182. Mastering Nonprofit Leadership with Sarah Olivieri

💭 Ever wondered why nonprofits often hesitate to take risks or how they can achieve true sustainability?

In this episode of The Leadership Project, Sarah Olivieri, founder of PivotGround, delves into the complexities and unique aspects of running a nonprofit organization.

She outlines the essential principles of effective nonprofit management, emphasizing the necessity of business acumen in ensuring sustainability and impact.

Sarah shares her journey from studying international relations to founding Pivot Ground, revealing the inspirations behind her focus on nonprofits.

The discussion covers essential topics such as fundraising, leadership systems, measuring impact, and the historical context influencing today's nonprofit challenges. Sarah also provides actionable advice for potential donors and volunteers on how to engage meaningfully with nonprofits.

The conversation concludes with insights into the distinctive leadership skills required for nonprofit success and the specifics of Sarah's Thrive program aimed at helping nonprofits operate more efficiently.

🌐 Connect with Sarah:
• Website: https://www.pivotground.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pivotground/

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Chapters

• 0:02 Navigating Nonprofit Sustainability and Impact
• 12:36 Navigating Nonprofit Challenges and Risk Aversion
• 17:39 [Ad] C-Suite Strategies
• 18:27 (Cont.) Navigating Nonprofit Challenges and Risk Aversion
• 25:01 Maximizing Nonprofit Donor Impact
• 32:48 Examining Nonprofit Transparency and Ethics
• 38:38 Navigating Nonprofit Leadership Systems
• 53:26 Valuing Time and Nonprofit Success

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

What are the differences between leading in a not for profit compared to conventional businesses? There are a lot of misconceptions about the world of charitable organizations. In today's episode of The Leadership Project, we are joined by Sarah Olivieri, the amazing mind behind pivot ground. Sarah shares with us how not for profits need to be led and managed. They need leadership. They need operating systems, and they need business acumen to manage their finances. They use that money to fuel their mission, and they measure their success through return on impact rather than return on investment. Stay tuned to the end, as Sarah helps debunk some of the common myths about how charities work. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today by someone who makes a real impact in the world, and that's Sarah Olivieri. Sarah is the founder of pivot ground, an organization that helps nonprofits to make sustainable difference in the world by making sure that they manage their own finances and that they have that sustainability so that they continue to have the effect that they have on whatever not for profit impact that they're looking for. So I'm really interested today to unpack a lot of it, what it means to lead a not for profit organization, and what some of the lessons are, regardless of whether you are leading a for profit organization or a not for profit organization. There are definitely some differences, but there's also some commonality there, I'm sure as well. So without any further ado, Sarah, I would love it if you would introduce yourself, and I'd love to understand a bit about your background and what inspired you, not only to go into not for profit, but then to find this ground where you're helping other, not for profits, to make sure that they are sustainable and successful.

Sarah Olivieri: 2:12

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. And you know, as timing would have it, I was just called up by my alum college. I went to the University of Chicago, and I had a first year student asking me a very similar question. And I started out in college, I studied international relations, and I was very interested in globalization and its effects on marginalized populations, and how did I go from there to nonprofits? Well, I'm always interested in tackling issues and things that are really dynamic and complex. And I was back when I was in college, and I continued to be from there. And after traveling around the world, living around the world in several places, I went on to start working at nonprofits, partly just because I was offered a job. I was offered a job at organizing a conference, which I had never done, a multi day conference. So I said, Sure, how hard can that be? You know, I'm up for a challenge. And that then they that nonprofit who's organizing that conference. They worked with people high functioning on the autism spectrum, and I quickly learned that people with developmental disabilities and autism, there's this self advocacy movement, and it's a very similar dynamic to what was going on with globalization and marginalized cultures. Essentially, people with developmental disabilities are a marginalized culture in our society. So that was kind of how my interest led me to working at this nonprofit. But I discovered in that process that the way nonprofits exist is fascinating and also complex and dynamic, because nonprofits are businesses, just like for profits, but they have a lot of stuff going on, even at a very small nonprofit can need the kind of structures and systems that a very large corporation might have, because a small nonprofit is required to have a board from all nonprofits required to have a board of directors from day one so they could have no budget or just one service, and yet they're dealing with a board of directors, although we can go into nonprofit boards and for profit boards are have some fundamental differences in how people show up on the board, and I just found it fascinating. You know, nonprofits also have this minimum two prong business model, so they're always running the business of making the impact whatever the service they're providing, but they're also running a fundraising business, and within fundraising, there's many different types and ways to do it, and each one is like starting a new business. And there's lots and lots of people. I always like to say there are more people per dollar in a nonprofit, because we have volunteer staff members as well. As paid staff members. And then often we're serving people at nonprofits. So there's lots and lots of people, and then there's the whole donor based community as well as the client based community. And they can intersect, they can be the same people, they could be family members. So here we have a very, very complex situation, which I just always find fun in my free time. Besides being a parent, I like racing sailboats with my dad co captaining. So sailboat racing is already dynamic, and then we add that family element. So it's just where I thrive is in that space of taking complexity and instead of experiencing chaos, experiencing joy and simplicity in managing it, because I really feel like inside every complex dynamic, it's almost like the diamond in the rough, like there's something really often important going on there. And if we can gain some control over it, or some ability to kind of manipulate it, then we can really make an impact in the world.

