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I recently came from a retreat that I led with a group of incredible organizational leaders, all leading multimillion dollar organizations. And I was struck by three themes emerging so clearly from that space. A lot of times you'll be in a space with people and you talk about lots of different things and there's energy and they share their experiences and they're definitely themes that, that emerge, common themes. But there were three specific sources of struggle and ultimately success that were really clear in this space. These are themes that I listened to these incredible and successful nonprofit CEOs talk about colliding with that blocked or stalled their growth that made sustaining seven figures so much tougher than it needed to be. And what they made explicit in this space with each other and what I heard them say about their experience was that they wish someone had just named the patterns, named the things that they needed to stop doing, and said to them directly, stop doing these things. So that's what I'm going to do today. Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast, where we name what's really happening inside growing nonprofits and what it actually takes to design a high impact nonprofit the right way. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage, longtime nonprofit strategist and coach. Each week I unpack the systems, strategies and specific mindset shifts that help growing nonprofits get smart and intentional about growing their impact without burning out along the way. This show is about moving beyond grit to design. It's about building organizations that have the systems, structures and leadership capacity to, to truly hold the weight of their mission. Welcome. This is not going to be soft and fuzzy. And I'm also not doing this episode to be harsh. I'm doing it because every leader, I really believe this. Every leader needs a thought partner who will cut through the noise and say the real thing to them, even if it stings, even if it's hard, even if they don't necessarily want to hear it in that moment. So if something lands a little hard today, that's okay. That's a signal. It's not a reason to not hear it. You don't have to act on it. But I want this space, this nonprofit mastermind space to do what masterminds do, to highlight the things that ought to be highlighted to make your work more impactful and more easeful as you go along. So I'm thinking about a specific kind of leader as I record this. You are running a seven figure organization. 1.2 million, 1.8 million, 2.7 million. Right. You have a real team. You have strong programs that are Doing really good work and real budget pressure. And you've crossed enough thresholds to feel the complexity that comes with institutional scale, but you haven't necessarily built the structural architecture to carry it. And that gap is what I'm going to name today. Sitting in that gap, what I heard these leaders navigate and grapple with was that gap. What gets an organization to seven figures of impact is not what helps it sustain that impact without operational chaos, without burning out. And the leaders who do sustain that level of impact without eventually stalling or. Or quitting have almost always done three things right. The ones who don't make it tend to have missed these same three things. So I'm going to name them directly and talk about them today. Truth number one, you're working hard and you're probably not working on the right things. So the narrative that I've actually gotten really tired of in our sector is that building a great organization is a combination of magic and luck and the right personality in the leader's chair. So the reason I'm tired of this is not because I actually don't believe in magic. I do or don't believe in luck. I do. Those things are really important. And personality matters, but not, not in the way that people talk about it and not as the full constellation of things that make organizations work. I'm tired of this narrative because it undervalues the things that matter the most. The role of strategy, discipline, and hard choices. Making choices. And more than that, this narrative that we just have to sort of say the right thing and be extroverts and have the right combination of luck and magic. It lets you leaders off the hook for the hard redesign work that growth actually requires. What gets sold as authentic leadership or sustainable growth quietly buries what's actually happening. Making tough changes, doing things very differently than you did before. Even if it's uncomfortable, if it's not optional, it's required. So what does this actually mean? It means that when a leader looks at the team that got them to 1.6 million and realizes that a third of that team don't actually have the skills to get to 3.5 million, which is where the strategic plan aims to go, and that leader feels guilty about what she sees. That guilt is rooted in the idea that redesigning your team is optional. It isn't. It means having an honest conversation with your board about what accountability actually looks like. Even when that conversation is uncomfortable and overdue, and even when it means some of those board members are going to leave. That isn't optional. That happens as organizations grow. It must happen if the organization is going to stay healthy and stable. It also means cutting a program that is consuming resources and isn't generating the impact that you defend to a sophisticated funder, even if that means some of your team has to go or a partnership has