Thriving in Transition: Principles of Building + Scaling Organizations - Brian Joseph

6:49AM Mar 6, 2023

Speakers:

Julie Confer

Becky Endicott

Jonathan McCoy

Brian Joseph

Keywords:

revenue

nonprofit

organization

people

funders

conversations

sector

nonprofit leaders

build

community

talk

year

peer groups

create

capacity building

brian

revenue model

financial sustainability

space

professional development

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Hey, I'm John. And I'm Becky. And this is the We Are For Good podcast,

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So let's get started. Thank you us having

you know, what I like John was that I really liked CEOs who are growth mindset. Brilliant, and so kind. I'm so glad we have that guest in the house today. Is that amazing? Or what? Well,

I thought you're gonna go you know, we have been wanting to talk about capacity building, we get this question a lot. And right before this, we were saying we've got a guy for that and the guy is in the house, to come bring us all the goods. And you're right, he has kind of like all the things all in one package. So it is a huge delight to have Brian Joseph in our house today. He's the co founder and CO CEO of Rev Jin group. They're a social enterprise dedicated to the empowerment of nonprofit leaders and the organizations they serve. And get this they do a lot of things in the ethos that We Are For Good does coming at it from the heart of a teacher in community. They have these revenue capacity building workshops that have facilitated peer groups and this membership that's in community. And what they do is they arm social sector leaders with the knowledge, resources and support to amplify their impact and fuel, the greater good. He has just had this incredible career, he has served in all these different leadership roles. And he has got the pedigree, you know that you would expect just the casual Executive MBA with honors, from SMU, he's just down the street from us in Dallas, a really long street, let's be clear from Oklahoma City. But he is going to thread a lot of his experiences and just his professional life into this conversation today to speak to us like how do we do this? How do we do the work in our own organizations and come alive as a culture in the process? So Brian Joseph get into this house, it is a delight to have you my friend.

Thank you both for having me. When you first started describe this person coming in. I was looking around. I'm like, we got another guest joining us. Here's your mirror,

you're here behind door number one. Brian, you know, I gave the briefest of intro about your incredible journey. I wonder if you take us a little bit into your story. Like what were some of the key hallmarks that led you into this work today?

Yeah, you know, it's a great question, John. I mean, I think it's like all of us, we get incredibly lucky at different stages of our career. And I don't think some people wake up and they're like, can I go to college, I'm going to do this. And mine was just a lot of random twists and turns that I won't bore you with. But the inflection point for me was finding business and then having a mentor who took an interest in me. And I met him at a stage of his career where he had built and scaled a lot of companies, his secret sauce was always around scaling national sales organizations, and he had done that the insurance, industry, telecom, etc. And for some reason, he took an interest in this kid and, you know, put me in charge of companies and taught me all this incredible things. And he always used to say to me, you know, Brian, I'm teaching you how to build the system and build the system is different than operating the system when you go inside of an organization and never forget that it's just always stuck with me. And we just had conversations around success and significance. So how I left the for profit world and got into philanthropy was just a lot of unfortunate circumstances. But you know, everything happens for a reason. So here we are,

yeah, thank you for that background, I cannot underscore enough how important it is to have mentors in our life that set us on that path. I love that you created space for him. And just having your sort of mindset and entrepreneurial mindset in this conversation, I think is going to be a real hallmark for the community. And we want to talk about these principles of building and scaling organizations. And you have this great quote, that you learn the fundamental principles of building and scaling the very companies that you are later put in charge to lead. And I want you to talk to us about this and kind of tone set this conversation with some of the principles of building and scaling organizations that you've discovered in your career.

It's great question, Becky. And I think there's so many things that go with that, right. I mean, people there's luck. There's industry, there's everything else, but I think one of the core philosophies that we've always I've always had with me that began my mentor put into me was, regardless of the organization, nothing happens until something is sold, right. And we use that term in the for profit space. I know sometimes in the nonprofit space. We're like, Oh, are we selling? Yes, I know. We have an urn component we are but it's same essence is creating a customer, right? Peter Drucker talks about that the purpose of the business is not to make a profit or to do this is to create a customer. And I think when we do that that's a fundamental principle of how do we then build an organization, our culture and our people? To keep that in mind? The old adage, no money, no mission, right? So for nonprofits, as we think about the work that we're doing, revenue isn't I use revenue agnostically contributive, government earned? Revenue is the force that is always the thing that we're struggling to have enough of the scarcity of it, and how do we do things and don't get people the human resources. But if we can actually focus on some fundamentals and start to really lean into that, can we generate the revenue that actually propels the organization in the impact forward? So by focusing on the revenue side of things, you know, first actually drives the impact side of things on the second, but it's just one of the core principles that has always stuck with me, again, doesn't matter what the focus of the organization is, revenue is a revenue first is the thing that drives everything else, right? We don't need any we don't need CEOs. We don't need accountants, we don't need anything until we actually have a customer.

