felt like summer in a bottle.

I’ll hand it over to Sam from here.

Sam Landenwitsch’s recent essay and Allison’s wonderful counterpoint have made the question of balance so front and center for many of us “parent consultants.” I have been a parent far longer than I have been a solo nonprofit consultant. With tweens ages twelve and thirteen, they are accustomed to my five-year old business being the baby in the family.

The perennial juggle for balance and avoiding what Sam deemed a “zero sum game” is sticking with me as the summer months arrive. Even with longer days and kids attending various summer activities and programs, the joys of summer make finding balance easier in some ways yet harder in others. With July 4^th in our rearview, friends and colleagues already started the quiet echo “summer is flying by!” Uh-oh.

My only addition to the valuable point/counterpoint my colleagues explored is the added layer of how a parent consultant should also navigate other caregiving responsibilities (such as aging parents). That is another post entirely, loaded with the privilege of living parents and the acute stressors of sandwich generation realities.

But back to the sunny optimism of a more relaxed summer schedule with longer days, warm-weather pursuits and more-than-appropriate runs to the ice cream shop or driving range (guilty, both counts). How should a parent consultant use more time outdoors and variable family schedules to maximize work (quantity and quality) and some joy? Inspired by my kids’ summer work reading and essay requirements, I thought maybe the adults should be borrowing a bit from the kids’ summer playbook.

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Lemonade Stand Pluck

Sometimes it’s the sweet-tart formula that sells, or even an arresting, bright bubble-letter sign. But usually the stand’s success boils down to the age old, “location, location, location.” Consultants could stand to revisit our version of the secret ingredient formulation. Instead of the water, sugar, lemon ratio, ours usually rests on what new or different value-add should we be building for our business and our clients? Where should we iterate or innovate? How do our (more polished and usually virtual) signs attract future engagements? Consider your marketing signs through an expansive lens; use a few extra moments this summer to evaluate your client satisfaction and long-standing tactics.

Purely anecdotally, last summer I simply tried a variety of locations in NYC. I met a colleague for lunch in Soho one day and camped out for a coffee on the Upper East Side on a different day. Both times I randomly bumped into an interesting nonprofit leader. In one instance, I wanted to follow-up with the professional and in the other, I made a key introduction. New and renewed client connections only happen when you keep your head up, eyes clear, and heart open. Just as Sam’s essay noted that consulting work lets you “spread” your professional identity across projects, this season itself might be conducive to “spreading” yourself around. Your special sauce might not change much this summer, but keep in mind the opportunities around your physical location.

Outdoors, Creative Time

For many lucky kids, summertime means running around outside, biking, and swimming from dawn to dusk. Especially for families outside of large cities. Parent consultants don’t really have the same luxury, but we can adapt that rhythm into smaller, manageable bites.

I live near Central Park. and I always feel more creative and sharper after a long walk in the park. Without the morning off-to-school rush, I have the space to make a long walk happen. Besides the sun and endorphins, it’s the scenery in the park which grounds me for the rest of the day. I also use the visual cues of the skyline, houses of worship, and landmark towers of Central Park West to open ideas about workforce trends, religion, the arts, landmarks, parks, and more. I especially enjoy “the regulars” who run rain or shine and remind me that persistence pays. If I bump into a friend or former colleague as sometimes happens too, added bonus. The park is my kind of scene.

If time outdoors sparks creativity, as studies support, this is a huge opportunity for busy parent consultants. Since solo work lacks built-in thought partners, it can be tough to refine new ideas. Claude notwithstanding. Being in nature encourages curiosity, and that beginner’s mind is exactly what many consultants need to keep their clients’ perspectives fresh (and their own!).

Revisit your To-Do List Sharply

For many kids, summer encourages new activities, jobs, camps, programs, and community service. Summer is sometimes the only flexible time to fast-track something unexplored to the top of your “to-do” list. So what should the parent consultant lob to the top of the list? I’ve learned over the years, the short answer is…not too much! Do not bite off more than you can chew. Please be incredibly intentional about your time even with longer days and (possibly more) windows of available work hours.

Allison’s essay referenced the power of her peer communities; I wholeheartedly agree. My circles of peer consultants have not only combatted isolation but continue to open doors for me. Even this opportunity to contribute to a peer’s Substack is a meaningful chance to collaborate. Accordingly, I always make my summer to-do list prioritize those in person touch points with local consultants and clients that never happened during the “school year.” While I’m spending more time this summer digging into AI (thanks to colleagues like Sam), I’m also trying to keep a steady cadence of in-person exchanges.

