Last week I finished a 30-day check-in with a nonprofit director I'm working with. I expected a report on what had fallen behind. What I got was the clearest description of a small business problem and its solution that I've heard all year, from the person living it.
Some context. His team had years of marketing knowledge in their heads, and it needed to be documented, organized, and turned into a plan for what comes next. Just over a month ago we completed Phase 1, and they have been working through their 30-day activation plan ever since.
Fire to fire
His team had known for a long time that their systems needed attention. They knew it “in the back of our heads for a long time,” he told me. The hard part was never understanding it. The hard part was getting to a place where they could put time toward it, because they were used to “going from fire to fire” and were busy with “other people's problems.” Nobody was there to hold them to it, and he said so: they didn't have “somebody to hold us accountable.
That pattern is not unique to nonprofits, or small to medium-sized businesses for that matter. It's what most owners I talk to describe, in different words. The urgent thing is loud, the foundational thing is quiet, and the quiet thing loses every week.
Reminiscing about the month we spent building, he smiled and called the work unglamorous, and then he said the part that matters most. It's “the work that needs to get done” so the building blocks can fall into place, and we are seeing that now.
What the business cards were telling us
In working through phases, there will always be questions that arise. Recently his team had come back from an event with a giant stack of business cards and not a clear home for them quite yet. Around the same time, they asked their community to vote for them in a local regional contest, and he reached out by going through who he could think of, “pulling out of my head” who to text. Ultimately, they placed second, which was exciting to learn. It's also a fair and common picture of a business that runs on memory: whoever came to mind got the message, and everyone else never heard about it.
As we talked through what comes next, he connected the dots on what we had built. Part of his contact system is already in place, and the planning for how it will be used is still ahead of us. When both are done, it becomes the communications hub for everything that builds trust. It replaces “a scatterbrain” with “a consistent, systemized list,” and that saves a lot of guessing.
The order matters
Another realization he came to as we walked through the plan is the order of things, and he said it back to me in his own words: the messaging shapes the content, the content shapes the events, and the events bring referrals and donors. Each step depends on the one before it. Skip one and the next gets harder to do well.
Their fundraiser is the clearest case. The program was good, the flyer was good, and the sign-ups still came in well under what they had hoped for. Nothing was wrong with the idea. The community simply hadn't had enough chances to get to really know them, and trust in their kind of work is slow to build. So the fundraiser stays on the table, and for now it is a not yet, not a no. That is a much easier thing to accept when you can see the steps that have to come first.
What it costs, and when
Every business pays for this order somewhere. You can pay up front, in slower weeks, a shorter list of launches, and documents nobody applauds. Or you can pay later, quietly at first, as repeat customers drift off and a team gets stretched thin, and then loudly, when something breaks and the fix costs far more than the discipline would have. Most small businesses I talk to are in that quiet middle stretch without realizing it yet.
What the 30-day action plan told us
Two places. First, his team is about halfway through the 30-day plan, and I had expected it to run 45 to 60 days for a team this size, which is why I built in room to adjust. Now I know where they get stuck, so the next list will be tailored to the hours they actually have.
Second, they don't know how often their donors want to hear from them. I said monthly is a respectful place to start for donors, but made it clear I didn’t want to guess, because being wrong means being the email that nags or the one that's forgotten. When I started my own newsletter I sent a short heads-up first, expecting some unsubscribes. Surprisingly, I got none, and a lot of very kind notes. The answer will come, and it's great that they are thinking about it now.
Four questions worth asking yourself
You don't need a consultant to start. You need honest answers to these questions.
- What do I believe, and what does my behavior show? If you'd say you know your best customers, could you reach every one of them today from a single list?
- What is in the way? Say it in plain words. Not “lack of alignment,” but something like “the list lives in three places and nobody owns it.”
- Am I willing to spend the time, energy, and money to move it? “Not yet” is an honest answer, and a useful one.
- How will I know it's working, and what would make me change course? Pick the number or the signal before you start, not after.
What is the unglamorous thing your business has known it needs for a long time, and what would it take to give it a little time and some focus?
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