I mean, what tone setting and way to go naming the company and a revenue center? Yeah, I mean, the branding mind over here really appreciates that. But I also think it's interesting use the word force, because I do think there's like an energy component of what revenue and all of its different sources can mean to our organizations. And so I wonder if you know, we're in startup hustle over here. And so while we have the brain of growing up in the nonprofit space over our careers, the last 1520 years, Becky and I, and Julio are now in the very much the startup mode and their same idea. It's like no money, no mission. So I wonder if you would kind of take some of these startup mentalities that, you know, are maybe on the for profit side? And how can we apply those in what nonprofits can take away from that, too?

You know, I think that one of the things is I just use this yesterday, we were having a conversation internally, we have an innovation lab that we're putting in place this year. And, you know, it's the fail fast, right? And fail. I have a friend of mine who calls bail is an acronym right, forward advances and learning. But he used I think it was Reed Hoffman from Netflix that made the comment, if you're not embarrassed by your first prototype, you're moving too slow, right?

I love that. It's a struggle for the designer, because I want things to look a certain way. But it's so true.

Yeah, yeah. Right, because you want it to be perfect. You want it to work, and this. And I think, fear too often drives us to not move fast enough to try things and do stuff. And I understand in our space, especially when we take donations, we don't want to, we want to be mindful, and we want to use those and be good stewards of those funds. But in startup mode, and as an entrepreneurs, we have to be able to have the flexibility and the freedom to fail. And, you know, it's not the stigma of carry with us, it just means we learned something, right? There's no crystal ball, there's no thing that we can look at, say, here's the perfect path, because what we think it is, we know is going to be dynamic, and it's going to take all kinds of hard turns. But I think having that drive towards just how do I test things and try things and keep the customers perspective in mind. Right. And the customer, again, can be a donor could be if you're serving kids in a school, it's how do I keep them and that schools and principals, just all the different constituents along the way in line? And how do I keep that as a focus. But the thing that I don't think we talked about with entrepreneurship, enough is how incredibly lonely and tough that it can be as well. And I think that that's something you know, we have movies, we have Silicon Valley, we glamorize entrepreneurship, and we're like, yes, it's gonna be awesome. And then we don't tell the story about the day and day out of just, you know, the grind and the beatdown that happens, and how do we actually continue to re energize and be resilient and continue to move forward? And I think those are the things that just need some more highlights. Because I think first for so often, especially in our nonprofit space. Our leaders are amazing. These entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs that create stuff, and when you hear their stories, it's just like, Okay, let's keep doing this. We're trying to make some change.

Thank you for just calling it out. Because I will say that we reflect all of that the bruising, that comes from the startup, the loneliness, but also the joy that comes from doing this work. And, you know, we're seeing just this evolution happening in the sector right now. And we just have this unique vantage point as we sit in these chairs and have these conversations where the sector is shifting now, more than ever, and the way that we're looking at how we work and the ways that we connect, and I want to talk to you about capacity building because this has been such a heavy topic and our community as the people who have they're still in their nonprofits. Several people have left several people have taken new jobs, and there's this absorption of other duties and those kinds of things and nonprofit professionals are looking at saying I love the work, I believe called like I'm called to this mission. But my gosh, I am just working on the margins. So talk to us about some of the root causes, that nonprofits are facing those revenue challenges that are making capacity building so difficult for us.