Take a brutally honest look at that summer to-do list again. If an item has sat on your list for more than one summer, consider jettisoning the same. Even I got tired of hearing myself say “I’m going to update my website this summer!” Turns out, it wasn’t actually pressing enough to take shape. Boosted by one of my peer communities of nonprofit lawyers digging into AI tools, I pivoted this past June. Instead of dreaming about that snappier looking website, I realized building an app to streamline my workflow would pay dividends into the Fall and Winter (and maybe that app could improve my website too?!).

The same holds true for my clients who juggle so many pressing projects. Strategically, what is summertime dictating to adopt or revisit? For those organizations coming off a cycle of governance and re-writing the by-laws/handbook/policies, I encourage them to get the team outdoors for a BBQ or service opportunity. For those teams who have just rotated off a capital campaign, I recommend their “fresh air” prescription as more site visits and hands-on work. An antidote to an events-heavy Spring schedule might be a simple coffee with a new or lapsed programmatic partner/corporate sponsor. Summer schedules could make a terrific window for a staff offsite or board retreat. Or if summer means lots of travel for your team, it is an excellent time to plan a Fall staff meeting or board offsite. With a delicate approach, shape your days to include both recharging and targeted productivity.

Summer Homework Lessons Learned

Schools assign summer work to mitigate learning loss and keep students plugged into critical thinking and cumulative math skills (among other reasons). Talking to my son about a draft summer essay (as a parent) reminded me (as a consultant) about the power of editing and revising. Off-season schoolwork feels like visiting a beach town during the off-season – spectacular scenery and simply less hectic. The skills we learn as students play through. I am motivated to go back to a few of my working templates and decks to edit and improve my offerings. My school year routine doesn’t prompt the import of editing the way this summer work reflection did. Summer reading, writing, and revisions also give some real-time feedback about the places where we have improved and the spots which still demand extra attention. We could all use more moments of noticing patterns, celebrating successes, and finding cycles of renewed purpose.

As Fall descends on the parent consultants, try to use lingering warm weather to remain outside a bit and test some of your “summer work” findings about important pivots and strategic revisions.

Mission-driven Work is a Privilege

I agree with Allison when she suggested she’s a better parent for doing a mission-focused job, but I also see it slightly differently. I hope that working in spaces focused on dignity, social justice, and equitable outcomes actually makes me a more empathetic human (which includes parent, spouse, sister, daughter, cousin, neighbor, etc.). My exposure to different nonprofits energizes me every day, along with copious amounts of coffee and matcha. Most days, I bubble over with excitement to tackle the work. Does that excitement and job satisfaction give me more patience as a parent for dirty socks everywhere and scratched-to-bleeding bug bites? Firm no. Does mission-driven work make me a more open-minded, curious, and energized (human and) parent? Hopefully so.

Both among the survey-takers who contributed to the report and also from readers, the biggest ask has been “ok but where do I fall?” Folks have been scanning the charts, looking for their discipline, and trying to place themselves in the distribution.

I wanted to make it easier, so I built an interactive tool you can use!

The 2026 Rate Report Explorer is live on the Working with Consultants site. You can plug in your hourly equivalent rate, and select your discipline, experience level, business structure, and fee model, and it shows you where you sit against the rest of the sample. It also lays out the patterns from the report all in one place: fee model, rate-setting approach, retainer share, and expense handling with the overall median marked on each one.

Try the explorer →

You won’t see individual responses. Every figure is a group median.

The survey is still open

We’re at 59 responses now, but both the report and the explorer get more useful with every submission. The disciplines where we’re still thin are Program Design/Evaluation, Fundraising, and Coaching, each at a handful of respondents. If that’s you, or you know someone in those fields, five minutes would help a lot.

A few odds and ends

Last week I sent the full report, and it was long. Here are a few thoughts I had when I saw all the data.

We’re probably all too flexible. I wrote in the report that the consultants earning more have decided their rate somewhere other than in the conversation with the client, and that those of us earning less are doing the opposite (reading the room and adjusting). That’s me! I care about the work my clients are doing, and I want to help, and so I find myself quietly shaving the number before anyone even pushes back. One of the open-ended survey responses put it bluntly: the honest truth is whether your client has money or not, and that dictates what we can charge more than our own experience does. Being in the social impact space makes us more susceptible to this: we blur the line between activist and businessperson, and the activist side is usually willing to take a pay cut.