to end. It means deciding that certain meetings are no longer the best use of your time and stepping back from work maybe you actually love because someone else needs to own it now. I started my career as a lawyer, as a community lawyer, social justice lawyer in New York doing impact litigation on behalf of low income teen parents. And I loved it. I loved everything about being a lawyer. And part of why I started my second organization was to bring that love of the law that that feeling of empowerment that comes when you know what your rights are and you can stand in any tribunal and argue for those rights. I wanted to bring that into the hands of young people and I loved doing the work. And at a certain point we got big enough and sophisticated enough where I wasn't the one doing the work, I couldn't be the one doing the work. And I remember there was a really amazing friend and mentor who had been running and organization for about seven years by the time I started mine. And she said, you're going to get to a point where you have to let go of a part of the work that you love and you can either do the work or you can lead the work. And right now those are sort of the same and at a certain point they won't be. And are you going to be okay with that? And I was like, oh yeah, of course. I want, you know, I want to build an institution that's going to last beyond me and that's going to be know just bigger than what I do. And I underestimated how hard it was. And. Real quick, if this is landing for you and you're wondering if there's a next step to get my eyes on your organization or my help meeting, the moment you're in there is head to brooke richie babbage.com fit check and fill out the three minute fit check. You'll answer four questions that'll give me insight into where you are and what you're navigating and I'll point you in the right direction. I read everyone personally. Okay, let's keep going. So these are tough things, right? Letting go of team members that have built this thing with you so far because they're humans and you're human. What this first truth speaks to is that the hard work of Leading a growing organization, sustaining seven figure impact isn't the same hard work as leading a $600,000 organization. It's often emotionally harder, right? So a lot of times where the operational chaos and the feeling of stall comes from is that you are working hard, you are spending hours hard at work. But the hard work of tough choices and disciplined redesign and cutting things and being strategic is a different kind of work, right? The reps that build an organization, that sustain an organization, are specific. They look like a certain thing. They look like staying with your major donor cultivation strategy longer than you think you need to, but long enough for it to compound, even when it feels painfully slow. The reps look like running your board recruitment process and building on what didn't work and doing it again the next cycle better. It looks like iterating on your annual fundraising plan using actual data instead of pivoting to a new approach every quarter. That's what builds the engine of your organization, right? That's what fills your capacity in the right way. That's what allows your clarity, your strategic direction to be a compass for you and your team. None of this is glamorous and it almost always requires a type of hard work, a type of hard choice doing uncomfortable work that is different, but that must be done repeatedly before you can see the return. So the honest question for you to sit with with this first truth is, where are your highest leverage hours going this month? Not your busiest hours, where are your building hours going? How much of your month is actually going into the structural work that strengthens the design of the organization? Because there's a difference between working in the organization, working hard, and working on it. And at the stage of leadership that I talked about at the top of this, of this episode, at this stage, the ratio between those two working in and working on is one of the most important strategic shifts you can make. Okay, truth two, chances are the you're making scattered, inspiration driven investments in your capacity. So this one's tough. But I want you to hear this as someone who is genuinely rooting for you and who has been where you are. There is a version of capacity building that nonprofit leaders, the whole sector, has normalized for decades. And it looks something like this. A training here, some workshops for you and your board and your team, maybe a toolkit or an online course or set of resources that you bought but have never fully implemented. Depending on your size and scale, it might look like a cohort experience that was genuinely stimulating, or one or two consultants that didn't necessarily connect with each other. But have produced deliverables. Each individual investment, each of the things that I mentioned, is defensible. And each one, if you invested wisely, was probably useful. But here's the thing, useful in isolation. When you step back and look at the full picture of what your organization has spent on its own development and what you have spent on your development over the last, say, three years, chances are there's no through line. The investments aren't necessarily adding up to a genuine shift, a genuine leveling up of your institutional capacity. The dollars spent were real, the money spent was real, the time spent was real. But the structural change left when those investments left. Right? The structural change isn't