Yeah, great question. And you know, a couple of things I've talked about to this, because I think there's some things in our space. So I want to come back to that are important for us to call out. And I think that as leaders together, we all need to help drive some change. But so in capacity building, we focus on revenue generation, because again, if you look at it for the top five challenges, it's the thing that we constantly see, as far as a major hindrance for nonprofits do the great work. And I get it, a lot of times we'll hear nonprofits say, but I'm doing great work. And I'm doing, I'm serving a need, and I shouldn't have to do this. But the fact of the matter is we do, we need to generate revenue, we need to build those muscles internally. So when I think about capacity building, especially around the revenue generation piece, it's so critically important to provide that space and everything else. When we talked about root causes Rev. Gen, the thing that we have a framework that we use a house. So when I looked at the sector as a whole and did landscape analysis, when we first started this work was to try to train, right, because going in as practitioners one thing but then when you're trying to teach others to take these skill sets in this mindset that they can then go forward with and continue to iterate on. It's a different aspect. But when we looked at it, what we found was the roof of the house tends to be have a lot of focus around it. And it has the what we define as revenue skill sets. So it's my individual day to day frontline fundraisers, how do I cultivate my donors? How do I steward the relationship? How do I move them through the pipeline to get them to actually want to donate to our cause is where the rubber meets the road. It's critically important in this, and it's really, really needed in our space. And there's a lot of tools out there, webinars, consultants, everything, there's a lot, there's a lot of space out there. But you don't start building the house at the roof. The walls of the house when we first started Rev. Gen, we were a consulting firm, and it's where we got hired in. Candidly, that's where a lot of the consulting world does live about 20% of the solutions, maybe 30, which is we defined the walls, the houses revenue management, it's my management team that runs that, you know, engages the frontline fundraisers the day to day fundraisers, and it's things like what CRM system should I be using? How do I build a training program? How should I be interviewing for these things? How do I build my reporting for my team versus my board, all kinds of things from a management perspective that are really important, again, keeps the house moving keeps the day to day activities going in the right direction. But again, you don't start building the house there. In my opinion, what was fundamentally missing was that foundation, that revenue infrastructure is what we call it. And it's really five key elements. And it's not just the revenue team's responsibility to put these in place, this goes back to the principles, right, this is the principles where my mentor taught me he's like, this is about building this system. And the five elements that we try to get nonprofits to focus on is first identifying your revenue model. Right? Where does your money come from today? Where do you want it to come from the next one to three years? Tactical actionable? is things like recognizing who owns the relationships, right? are we actually trying to mitigate away from the founder who's very dynamic, etc. So the funders have other relationships with other people? Is it you? Do you separate operating capital from from one time capital? Meaning, you know, I have a funder who wants to see growth, but they're only going to be there for a period of time? How am I going to replace that with ongoing operating a lot of questions that we dig into on the revenue model? And we tried to get them to apply a an acronym that we call pies, preserver to do? Well, can you increase that before you expand? And then what can you stop doing? Because we have, we're limited by resources. So we focus on revenue model and trying to get the leadership team aligned. So when we teach this, we always try to ask, when you're making strategic decisions for the organization who sits around the table? Well, that's our Executive Director, that's our head a program that had a revenue operations to get the same people that we want to be talking about revenue, then this is not just in the development team, it will come back and have these, this is exactly the executive team, we have to have in place aligned. So then the development team back to the walls can go back and make sure the roof can get out there and do the thing that needs to be done. So we start with revenue model, we then go into the second element, which is revenue strategy. What are the people processes and systems I need in place to actually execute on the revenue model that I just got done, identify, and it builds, you constantly have to iterate? The third element is then when I look at my revenue strategy, what skill sets do I need on the team? Right? If I'm going to have a major gifts, or if I'm going to do an urn component, or if I'm going to do an event, or what have you, those all take different skill sets? And