Mick Spiers: 5:59

Really good, Sarah. What a great start to the show. I want to play back to you, I'm almost hearing three chapters in what you're saying. So one is these not for profits. They're very purpose driven, and they want to maximize their impact. So I got that part, then I got the input part, which is we need to make sure that there's fundraising, to make sure that there's fuel for the impact. And I'm hearing an underlying message there around business acumen, about running it like it is a business, to make sure that the doors remain open. So fuel in one side, fundraising. Fuel out the other side, impact and in between, the business acumen, to make sure that the operations are effective, efficient, and that the doors stay open, because if the doors don't stay open, there is no impact.

Sarah Olivieri: 6:47

Absolutely, I should add that in the nonprofit world, there's like FOMO of the for profit world. I think that people in the for profit space, especially in corporate know things that they don't, because they often don't come from that background, but the truth is, you need more advanced leadership skills and systems to run a nonprofit than you do typically to run a for profit business.

Mick Spiers: 7:12

Tell me more about that. So what, what's the added element?

Sarah Olivieri: 7:16

The complexity, the lack of money, right? So the ratio of money to problems to solve is less, or if, depending on how you run the ratio, but basically, a lot of for profits can solve their challenges with money. And if something is not financially, let's say I don't want to use the word viable, but if it's not, you know, ultimately bringing in revenue at a for profit, you're probably not going to do it for very long, but at a nonprofit, you might sustain activities that run at a loss financially because they have a positive return. ROI, we've got right return on investment, but we also, in a nonprofit, we have return on impact, right? So some things are very impactful, even though they bring in no money or just cost money. So we have that dynamic of not having money, and we also not having enough money, always as much as a for profit business. And then we just have all those things, like lots of people, lots of stakeholders, lots of influence. And I have to say, you know that the nonprofit space has a mindset problem as an industry, right? They have been told for generations not to take any risks, to accept being impoverished, although there are many nonprofits whose operating budgets are in the millions and 10s of millions, even hundreds of millions, and they're billion dollar nonprofits, but they have been told to kind of suffer and not spend big, not take risks, not push the limits of innovation, and that really holds them back. Because ultimately, if you think about it like I like to think most nonprofits are solving the world's most complex challenges, and how could you do that if you're not going to be extremely innovative.

Mick Spiers: 9:11

Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I want to unpack this return on impact piece. So yes, in a boardroom of a for profit organization, there's going to be lots of decisions about where investment money goes to go. Okay, well, looking at our weighted average cost of capital, and if we invest our dollars here, it's going to return in this way, and cash flow is going to be managed, etc, etc. But yeah, in a for profit organization, there may be absolutely zero financial return, but we're looking to measure that impact. How do we measure the impact?