Raising rates on existing clients. This came through in the open-ended responses more than anything except the market-rates question. People want to know how to have that conversation without damaging the relationship. I think I can smell another survey coming, or at least a guide with good anecdotes and lessons!

The confidence finding. The highest earners in our sample are the least confident in their pricing. I would have expected the opposite.

Subcontracting doesn’t seem to help your rate. Solos who regularly subcontract to others actually average lower than pure solos at $178 versus $202. This surprised me, because if you’re subcontracting to others, I would have guessed it was for bigger contracts that could have supported higher rates. I’d love to hear from the folks who use subcontractors on this finding.

Coming up…

The explorer is in version one. I want to add project-fee ranges and some of the retainer-scoping data if I can figure out how to display it usefully. If you play with the tool and something feels missing or confusing, reply to this email and tell me.

And if last week’s report was useful, the most helpful thing you can do is forward it to the consultant who keeps asking what they should charge. Here’s the link.

I’m grateful to you for being part of this. It helps all of us deliver better work to our amazing clients and build sustainable businesses for ourselves. Last year’s rate report was based on fewer than 20 responses and a handful of questions. It still became the most-read thing we’ve ever published, but the feedback was to do it again with more people and more questions.

This year, more than 50 independent consultants in the social impact space answered a survey roughly three times as long covering rates, retainers, scope boundaries, expense handling, and travel. What follows is a picture of how this community actually prices its work.

Who answered

Forty-four of the 56 respondents (79%) have ten or more years of experience in their field. Thirty-five are solo practitioners, ten are solo-but-regularly-subcontracting, and eleven have employees or a small firm. The biggest discipline clusters are Strategy/Organizational Planning (14) and HR/Talent (12), but we also had a number of respondents in Finance/Operations, Communications/Marketing, Digital, Coaching, Fundraising, and Program Design/Evaluation.

But almost nobody in the survey sample is early-career, and several disciplines are represented by just two or three people. Every number below should be read through that lens: this is a senior, solo-heavy, social-impact community.

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Shut up and tell me the number!

We all have different pay structures we rely on: hourly, retainer, project-based, and monthly. The survey respondents were asked to convert their predominant pay structure into an hourly rate so we could compare apples to apples across our sample. For example, if you work on retainer, you were asked to estimate your hours over whatever time period your retainer covers to provide an hourly equivalent rate.

The average hourly equivalent across 50+ respondents is $207. The median, which would be less distorted by a handful of high earners, is $188. The most commonly reported rate (the mode) is $250. The full range runs from $60 to $400 equivalent hourly rate, with the middle half falling between $150 and $250.

Pay structures matter most

The gap between consultants who primarily use an hourly pay structure ($179) versus retainers ($222) versus time-limited monthly fee ($275) is the widest spread of any single variable in this dataset.

My partner Amy told me to stop billing hourly in my first year. She was right. (She is usually right about these things, and I am usually slow to listen.) I wrote about this in my “Day One” piece, and now we have more than 50 data points confirming it!

This finding is also consistent with what we found in last summer’s sources report. Consultants earning over $150,000 per year overwhelmingly structure their work as retainers or monthly fees rather than hourly or project-based. That report was about how people find clients, and it points in the same direction as this report on fee structure.

That gap occurs within the various consulting disciplines, too.

Last overall observation is that pricing different work differently tracks with earning more. Consultants who use a secondary fee model on some engagements average $210 in equivalent hourly pay compared to $201 for those who bill one way for everything. A small difference but worth noting.

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Disciplines

Disciplines showed different average hourly equivalents, but we can’t tell why with the data in hand. It could just be a sampling issue, by which I mean very accomplished people in Coaching could have taken the survey versus schlubs like me in Strategy/Organizational Planning. The best way to spot a lesson here will be to continue doing the survey in the future to see if differences between disciplines hold up over time and how they change.

Experience In-Field

The more experience you have in your field (not necessarily as a consultant), the higher your average pay rate. Folks with under ten years of experience in their chosen field average $175 in equivalent hourly pay as compared to folks with more than ten years of experience who average $216. This finding wasn’t surprising to me, but it’s still useful to know.