what skill sets do I need? Then how do I overlay my team to say, here's where we're strong? Here's where we're weak. Here's how we actually do that. From an organizational design perspective. The fourth element is very much a financial exercise we call resource allocation. And as to try to take the organization and say when 100 pennies come in the door, how do you allocate that to program, I get it, we're mission driven, right, we want to actually see the impact in the world. But we still have to allocate some of those pennies to operations. We need it, we need HR, we need all those fun things, and a revenue team. Because if we don't allocate enough financial resources, we won't have the human resources back to our design, to execute into revenue strategy, to see the revenue model shift. And then we really want to also break down and look at that resource allocation by revenue stream. What does it actually cost you to bring in $1. By revenue streams, it's not always equal, right? What it costs me to actually run an event versus what does it cost me for major gear? Applying all the costs full costs with people and other expenses that go with it, to really try to define what the gross margin is, and make choices around that. And then last but not least, is revenue culture. I always tell organizations, you have a revenue culture, whether you know it or not. Yes. Are you intentional about it? And how do we what I mean by that? is really how do we draw a line of sight between our revenue team and our program team? Because again, we focus so much on the program, we sometimes say, well, revenue is the icky stuff, y'all just go raise the money. But that's really hard. I can't just connect the two. So how do we create a culture that celebrates it that realizes that we're all on the same team? And again, no money, no mission? So how do we empower and put a seat at the table and not just arbitrarily surely say go do these things. But we have found his those five elements gives a leadership team a common framework, a common language, and they've given them the dedicated time to dig in, really sets the stage for a solid foundation, again, so that my day to day, revenue team can put in solid walls to execute on the roof. And that really starts to build a full framework. And for us, when I talk about root causes, I'll share an example of that, which is we get organizations that used to come to us and they say, Hey, Brian, help us because we're like everybody else, we're turning over our development director every 16 to 18 months, and we think we need to be better at interviewing, like, Okay, well, let's talk about that. So we look at the interviewing process, and they're really robust. They're doing personality analysis, they have professional recruiters are paying to help. I mean, it's robust. I'm like, you're actually really good at recruiting. What could be the issue, though? Are we actually recruiting the right people. And here's what I mean by that. You hired a major gifts officer who had a stellar resume, who really identified with your organization, but when they got in here, you ask them to get and go build systems, and start an individual giving campaign and to run the event, none of which were their skill sets. Or they got him here, and they're really passionate, and you put them on an island, because your revenue culture doesn't exist. And you never included them in the strategic decisions. You never include them in the programmatic stuff. And they're forcing it like, I'm not even part of the team. Oh, my gosh, I've seen this happen. Because it's live. Yeah. So that's, that's the whole point. So when we try to talk about these things, is how do we do that? And it's, it's fun. Like, I have a story of one group that came up to me when they'd done the resource allocation piece on the on the training, and their CEO came up to me and she said, she goes, Brian, you're not gonna believe this. She was we just went through our model. And we realized we spent 60% of our staff time raising 5% of our revenue. And it's the 5%. We all hate, if we just stopped doing that, like how much time we have. Right? And they'd never looked at it that way. So it's just these type of things, these principles that and the biggest thing for me is we live in dynamic environments, right back to what you said, when we started, right, the COVID, survivors, etc. But before then we had the 2008 financial meltdown. Yep. Right. Remember how tough Those years were for nonprofits. There's always dynamic situations. And even when the markets are good, and the economy is good, you can have it where you lose a major funder, or you have something that happens with your program that doesn't have the efficacy needs, there's always things. So for me, it's like, again, how do we teach the the team inside these nonprofits to have these muscles to actually to exercise these muscles, so they have the revenue know how to continue to flex them to navigate a dynamic market. And the example I was given that it's just like, you know, trying to live a healthy lifestyle. I don't eat a salad once it's okay, I had my spinach salad never have to do that. I don't go to the gym. I'm get cardio for life. Now. It's a constant vigilance, right? Like every day choices, I make revenue. And capacity building is no different.

