My guest today is Sarah, Olivieri. Sarah is the founder and the heart behind the company Pivot Ground. She's a nonprofit business strategist, an author, and a former executive director. I think she's going to bring just a huge wealth of information to you on how to pivot during this season. Tell us a little bit more about you and the work that you do. Well, I come from a nonprofit background and I've worn so many hats from secretly fixing the toilet after everybody left so nobody knew and that didn't become my job officially, to Program Director, conference coordinator, graphic designer, teacher, you name it, I probably did it at some point. I've been executive director and founder. I was once the first executive director of a foundation. And then I actually shifted over into marketing and I built a marketing agency for nonprofits. That led me right back into the heart of what makes nonprofits tick - how they're organized and how they bring their people together so they can really make the biggest impact possible. Tell us about your “impact method” and how affected the lives of the nonprofit leaders you work with. The impact method is really based on three things that I think every nonprofit needs, and every for-profit to be successful, which is a process of improvement. That's how we deal and adapt to change in an ongoing way. And also, how we root out the issues that are getting in our way in a proactive manner. So many nonprofits are stuck in reactive mode and they're running to put out fires all the time. When you dig out your own issues proactively and address them, you don't have to be in that firefighting mode all the time. Then, your issues become opportunities instead of challenges. The second thing is an actionable strategy. Strategic planning is one teeny piece of making your organization run properly. It's actually making that plan actionable, where a lot of work comes in. And the third thing is, I call it your modus operandi. It's how your organization is structured, what glues everybody together. What is the core belief that your organization holds? What are your values or guiding principles? How is your team organized? What are your systems and processes? How is everybody collaborating and coordinating to work together, and there are some traditional ways of doing this that actually aren't that effective. And yet, they're very prevalent. There are other ways to organize your people that are much more enjoyable and much more effective. Based on your own personal experience, what do you think is working in the organizations that you see? The ones who are doing it really well who are following the things that they should be doing, and letting go of the things that aren't really making a difference. This can be hard because sometimes the things that don't make a difference for our nonprofit are still really impactful. But the organizations who are doing it well, right now, in the middle of the pandemic, they're raising more money than ever before. They're hiring people not firing people, they are growing, they're expanding their impact their reach, and their base of supporters. So all of this is really possible right now. And they're also they're not overwhelmed. They're not burnt out, they're taking time to address the pandemic, one of the things we do in the impact method is every month, we assess how much time we are spending on each area of our organization on routine things. And we're monitoring our total capacity as human beings. What advice would you give to someone who's just getting started or someone who's trying to raise more funds, trying to get to that next stage of their organization? Well, staying focused is one thing that I'd really recommend. A lot of people ask me, well, Sarah, if I'm the only one, how do I get out of being overwhelmed? How do I stay focused, and the first step is to take things off your plate and throw them in the fireproof garbage can that I am now virtually handing you because their fires will burn themselves out. That is the best way to get some more time and focus back in your day is to just stop doing some things, eliminate them. And that works even if you don't have anybody to delegate to. After that, do get somebody to delegate to or at least get a machine as a stopgap to delegate to some get some automation tools in place. You can't do it alone. That's probably my second tip; you have to plan to get another person on board whose job it is to do the work as soon as possible. So, for most startups, this means probably you are the executive director, and you need to hire an assistant as soon as humanly possible. They don't have to be full time, but 10 hours a week, it'll be huge, what you can do you full time and an assistant 10 hours will be incredible. My third piece of advice is, think of your startup, just like a for-profit startup would be you're going to go through a planning phase and a funding phase, and then a planning/doing ...