What we don’t know is whether clients are actually paying more for the experience, itself. It could be correlative rather than causal. By which I mean another explanation for this finding could simply be that those with more experience have deeper networks and better connections, and thus can land more plum engagements that pay more. We would need to survey our clients to understand if they do pay a premium for experience. (Hey, that’s a great idea!)

Retainers, retainers, retainers

Seventy-nine percent of the sample earns at least some revenue from retainers. Below 50% retainer revenue, hourly equivalents cluster between $175 and $190 with no real trend. If you’re getting more than 50% of your revenue from retainers, the average hourly equivalents jump to the $230s.

Just guessing, but I think many of us are angling for retainers, and if we’re below 50% then it probably means we’re accepting some sub-optimal work because that’s what we could get.

The only rate-setting input that tracks with higher rates

The survey gave five standard inputs people use when setting rates and let respondents check all that applied. The idea was to gain more insight into how rates get set by understanding what variables influence consultants’ pricing.

Value-based pricing is the only input associated with higher rates: +$37 over peers who don’t use it. We’ve covered value-based pricing before, but in short, it is when you set a price based on the value being delivered rather than other factors like how long the work will take or how complicated it is. (Also, a great guide on how to use different pricing models here on our Working with Consultants site.)

Every other input is actually negatively associated with the hourly wage equivalent, meaning survey respondents who used any other method of setting their rates had a lower average hourly equivalent.

The usual caveat: this is all correlation, not causation. People who already charge more may gravitate to value-based pricing because it helps them name a higher price, or it may just reflect the high experience levels and business sophistication of the survey sample. But the direction is unanimous across every cut in this data, so it’s worth boning up on how to do value-based pricing in your practice.

Variables for Higher & Lower Rates

Here are a few patterns to compare your methods and pricing against.

The through line, if there is one, is the consultants earning more have decided their rate somewhere other than in the conversation with the client. They review their rates on their own schedule, they don’t flex their pricing by client type, and they price to the value over anything else.

If I had to hazard an intepretation, it might be that we’re all too flexible. Time and again, I find myself subtly moving in response to a client’s needs. I care about what they’re doing, and I really feel like I can help, so without even consciously doing it, I’m giving them an empathetic discount. It’s where I blur the lines between activist and businessperson. Parsing all of this data gets me thinking that I should price my services based on what their worth and what value they provide, and then cleave to that and just communicate it to prospective clients. And stop pre-negotiating for them!

Confidence doesn’t track with rates

Mean confidence in current pricing strategy: 3.4 out of 5. Twenty-five of 56, just under half of everyone who took the survey, picked the exact middle. People charging $250+ rated themselves a 1 (not confident); people charging less than $125 rated themselves a 5 (very confident). It’s fascinating to me that the highest earners in our sample are the least confident in their pricing strategy.

Freebies

Fifty-seven percent of respondents give away three or more categories of work at no additional charge. On the other hand, only 18% of survey participants bill for everything.

When scope creep happens, 80% of survey respondents absorb the small asks and flag the big ones. Thirteen percent build a buffer into the original contract. Four percent use a formal change order.

The consultants who routinely pass various expenses through to the client average $171 per hourly equivalent. These are things like Canva or CRM subscriptions, job-posting fees, and compensation databases. Reading the responses, the line people draw is whether the tool is for one client’s project or part of their core kit: a database bought for a single engagement gets passed through, often at cost, while anything they’ll reuse next month gets folded into the rate.

The consultants who eat these sorts of expenses as overhead average $217. Absorbing the cost correlates with earning more. I don’t know why that would be, but a guess is probably because higher-priced engagements make individual expense lines feel petty to itemize. A lot of the free stuff could be seen as a relationship investment, and some of it is just the cost of being easy to work with. Still, it’s probably good to be a little more disciplined and intentional about whether you’re choosing to give it away.

Retainer scoping and boundary communication were among the most frequently requested topics in the open-ended responses. Among the 44 respondents who do retainers, what’s included in the fee is fuzzy. 68% of respondents who use retainers include general availability or on-call access, 64% include a set number of hours, 59% say the combination varies by client, and 52% include defined deliverables.

Travel: no norms yet

Sixty-four percent of survey-takers travel to client sites at least sometimes. Among those who do, there is no majority approach to cost handling. A decent chunk of folks pass those costs through to clients directly, another chunk builds it into their fee structure, and many people chose “varies by engagement,” with none of these options clearing half of respondents.