I told you, we found that guy,

I just gotta say, I'm looking at your face, John, and I can see how geeked out you are right now?

Well, I just think I'm so happy because like, I feel like this conversations answering what the community has been asking for this type of direct guidance. And I think you know, to go back and replay is this is going to be a gift, you know, to just be able to sit with kind of this strategy, but I want to speak specifically to the organization that's listening. Because this is a great place. If you're starting. You're like, okay, I can build this foundation, right. But a lot of us find ourselves inside. I'm sitting in 100 year old house right now. So let's talk about our foundation right here. If you need to fix that, what does that look like? And what are some of the you know, conversations look like to say, and we need to go back to basics and talk about these core things. But everything's built on what does it look like for a team to start in? You know, entering into a conversation like that?

I think it does. I think they start and I think that's the thing is, there's no one thing, right? When it comes to capacity building in general, when it comes to revenue in general, there's no one thing it's back to the common common language common framework, and then again, dedicated time to be intentional about it. We have a cartoon that we use in some of our trainings, and it literally says, okay, and it's a bunch of people sitting around a conference table and the guy looks at his watch and said, Okay, there's 10 minutes left, let's do revenue strategy, right? It's like, because we always want to focus So I'm program, and I get it is the reason why we exist, whatever your mission is, if it's, you know, education of his literacy is poverty, if it's environment, if it's trafficking, there's a host of things that are needed. And when you talk to the leaders, but when it comes to revenue, it's, it is scary. It's hard. It's all those things. But it becomes less scary, less hard, less everything, the more intentional, you are about just leaning into it, and getting off the hamster wheel. And I know, that's easy to say. And we say that all the time. It's like, oh, just get off the hamster wheel. It's like, yeah, how do I do that? I'm trying to make payroll, I got less than 60 days of cash in my in my bank account. So how do I do that? And it's really trying to get the leadership team, you don't have to do well. Right? You can actually step back, how do we start to put a plan in place? How do we make some force decisions? How do we capture our assumptions and what we think is gonna happen, and then pressure test that, so we can slowly start to migrate away to make some changes. And I think that's the biggest thing is just start and then again, challenged each other in a productive way. An example I'll share with that is, when you talk about just starting, it's, I sat down with a nonprofit leader, this is this is actually right after the 2008 financial collapse. So it's about 2010. And they had their incubated inside of a foundation. And the Foundation came to them and said in two years, we're not going to find you at all, we're moving in different directions. So they have basically 90% of the revenue that's going to go away in 24 months, as you can imagine, they could identify with this. And I sat down with their executive director, and she had some ideas and she wanted to lean into could I create an earned revenue strategy? And they had they had served schools. So you're talking to elementary schools. And we talked about this, and I said, You're doing the right thing? Because you're trying to figure out how do I go forward? With both fundraising do I want to do an earn component, etc. But let's talk about this. And they had a model that we've we talked about it, what we started with was let's capture some assumptions. First of all, I said, I think an earn component with school districts were too early. So we're literally two years after 2008, which means property taxes are lower, which means schools are struggling, which means we're gonna have a really uphill battle to try to get any earned revenue, and we're gonna waste a lot of energy and effort. How do we how do we get that ready to push pause, and maybe in two years, we start that we're laying the groundwork in between them. But what can we do between now and then, because again, we have this money that's going to literally go away in 24 months. And what we looked at and we looked at models we came up with is they had an experience that they could actually run very similar to Habitat for Humanity, that created a new revenue model, it was actually taking somebody else's playbook and saying, we can apply it. And they started to lean into that. And they started to charge for this experience. And today, they have they're, you know, fast forward a decade, they have scaled in multiple cities and regions throughout the country, a third of the revenue comes from that corporate engagement, where they charge for an experience, a third of the revenue now does come from schools that pay for the services. And the third is philanthropy. But it's the intentionality of just started, we had no idea if it would work, we started but we had really good assumption. And we can look at other models that we can emulate, because we want to try to create anything new. And we just started to move forward. But the whole thing was just start, right? Not sit there and bury our heads in the sand that to go back to the foundation to say, could you change your mind and just stay with us? Because that's, they've made their decision to now we have to confront the brutal facts that, quote Jim Collins, and move over

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I thank you for sharing that because my heart is back at They're like resting heartbeat now that this organization has a diversified revenue strategy, because if you have all your eggs 90% of your eggs in one basket, like that's a scary place to be in when you are specifically in a recession, or looking at what we're seeing in the economy and in the world right now. So thanks for that great example. We just had this conversation around retention and sustainability this year. And I think there's a lot of focus on that you wrote a really brilliant blog blog post that was about nonprofit humans and financial sustainability, like, how can we work toward sustainability within ourselves, once we have that foundation built, we were all busy human beings. And I want you to talk about sort of that blog. And what was the impetus behind that because I definitely think the nonprofit human at the end of this once to have that piece a little bit and not feel like they're working on the margins. But we want to work toward that financial sustainability. So we can dream. So we can take risks so we can fail forward faster in the way that you're talking about love to get your thoughts on. This