Sarah Olivieri: 9:48

Yeah, it can be really hard. You know, I think of one organization, a client of mine, they serve people domestic violence, women. And it's not just women who are the victims of domestic violence. And you know, what is, how do we measure that? Is that the number of women who are served or people, I'll just say people, because it's all people. Is that the number of people who are the amount of people out there who are struggling with this, and then is that number reducing? So I like to call that the impact gap. So on the one hand, you could measure, you know, how many people are we helping, but on the other hand, the problem could be getting bigger faster than you're helping. So I like to encourage nonprofits to measure what I call the impact gap, so measure the total problem, if they could really solve the whole thing. So like, if you are doing domestic violence, let's say in Chicago, how many people get a rough estimate, how many people out there are in need of assistance in getting out of a domestic violence situation? And then we need to start tracking that number and make sure that number is going down, because the number of people you're serving could be going up, but the need could be going up even faster. So those things don't always correlate, although we certainly can measure both. Some organizations, let's say I think of a client who is serving people in the mental health space. How do we measure success when it comes to people's mental health? You know that ultimately we come down to often a question of, can we measure increased happiness over time or satisfaction with your life? That one's really, really hard to measure. So sometimes we have to step back and think about, well, what can we measure? Like we could measure how many people's mental health conditions are leading them to drug abuse or homelessness or housing insecurity or losing their employment, and then see if we can be reducing those numbers.

Mick Spiers: 11:49

It's really interesting. I'm just listening to you and thinking about all of the different dimensions of how I might go about measuring that. Words that are popping into my head, Sarah, are things like prevention better than cure. If you can't cure, let's look at harm minimisation. Then I'm starting to think about longevity of impact. So one of the things that popped into my head as you're talking about talking this through, was thinking about something like polio. Are you going to try to treat polio? Are you going to try to eradicate polio? So yeah, I'm hearing all kinds of things. There's a degree of impact, and then there's a longevity of impact, and then there's a number of people served impact. How does that sit with you in terms of those dimensions?

Sarah Olivieri: 12:30

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you mentioned that, you know, prevention versus treatment piece. I think a lot of my clients, as they start to scale and become successful, and once they have, you know, they're no longer worried about money or how to, like, get everything done. My clients tend to be executive directors, nonprofit CEOs, and they struggle with the whack a mole problem, how do we get it all done? Because there's so much to do. But once they start to get a grip on that, many of them are faced with exactly that question, like, hey, if we're really going to tackle this problem, maybe they were a service based organization and realized that to tackle this problem more effectively, they're going to have to become like an advocacy organization that gets laws changed. And, you know, imagine like, and I can think of a, I'll use a mental health example. Again, I had a client who served people with mental health issues. They provided housing, and they also provided drug rehabilitation. And in New York State, where they were located, the state passed a law so you can get their state funding for putting homeless people into housing, supporting that initial transition, but the law was changed so that it required you couldn't be if you went into rehab, so you have to be homeless for at least 10 days before the funding kicked in. But if you went into if you were homeless and went into drug rehab, being in rehab didn't count as homeless. So technically, the way the law was changed in order for someone coming out of this nonprofit's rehab program to qualify for housing after rehab and before housing, they would have to be homeless for at least 10 days. Now, logically, how is somebody fresh out of drug rehab supposed to survive being homeless for 10 days without having a relapse. I mean, that is just total nonsense. So what is that nonprofit to do? Are they to lot become a lobbying organization who helps change the law? Are they to just suffer through having a lot of their rehab services kind of just become very ineffective, because a lot of their people going into rehab are coming out of being homeless because it's free rehab. Or are they gonna turn a blind eye to the law and somehow just put people in housing anyway, and now be in this very tenuous legal situation, and so they're faced with which. Way do we go? And it is very different type of business to run a rehab clinic as it is to be, you know, a governmental, lobbying, advocacy organization, right? Those totally different teams, different skill sets, and oftentimes, you know, starting both at the same time, that's just too much business growth too quickly, and can kind of dilute what you're trying to do.