Site-visit scoping splits four ways: built into the project fee (12), case by case (12), separate line item (7), not in proposals at all (5).

Why people raise their rates

When consultants raise rates, the reasons are overwhelmingly internal. That lines up with what I would have hypothesized prior to the survey, because we lack the ecosystem and knowledge base to use external factors. There simply aren’t any accessible ways to use research data when setting prices!

What you still want to know

Most people answered the last question: what’s the one pricing question you most wish you had better data on?

The biggest cluster: market rates by segment (by discipline, by experience, by region, by client type). One person put it this way: they don’t have a great sense of what the going rate is for someone with their experience, or what a great year versus a mediocre one looks like.

Second: how peers actually set and raise their rates.

Third: retainer scoping. How do you structure retainer agreements when neither hard deliverables nor fixed hours cover what you’re actually offering?

Fourth: value-based pricing in practice.

These questions will get worked into next year’s survey. If you have one of your own, reply to this email and tell me please!

Coming Next

I am working on an interactive version of this data where you can plug in your discipline, experience level, business structure, and fee model and see exactly where you land against the rest of the sample. It’ll be in the next newsletter.

If this was useful, the most helpful thing you can do is forward it to the consultant who keeps asking what they should charge.

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Method

56 responses collected May-June 2026 via the Chorus Consultant Community and related networks. Hourly-equivalent figures are self-reported; respondents whose primary fee model isn’t hourly estimated what their work comes out to per hour. Averages are arithmetic means. Multi-select questions (rate-setting inputs, increase drivers, retainer scope, included-at-no-charge) were scored per option. The sample is self-selected and not a representative market survey; small-cell warnings apply wherever counts fall below five. This is the second year of the survey. The sample tripled and the questionnaire expanded substantially, so year-over-year rate comparisons aren’t reliable.

First, it’s chaos. Travel time has no rules. Some of us bill it at full rate, some at a reduced one, some not at all, and the largest group says it varies. About half of us absorb client expenses as overhead rather than passing them through. The list of things we hand clients for free from between-meeting Slack access to quick calls to introductions would make a respectable line item if anyone billed it. And when scope creeps, most of us just eat the small asks and flag only the big ones.

These are all new things in the 2026 survey that we didn’t collect data on last year. I’m excited to share all the new stuff with you!

Now, the rates themselves are interesting. Two consultants in the data have ten-plus years of experience each, but one’s effective hourly rate is three times the other’s. How you structure the contract correlates with what you take home per hour in a direction hourly billers will want to see. And the early effective rates have moved off last year’s $250 median, but not in the direction I would have guessed. I’m holding the figures for the full report, because the sample is still growing and I’d rather the benchmark be as complete as possible.

Which brings me to my ask. The specialty-level rate breakdowns are the thing you asked us for most after last year’s report. They get better with every response, but some slices are still thin. If you haven’t taken the survey yet, it takes about five minutes: Take the survey → here.

Full report, with visuals, in a few weeks. While the numbers finish cooking, let me share another thing I’ve been collecting.

The worst advice we got when we started

“Just say yes and then figure it out after.” That was Ben’s entry when I asked our community for the worst advice they got when they started out.

Everyone who goes independent keeps a small collection of advice good and bad. Some folks shared the story of the friend who suggests lowering your rate “just to get established,” and another talked about the mentor who says take anything that pays. We publish a lot of advice in this newsletter, so consider this the control group.

Salim came in hot about the “S Corps Made Easy” industry: services that promise to bundle your entity setup, bookkeeping, and taxes into one tidy monthly subscription. His verdict: “a bunch of BS.” Accounting is not something you can outsource to people who won’t speak with you once a month, unless your business is incredibly simple. The alternative is a real accountant who knows your name and picks up when something weird happens, which is probably most of our day-to-days.

Mine is a cousin of Ben’s. Early on I went after any engagement out there, including ones where I had no domain-specific expertise. Challenging yourself is good, and engagements should push us to grow. But I took on work I wasn’t qualified to do, and the learning curve meant more hours back in the kitchen just to deliver for the client, which crowded out everything else I wanted to be doing.