is a great question, Becky. And I think this goes back to the earlier comments. We're talking about our sector as a whole. So our mission when we started was financial sustainability. I think this is solvable in our, in my lifetime anyway, to drive out these skill sets to teach nonprofit leaders how to do this again, if I can learn it, anybody can learn it, because I couldn't spell revenue when I started business. But it's what I've realized is we've gotten into the revenue side of things in the financial sustainability in the trainings that we put together as we will never have revenue from sustainability if we don't address the financial or the human sustainability. And what do I mean by that? So first of all, pre COVID 1618 months is the average lifespan of a job development director inside of a nonprofit, across the country, on average, doesn't matter what the issue focus is, etc. 16 To 18 months, I want us to wrap our heads around it. Imagine if I walked into Nike and said every 1618 months, your head of sales is gonna be gone. It's just It's crazy. And it's like, why, but what's the underpinning of that's causing that? And we've seen the studies we saw underdeveloped that came out in 2014. I think it was that the Haas Jr. Fund did love the study talked all about fundraisers that were leaving, etc. Five years later, Chronicle of Philanthropy does the same similar study, exact same results, 51% of fundraisers are going to leave their post 30 some percent of those are going to actually leave the sector altogether. We're hemorrhaging talent. And it's costing us 10s of billions of dollars a year. And then when you think about the development, Director turnover, what does that also lead to isolation and burnout, isolation and burnout, not only of our heads of development, we often put on an island back to the culture piece. But think of our executive directors, our executive directors I hire, I hired John, he's my development head, and he's gonna come in, he's gonna rock it, he's in here. 18 months later, he's like, I'm out. Like, for whatever reason, he's gone. And I'm like, Ah, right. That's not like I got a boat full of money, guys still gotta make payroll stuff back on my shoulders. And then the cycle repeats. And by the third time, I'm just so beaten down. I'm just burnt out, I can't talk about it. Because I'm, you know, kind of isolated as the executive director. And I got to put a good face on for my staff, my, my board members, for my funders and for my constituents. But I'm just burned out. So those two pieces of human sustainability, we can look at cross sector studies from Harvard, etc, about the effects of burnout and isolation on not only individuals, but also on the organization's effectiveness. So back to impact. And candidly, we need to talk about the individuals to and what we do for our nonprofit leaders. Like, I just read a book that talked about how isolation is worse than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Oh, my God, the health effects that it has on our on our leaders is massive. So when I looked at that, I said, we can't have financial sustainability of an organization to build those principles and do things if we don't address this other, these other big components. I think some of the root causes that land underneath that is also just in our sector, how we view professional development, how we actually invest in our people. I think we're starting to see tenants of this rise up. I mean, pick up any recent articles, you're seeing this stuff about unionization, why do workers unionize? Because they often feel like they're neglected? When we look at our nonprofit leaders? We put them in a this choice of, do I do I serve my constituents? Do I spend this money to literally feed a child to teach a child to read to help a trafficking victim? Or do I invest in me and my team? That's, that's an impossible no one's impossible

with a hardwired human

who will sacrifice themselves and their time and every part of their mental health for it? Yes,

literally. And how do we change that narrative? And how do we get the funding community and also offer up professional development dollars? Because I look at our for profit counterparts. And I asked a major corporation that I'm like, How much do you all spend? I had their executive team and I was talking to him, and I said, How much do you all spend on yourselves for your professional development year? I said include when you go to a conference money, you pay for that, and it's in there like, minimum, you know, $10,000 Each, like the minimum like and that's we probably spend more than that. I'm like now I want you to think of the nonprofits that you serve on the boards of what do you think their professional development budget is? And one of the letters said, she goes, Well, we just had this conversation was like 250 bucks a year. I'm like, we see

a priority is unbelievable. It is truly unbelievable.

Organizations are still made up of people, the impact is still made up of people. Right. I mean, there's the other study, I like to quote on the burnout is predictive index did last weekend at 22. And my numbers aren't exact here, but it's ballpark is, if a manager leaders not burnt out only 22%, I think it is of the staff feels burnt out. And again, you can look at the downstream ramifications of effectiveness and productivity. But if a manager leader is burnt out, over 70% of the staff feels the same way.

I believe it.

I believe they do.

I'm so glad we're talking about this. I mean, we burnout, the World Health Organization added burnout to its list of occupational phenomenon in 2019. I mean, this predates even COVID This is the same year that Anthony clots was writing about this, this concept that would be coined the great resignation. And so I think we're sitting in that we are certainly feeling that within our community, I meet with someone in our community at least once every other week, who is burned out who is experienced incredible compassion, fatigue, who's talking about leaving the sector, and they just want help. They want support, they want to feel seen. And I just feel like, Brian, thank you for making the case for support for this. Because I do think there has to be a business case made for this to have, you know, to get funders on that side to get our board members over to understanding and I think conversations like this are helping move the needle immensely. And thank you for coming in. Yeah. Well, as part

of again, how do we change that narrative? Right? How do we change the narrative where we can quantify the ROI, because that's what we're trying to actually we're, we've commissioned a help on measurement evaluation with Project evidence, and we're trying to lean into can we actually quantify for these type of trainings, peer groups, etc, that the return on investment, so again, it just makes good business case. And then also talking to funders about if they have a separate pool of funds. So if you're gonna give $100,000 or $500,000, or million dollars to a grantee, you also have a pool of funds that you hold separate and distinct to pay professional development providers directly. So it doesn't count against until we can kill this whole 20% Or not sometimes talk about 25% thing that if you spend anything more than that, which is crazy. And because at any stage in the organization, sometimes you should spend less sometimes you spend more, but it's just how do you actually build a strong organization, we should be talking about outcomes, and not about some arbitrary percentage of the of the budget? Well, I'm

gonna give space because we're talking about professional development is a huge passion of ours here, and especially done in community like and I think that's part of what getting to have access to these resources, put you in the room put you at the table with peers that you can have dialogue with. So I went I know y'all sent her this, I just want to give a second for you just to talk about why is that so important that you all have centered peer groups and the way that you do this work? And how does that change kind of the way we grow?