there. This is scattered investment. And it's one of the most common patterns I see in organizations at your stage. And it was really interesting to hear the leaders in this space that I was in talk about some of the concrete ways that this has shown up for them because it deeply aligned with what I have known and seen over the last 15 years of working with organizations. And I want to name what usually drives it. If this is resonating with you because it's not carelessness, right? That's. I want to make sure that it's clear, it's not carelessness and it's not. These are not bad investments inherently. Most of the time, scattered investments are what I call operator mode investments. Right? You're investing in ways that make you and your team more equipped, more informed, more inspired to do the work in front of you. These are operator questions. For example, what do I need to know? What do I need to learn? What will help me execute better right now? Right? They're often skill based questions and they're not wrong. They're very important, but they're not the right questions to be leading your investment decisions when you are running a $1.8 million organization, when you are trying to grow your impact and your sustainable scale in seven figures. Because as the leader, operator mode investments follow what's useful and urgent and interesting in the moment. Right? They are down and in. They look into the weeds and make sure that those weeds are strong. But the investments are scattered among the weeds. They touch everything. They're not looking at building the entire institution. They're not looking at creating through lines. The contrast to operator mode investments, which are often scattered, are architect mode investments. And they look different. It starts with a different type of question, not what's useful right now. Instead it's what's the specific gap in the design of this organization that I need to close? Right? Inherent in that second question is, where are we trying to go? What's the gap between where we are and where we're trying to get to? And how do I close that gap? A leader investing like an architect can tell you in one sentence what she expects to change and by when, how this is going to get her to the next level of impact, to the next level of investment, from a donor to the next team, to whatever that next North Star or horizon is. The investments that that leader makes, that the architect mode leader makes, connect to one another because they're all aimed at the same thing. They're all aimed at the same architectural build, at the design gap that she's trying to close at the North Star she's trying to reach. She's not following inspiration from one thing to the next. And it's not aimed at the specific set of skills or resources that this particular team member or this particular installation of her board needs. The leader that is thinking in architect mode is making a concentrated sequence of bets, essentially on a specific part of the organization's design, with an eye towards the North Star and staying with that architectural build long enough for it to add up. So here's the diagnostic I want you to think about in your organization. Look at the last 10 times, five times your organization invested in its own capacity, however you define capacity building. Look at the conferences, the trainings, memberships, consultants, our investments in capacity, the cohort experience, the toolkits, whatever those investments were, and ask yourself, how do they connect to one another? Do they connect to one another? Is there a through line, a specific part of the organization's design? They were all collectively aimed at strengthening. Do they compound when taken together, right? Are they creating a flywheel? Are they adding to one another? Who get you more capacity at the end of all of those investments structurally than when you started or, and this is really common, do they represent 5 or 10 or however many separate moments of this is the right thing to do at this time? If the honest answer is that they were scattered, driven more by what was necessary in the moment, available, inspiring in the moment, than by a clear architectural intention, that's the pattern I'm naming. It is not a leadership flaw. It is a stage of growth mismatch, and it is really common. It happens all the time as organizations grow. The key is to recognize when it's happening, recognize when investments are being made in operator mode, when instead maybe what your organization needs to get to the next stage of either growth or sustainability is architect mode investment. Ultimately, the thing to think about here is that you can't workshop your way to a resilient $3 million organization, or $2 million organization, or $1.5 million organization. You can't toolkit your way there. One sort of investment at a time. So the question to ask before any capacity building decision is not, is this useful? The question is, what is it building towards? Where are we trying to go with this area of our organizational design? What does the finished team capacity look like? What does the finished board operation look like? What does the finished revenue engine look like? What's our North Star? And how does this investment help us get there? Does it connect to a specific gap in the design of my organization? Does it build on the other investments that I'm making? If the answer is yes, that's the kind of architect mode investment you want to make. So here's truth number three. This one was maybe the fuzziest of the ones that came out of this convening that I