The second version arrived as a drop in the stomach every time I refreshed an empty inbox: I was scared no one would hire me, ever. So I took whatever was offered, because I needed proof I could get work at all, and every offer felt like a verdict on whether I had a business. I wish I had spent that energy interviewing prospective clients and assessing whether they were the right fit, instead of treating selection as something only they got to do.

And I would have gone superlightweight on the startup apparatus. I built a website almost nobody visited and set up tracking systems for the scale I assumed was coming, when the whole time I was building a bespoke practice. Every one of those hours should have been a coffee with a former colleague.

What’s yours? Hit reply with the worst advice you got when you started — the friend, the mentor, the podcast, whoever. Name the advice; leave the advisor out of it. If the replies are as good as I suspect, we’ll round them up in a future issue.

P.S. Five minutes, if you haven’t already: Take the survey →

Tomorrow, I’m headed to Netroots Nation. I’ll be representing Chorus at Booth #204 Thursday-Saturday. If you’ll be in Philadelphia, please stop by and say hi. Last year, I had a chance meeting with Myles Bugbee in the registration line, and it turned into both a great piece for the Substack plus an ongoing friendship. Netroots feels more about the community-building than anything else, so come build some with me!

I am also presenting a session Thursday (6/4) at 3:45pm called “Receipts, Not Vibes: Turning Conversations into Data.” It’s a training on how to collect audio recordings from field work and then analyze them using new technology. We’ve been partnering with The Outreach Team on that, and the early results are really cool. There is an important quality control dimension but also an opportunity to learn about what is actually working to change minds or motivate people to act.

Take the survey!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, I’m going to keep plugging taking our 2026 community rate-setting survey. This survey is the tool through which we get confidential, anonymous data about how independent consultants set rates. The 2025 version was widely viewed and well-received. This year, we’re expanding the fields to provide information about more specific edge cases and needs. It takes 5-10 minutes and, again, it’s anonymous!

Free community resource

Less than 2 months ago, we launched Working with Consultants: A Guide for Mission-Driven Organizations. The point of it was to build a resource for our clients to learn how to get even more out of working with independent consultants. It’s been a pretty big success! Almost two thousand people have checked it out already and about 10% of those people have created a free account. And every single one of those people will tell you: we’re not spamming them! Free resource and free account means just that. So if you haven’t signed up yet to access the full library, go check it out.

But for this group, I also want to ask: is there anything missing? Is there an article you think would add something to the guide? Are you willing to write it?!?!?! If so, then please email me at sam@chorusai.co and let’s talk!

Center for Strategic Thinking

Some of you followed the Strategic Fitness findings Susannah and I published in April (the 3.17-point gap between how EDs rate their organizations and how everyone else does). At the end of that report, we said we were building something, and it’s rounding into shape.

Final name TBD, but our idea is a “Center for Strategic Thinking,” which would be a year-long executive program for nonprofit C-suite and senior leaders. Participants would work on live challenges inside their own organizations, in cohorts of leaders at comparable levels of authority, over a full year. We want to build a curriculum around the research many of you have been reading here: the perception gap, Reactive Sophistication, the structural reasons strategic discipline erodes as organizations scale, etc. Our goal is to create something that combines the rigor of a top business school program and the cohort intimacy of something like Rockwood, designed specifically for our sector.

We’re in the design phase now. If you’d want to learn more as a potential participant, someone who’d refer a client, or someone interested in helping build it, raise your hand here.

My college friends are the last group in my life where I had the full package of repetition, shared experiences, and accumulated memory that turns a group of people into a community. We lived, ate, studied, and partied together. We had years of overlapping daily life, and because of that we have a foundation of friendship that reached critical mass, like a star becoming a black hole but in reverse.

One of my roommates lives in Brooklyn, and we see each other a few times a month. When I mentioned this at the reunion, people were stunned. Nobody else had a friend they saw that regularly. I felt lucky hearing that, but I also felt the other side of it. I wish I saw more of my people more often. I wish my list of really close friends was longer.

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Most of us carry some version of the same wish, and the reunion reminded me that the difference between having community and wanting community is usually one person putting something on a calendar.

Our reunion group is testing this. We’re renting a place in southern California for the 4th of July in 2027 and telling everyone to come. We probably won’t get everyone, but the point is that someone has to be the prime mover, or the group just texts about getting together and never does. But if you have a prime mover, I suspect that’s all you need.

That’s what I’m trying to do here, too, but I want to do better! If you’re coming to Netroots next week, come find me at the Chorus booth. And I’m going to rededicate myself to creating more ways for this community to share experiences together. More on that soon.