So for me, it's again, looking at examples of what's already working. And when we look at peer groups in the for profit space, our counterparts have it figured out. I mean, you have this stages have been around for over 60 years for business owners, right? You have tiger 21, which is where people have a liquid net worth of over $10 million, and they spend a day a month we have chief, which is now for women executives, going up this growing like mad. So when we looked at it, we said okay, there's something to this. And can we create that space? Because we have a power dynamic in our sector? Right? So when I went out and asked nonprofit leaders, because they're the ones that asked for this in our training, like Brian, we've never had this honest conversations around revenue, how do we keep having, like, you know, each other get together. And it took a nonprofit leader by the name of Bob, who said, Stop being like everybody else. And it took me aback, and I said, What do you mean, Bob? He goes, free is not always better. And I'm already overworked and under resourced. So yes, I can get together with my peers, we can try to grab a beer, we can try to grab coffee, it's going to happen two or three times. And that's going to go on forever. We may connect again at the conference, but it's not consistent. I actually need consistency, Brian. And I actually need that also Rec and have a candid conversation around a table with my peers, as professionally facilitated, that I can actually be honest about without a funder sitting there as well. Yeah. So then we started asking questions. And how often do our nonprofit leaders get together tends to be maybe quarterly, sometimes annually, and who coordinates that tends to be funders? Well, if I'm an executive director, and I'm burnt out, and my funder is sitting at the table, who's going to have me up for a grant renewal and a year or two years or six months? I'm not going to be talking about I'm really thinking about leaving the space

No way. The Impossible happens, Becky clams up, you know, that hardly ever happens, but I get it, right.

So there's a distinct power dynamic that we know exists. So we've created them to be confidential to do that. The need for communities out John, back to your original question, what we're trying to do there are sectors, one of the only spaces that doesn't have what I call real time unfiltered data, right? So if you look at retail, they provide data metrics all times, if you look at restaurants, they provide it competitors, etc, manufacturing, the list goes on and on, until we get to the nonprofit space. Right? Somebody every five years will commissioned a study back to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, back to the Haas Jr. Fund, and we get some data. Otherwise, it's very much grantee perception reports, etc. And I'm all for that. I'm glad that funders do that. But that doesn't actually give us access to real time data that can we can say, put a finger on the pulse on what's going on what's going on in the DFW region versus San Francisco versus Seattle versus New York versus Atlanta, what's going on in my early education, nonprofits, what's going on with my bipoc, lead, nonprofits, etc, that you can filter. And the only way to do that my opinion is to come at this from a different lens, people have tried to build this data set from a macro perspective, we're trying to do it from the other perspective, if we can build our peer groups, so my group of 12 that provide real value in and I start to do this in multiple regions across the country, how long until we have you know, 1020 505,000 members who are meeting consistently, we're an independent third party. Right? We are neutral, we are Switzerland, we are not a funder. You have safety when you actually give honest, candid feedback that we can elevate the voice. And we can start to talk about some of these things consistently. Right? Is that a quarterly, here's a perception report of what's going on. It takes it takes a larger community, right, it's hard to do with just a couple 100. So it actually takes a statistically significant number, but I believe we can get there. And I think that starts to drive change, that starts to allow us to elevate the voices of our nonprofits. So it's not just one voice yelling into the wind, it's actually lifting all of the voices in a very candid conversation, to try to drive change across the sector.

Brian, Joseph, I am handing you this rose, because I am literally my Valentine's Rose is almost dead. I am handing you a rose to tell you, can you please find 100 people, no 10,000 people just like you who think in that way, who believe in that way who are setting up structures in that way, because that is the way that the sector begins to shift. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that this is and Bob, God bless Bob, for talking about what he needs, because he voiced the needs of, you know, almost 2 million nonprofits here in the US alone. And so I thank you for the challenge of thinking differently of operating differently of thinking about how to take care of human beings. And not just those that were serving in the mission, but the people who are on the front line. So thank you for this. I absolutely love your company. I love your ethos. I just think you are one of the great Oracle's of the nonprofit sector right now. And I'm wondering, we just believe in the power of story so deeply on this podcast, that it connects us and binds us. Is there a story of philanthropy that you've experienced that has really stayed with you and change you?