was in. Basically, you're quitting at month three, when actually this is a six, eight, ten month build. So here's what I mean. I'm thinking about a leader that I know really well. She's thoughtful and really strategic and genuinely serious about building something that can be sustained by she and her team. So she came to work with me about a year ago and we the focus of the work. So inside my next level nonprofit program, we focus heavily on the redesign of the specific elements of your organization that need to get you. That need to be redesigned to get you where you're going. And so she made a careful, well researched decision to redesign her development model, her revenue engine. She'd been running the same fundraising approach for years, and it had worked for a while, and then it stopped working the way that it used to. And that was deeply frustrating for her and her development team. She was doing everything. She had done everything right? So what we did was we paused, we got quiet for a minute, and we looked at her data, and we were able to make deliberate strategic shifts in the structure of her fundraising infrastructure. Basically, she did her homework, right? She brought in experts like me, like the coaches in the team. Honestly, some of the other folks in the peer network in the mastermind had built what she was trying to build, and it was really helpful for her to use her data. So then she ran the first iteration of this new model. And the first campaign was underwhelming. And then this is the part that I always love to highlight. She started to spiral, which we all do, right? She had done her research, she'd done her homework. She'd talked to people. She'd redesigned this engine. She'd stepped away from the familiar because the familiar wasn't working, but it was familiar. And now this new thing that she had invested in wasn't working. And maybe the whole model was wrong is where she was going. Maybe she should go back to the old approach, right? It was good enough. It wasn't working the way she wanted it to, but that's okay. Maybe she needed to try a completely different thing. So this was the spiral. And I watched her start to question every decision she'd made in the preceding, you know, seven months that we had been working together based on two cycles of results that were underwhelming. They were not disastrous. They just weren't the blowout that she had expected. So here's what I told her. And so here's what I'll tell you, because I guarantee some of you listening have had a very similar experience. What looked like strategic reassessment of what wasn't working was actually fear. Wearing different clothes. She had stopped evaluating her data. She wasn't looking at what was actually working and what she could learn and what she should do differently based on reality. She was looking for a reason to abandon the plan before she had to feel the full discomfort of staying with it. And there's a difference between those two things. And it's one of the most important distinctions a leader at your stage can learn to make. I'm talking about fundraising here. But it's any change, right? Any model that you admire, every infrastructure you wish you had, every board governance approach that actually works in the organizations you look up to. They were all refined into what is happening now. They were refined through iteration, not inspiration, not gut instinct. Nobody has built a resilient revenue engine on the first try. Nobody has launched a board cultivation strategy and had the board transform in 15 days. That's just not how it works. The things that work were worked on. They were run, they were evaluated, they were tweaked, they were run again. Tiny move by tiny move, they were redesigned with intentionality. That's how this works. And I've seen this pattern break people's hearts. So I want to name it directly here. When you build something and it doesn't work immediately and you start telling yourself a story about what that might mean about the organization, about its health, about you, about your leadership, whether you have what it takes, right, whether you made the right call, whether you missed your window, that voice gets loud. Those gremlins are vicious. And the Problem isn't that the gremlins exist. We're human. We have our gremlins. The problem is when we give those gremlins airtime without giving equal air time to the other voices, the voices that say, I'm probably one or two iterations away from the thing that actually works. Let me look at my data and say, oh, actually, 50% more people opened this email than ever in the past. That's data that means something in our messaging is landing better than it ever has. Okay, how do I take that messaging and now get them to click, oh, wait, look at the data. They are clicking on the link. So this tells me they are really liking this direction that we're going in. What's the next step? How do I activate them? Let me reach out and ask them. Right? Let me use my data to help me get where I want to go. The key here is you have to stay with a thing. You have to sit in the discomfort. Look at what's working, look at your data, refine it. Commit to 90 more days on the model that you've been doubting before you decide it's wrong. Change one thing, run it again, Change another thing, run it again. That's how you build a stability flywheel. That's how it builds momentum. It doesn't happen on the first turn or sometimes on the second. Sometimes it's the fifth. The organizations that you look at and think, that's incredible what they're doing over there, they stayed