“We can’t afford to lose them.”

By Susannah

Every time I hear this from a client, my heart sinks.

Underneath that sentence is something far more dangerous than organizational dependency or the justification of something that isn’t sustainable. This sentence says “we are abandoning strategic thinking and strong operating systems in favor of fear.”

Fear of disruption.
Fear of conflict.
Fear of losing relationships, knowledge, revenue, or stability.

Once fear enters the system, the organization starts changing around it.

Fear cannot be compartmentalized; once it starts driving decisions in one part of the system, it spreads and over time, and organizations reorganize around it.

Accountability becomes inconsistent. Policies become flexible for some people and rigid for others. Leadership avoids clarity because clarity might trigger conflict, disruption, or departure. The institution begins protecting itself from short-term discomfort at the expense of long-term resilience.

To be clear: this does not mean organizations should never adapt or work hard to retain strong staff. They should.

Sometimes a person truly is unusually valuable. Sometimes exceptions genuinely make sense. Sometimes reality requires flexibility.

But that is a different question entirely.

There is a difference between: “They’re irreplaceable, so we have to make this work” and “What would need to be true for us to say yes without undermining the system, the policy, or trust across the organization?”

One is fear-based accommodation. The other is principled adaptation.

Strong institutions are intentional, not rigid; they can flex without collapsing, adapt without abandoning principle, and value people deeply without trading the health of the organization.

Fear changes what the institution believes it is capable of surviving.

Accountability starts feeling dangerous. Clear boundaries feel destabilizing. Leadership transitions feel catastrophic. Normal operational friction gets interpreted as existential threat.

People adapt to fear-based systems faster than leaders realize.

Managers stop escalating issues because they know nothing will happen. Teams begin routing around certain people instead of relying on a shared process. High performers burn out carrying the weight of inconsistency. Institutional knowledge becomes increasingly concentrated because no one wants to challenge the dependency.

Eventually, the organization starts spending more energy managing around fragility than strengthening the system itself.

But they rarely experience themselves this way. Instead they experience themselves as pragmatic. Flexible. Protective of the mission. Avoiding unnecessary disruption.

They will not say:

“We no longer trust the institution to hold.”

They will say:

“They’re indispensable.”

Because the alternative would require admitting something organizations rarely admit out loud: that the systems are weaker than they appear; that knowledge has become too concentrated and accountability has become conditional; that the institution no longer trusts itself to absorb disruption.

And to fully acknowledge that would require confronting the implications: things need to change. And that is the very thing that fear works so hard to protect against.

Institutions organized around fear become fragile because fear prevents the very things resilience requires:

• Shared ownership requires letting go of control and dependency on a single trusted person

• Clear accountability risks conflict, destabilization, or departure

• Succession planning forces acknowledgment that someone might leave

• Documentation reduces the protective power of concentrated knowledge

• Distributed leadership requires trust that others can carry responsibility

• Institutional trust requires consistency, transparency, and willingness to hold boundaries even when it comes at a cost

Building resiliency requires institutions to tolerate discomfort, uncertainty, exposure, and redistribution of power — and fear resists all of them. Fear says: protect stability, avoid disruption, don’t trigger conflict, don’t risk losing the person, keep the system functioning at all costs, preserve what feels safe right now.

So instead of building resilience, the institution starts optimizing for anxiety reduction and eventually, it stops building capacity in order to preserve dependency.

That is the real danger. Not that someone valuable exists, but that the institution quietly loses confidence in its ability to hold boundaries and still function.

Your Move

If any of this feels familiar, the question is not:

 p“Who is the indispensable person?”

The question is:

“Where has fear started making decisions for the institution?”

• Where have standards become inconsistent?

• Where have accountability conversations become avoided?

• Where has knowledge become too concentrated?

• Where are people quietly managing around dysfunction instead of addressing it?

• Where has short-term stability started taking precedence over long-term resilience?

Because fear thrives in ambiguity and dependency.

If you recognize this pattern in your organization, start by strengthening the things fear erodes first:

• clarify decision-making

• distribute knowledge

• document critical processes

• reduce single points of failure

• make accountability more consistent

• build capacity to absorb transition without panic

Not because people are disposable, because once exemption becomes necessary for the institution to function, the institution is already weaker than it appears.

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.