Such a good question. First of all, you all are part of that story, right? Like, I mean, come on everything that you do, and everything every day. So this is the community that we're trying to read. I can give you 1000 stories, because every time I get to talk to any nonprofit leader, I just am energized. And as the thing that you all know this, you talk to them all the time, right? When you meet them and you hear their personal stories. It's so invigorating, but there's probably one thing that stuck with me and it was actually in college. So I was in a speech class, and I had to do a two minute extemporaneous speech and like every good, you know, sophomore in college at the time, I didn't prepare. I, hey, it's an extemporaneous speech. I used to do extemporaneous debate in high schools, I could do that. And I got up. And I did my two minute speech on random acts of kindness, and the importance of random acts of kindness. And I remember, it was a smaller class. And I used to sit next to a non traditional student, a gentleman who's in his early 40s, trying to finish up his degree, just got to know him a little bit, right. And I don't recall his name. But after that speech, I never saw him again. I was like, what happened, you know, when I'm just at the other. And then about a year later, I was in a Barnes and Noble bookshop. And I went around the corner. And there he was, I was like, Hey, how you doing? He goes, Oh, my goodness. Because Brian, he goes, You changed my life. I said, Whoa, I'm like, 19 years old, and I did I didn't change your life. It's like, no, he goes, when you talked about random acts of kindness and that speech that you did, because I reflected on that, and it just told me I was on the wrong path. And I changed my career trajectory. It gave me clarity and it was your speech was random acts of kindness towards me. And it stuck with me not in the aspect of that slant to be it's stuck with me the aspect of we all never know what difference that we're actually going to have on somebody else. And in our space, especially. Right it's the drop in the pebble and I have a friend of mine who is logo for his foundation is that the room holes that go out. And I think that's the biggest thing from a story for philanthropy. We don't know the impact that we're gonna have with our missions. And who we serve, the people that we have conversations with, it could be a funder. But by having those stories and just sharing journeys and sharing perspectives, it's how we all have conversations. And as humans, it's like you said, Thank you, the story started to make a difference. And that one's always stuck with me. It's just how do we do those random acts of kindness as well, and we never know where they land.

Holy heck. And it's like, I think, especially as you show up generously in life, and I think that that's the first time you know, we've met you, I don't know, at least a year ago, the first time we just chatted on the phone. And we just shared that ethos of just feeling seen and feeling supported and feeling like we have a cheerleader in somebody that we were just meeting. And I think that that ripple comes when you show up like that. So love that you're still creating those moments, at least for us over here feeling a ripple of kindness. So, you know, we round that all of our conversations with a one good thing you've given me, one to three pages of taking notes. My book is is short, but I've literally had three pages of this today. But if you can sum it give us one thing to just kind of ponder maybe this piece of advice or a hack. What's your one? Good thing, Brian?

John, I don't know if I have any one good thing.

Take some random act of kindness speech.

You know, I think, for me, that's just for our listeners. And for you all, I mean, just keep doing what you're doing. Right? It's hard. There's low days, there's high days, but just the perseverance and resilience that you see every day, you're doing great work. You know, back to the random acts of kindness, you don't know what the impact is gonna be. Keep doing it, find your community, be vulnerable, talk about the things that we're we oftentimes don't talk about, that's been hard for me as well. But that's the that's the biggest thing. Advice is just, you're not alone. Trust me. Everybody out there struggling with this, you are not a lone. And together, we will figure it out.

And I will say not only are you not alone, but you're in a community of people who are rooting for you. Like we are actively wanting you to succeed. We want to hear what's holding you back. We want to hear what's challenging you because we want to go find a solution or a framework or a tool that helps that thing. So thank you for just that call to link arms. I think that really resonates with us one of our trends this year is lock arms for impact because we can run faster together. You know low ego high impact and that's what we're trying to do so thank you Brian so much for just the wisdom you've brought tell people how they can connect with you how they can find red Jen, give us all the links.

Perfect so you can reach me, B Joseph B J S EPA tat red Jin R EB JEN group.com or rev gen.com or ejn.com. LinkedIn, you can look me up but definitely and thank you both like are you kidding me? What y'all do is phenomenal. I love it. I'm glad we're finally gonna make this work and honored that y'all chose to have me on.

We need to hang again. Next time in person. Drive down your way. Your treasure of a human appreciate you. Likewise.

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