when it was hard, when it was unclear, they did the redesign work. They looked at the data. They were intentional circling back to this sort of myth in our sector that drives me crazy. That's not luck. It's not magic. It's not instinctive leadership. The CEO just sort of knew what to do and had the right team and had the right board. None of that's true. It's strategic, it's intentional, it's deliberate, it's tough, it's scary. And that's how you do this work. So here is my ask of you. Before we wrap up this episode, I want you to be honest with yourself about which of these three is most true for you. Right now, it might be all three. It's probably at least one. And I will say again, that's normal. The key is not to not have these things that you grapple with that are inherent in growth. The key is to recognize them and to name them. But for now, just pick the one that stings the most. That's just the most. Like, oh, yes, it's True, but I don't know what to do about it. That's where your work is hiding. If it's the first one, if you've been mistaking busy for building and you don't quite know how to get out of that in the weeds cycle, if you are maybe avoiding the hard redesign work because it's really uncomfortable sometimes, one thing you can do is look at your calendar this week, right, and ask one question. Where can I insert one hour of high leverage structural work, work that actually requires me to name the hard choices I might have to make, to name the difficult decisions or conversations, and to create, to begin to create the mental space to plan to make those choices or make those decisions or have those conversations. I'm not asking you to commit to, to the hard choices this week, but carve out one hour where you get really honest and clear about what they are. That's the redesign work, right? That's the core of truth number one. If it's the second one, right? If you look at your capacity building investments, and they have been a little scattered and in operator mode rather than concentrated and building on one another in architect mode, here's one thing you can do. Think about one area of your organization that you want to be stronger, your board, your team, how they work together, the culture, your own leadership. And ask yourself, what are a constellation of investments that I could make to close this gap, to address this change that would actually lead to measurable change in the design of the organization in the next 12 months? And you notice I say 12 months because part of truth number two, part of architect mode investment, is that they compound over time. So ask yourself, what are investments that I could make over the next 12 months to get my team, my board, my leadership, our culture, our revenue model, where I want it to go. Now, if it's the third truth, there's a strategy or a model that you've been second guessing and it's been less than 12 months. The thing here is just to pause and ask yourself, are you evaluating your data or are you looking for permission to stop? And if you don't know the answer to that question, bring in the big guns, right? Bring in somebody who will be honest with you and can look at what you're doing and say, actually, this is where your model's strong. This is what your data is saying. Here's how we can make decisions together with none of this, do you have to do it by yourself. This is actually, it's not a fourth truth, but I will name a through line that's been one of my things this episode. A through line in this episode or through line in all of this is none of these leaders did it by themselves. They all had a mastermind or a coach or a mentor or honestly, a combination of all three to get them out of their head. To reflect back. Here's what I'm seeing. You don't have to figure this out by yourself. The leaders who have built and are sustaining the resilient organizations, the ones with a real reserve Runway and an autonomous team that is holding top with them and real board leverage, they started exactly where you are and what they did was make the hard choices they had been avoiding. They invested with architectural intention instead of scattering and hedging their bets. And they stay with strategies that might not seem like they're working on first or second swing, but that are actually the first and second turn. What turned out to be a really powerful flywheel and none of it was comfortable and all of it was required. You can do all three of these things. The only question is where you start. If you are running a seven figure organization and any of this resonates with you, if you already know the problem or if you're like this resonates but I don't quite know what the problem is. The application for the next level nonprofit Mastermind is open. Go to the fit check. Brookrichybabbage.com fitcheck fill out the fit check. Tell me a little bit about your organization and let's set up a clarity call to talk through what you're seeing. We can diagnose what the problem is, where you need to start, and see if working with me and my team is a good way to help you begin to redesign with Intentionality. That's it for this week. I hope this was helpful. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks for listening. If this episode resonated, leave a review. I read them and they do matter and make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss a deep dive into building your resilient nonprofit. And finally, if you're ready to move from grit to good design, head to brooke richiebabbabbage.com strong to take the 90 second quiz and find out where to start.