Mick Spiers: 15:24

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and I'm going to say this up front, because this is a area of the world that I don't know a lot about, and I'm going to make a lot of assumptions. Just give me a little bit of license, that the assumptions come from a place of curiosity, right? And I like to test my biases, etc. When I was hearing you talk about things like that, legal systems that constrain the ability to have the impact, I have a stereotype in my head of people working in not for profits, that their values are very driven by injustice, inequality, unfair would be a word that they would use a lot. I would hazard a guess that they would potentially in faced with a similar situation you're talking about. Rather than fight against the system, they'd work around the system, or something like that. So I can see that happening, and now we're in dangerous ground, because if they, let's say, Get caught trying to skirt the rules or whatever they're going to do, brand reputation to the not for profit.

Sarah Olivieri: 16:27

Yeah, I think you know the intentions. I like to say, nonprofit people are very heart driven, right? They're there. They have been called to tackle tough problems, often at great personal expense and salary reduction, not but they all take different approaches. Some of them feel like we got to skirt it because this is an emergency, and some nonprofits are dealing with life and death emergencies. I mean, what do you do? Do you let Do you obey the law and let the person die? Or do you bend the rules? But others are inclined to change the system. They're very inclined to become advocacy organizations, and some are inclined to provide the service, even though they might get beaten down by the obstacles along the way. They're just going to keep providing the service when and where they can. So I think people take all different routes. You know, just like you know, you know lots about leaders. Different leaders have tastes and approaches for different types of solutions and paths forward. So all paths forward, I think, exist in the nonprofit space, but there are many dilemmas to deal with as you go forward like that.

Mick Spiers: 18:18

Yeah, and I can see that temporal aspect of that, where changing the system might take time but have a bigger impact. But if you've got that person sitting in front of you with a mental health issue, they're desperate, you're going to think it's an emergency, and you're probably going to take some immediate action, yeah, really interesting. Now tell me more about this risk aversion around complex problems, because you're right. The more complex problem, the more chance that we need radical thinking to be able to go We've tried everything else. It's time to try something else, right? So try something new. How do we get past Well, where does this risk aversion come from? And how do we encourage not for profits, to push and go beyond that comfort zone and try something?

Sarah Olivieri: 19:06

Well, where does the risk aversion come from? It actually, it's quite a long history. I'm based in the US here, and in the US it goes. And I think this is probably the global answer, but I haven't researched as well for other countries, way back when the US was being colonized. Remember, we had the church, we had England and Church of England, and we had monarchy. And then there was the rise of the merchant class. You might remember that from your history textbooks, maybe in high school or something. And so with that rise of the merchant class, many of those merchants were Protestants. And what was happening was the Protestants wanted the wealthy merchant Protestants. They wanted power and influence. But back then, you got power from bloodline, from your birthright, not necessarily from money. So there was this big movement for the wealthy Protestant merchants to be using their money to try to gain influence. So what does this have to do with nonprofits today? So those wealthy merchant Protestants were coming over to what would become the United States in droves, and they knew business. That was, that's how they became wealthy merchants. They set up their first towns as corporations, and back in 1636, I think it was, they founded Harvard University. I'm sure most people have heard of that place. In order to grow their next generation of leaders. So. Harvard is, in a many ways, one of the very first nonprofit organizations in the US. And so what is happening here is they're doing a service to the community, right? They're educating new leaders, and they are building a board, board of wealthy Protestant merchants. They want to be on the board. They want to fund Harvard because they want to use their money to influence how these leaders are brought up, and so that is kind of this seed for our modern where we've come from is that creating nonprofits, creating organizations, came from this really practical approach of using money to gain influence by setting up institutions and organizations, but also because there was a Protestant element here, this culture, if you will, of the Protestants to give and be charitable as a means of demonstrating that they were predestined to go to heaven. I know this is like, right? We were not expecting to go here, but so we have nonprofits starting out as for wealthy people that gained influence and power, and also as a way, kind of, I want to, I'll just simplify it and say, showing off, right? It wasn't really started around the concept of, let's get to the root of the problem and solve it once and for all. And so I think really, since maybe the 70s, the industry and certainly in the 90s, has been trying to shift, but we have a lot of holdovers from the 16 and 1700s still in the nonprofit space. And one of the primary ones is how nonprofit boards are often set up. And another one is this ethos that we're not going to spend a lot of money. It's a charity supposed to like, be like a penance, or be painful or be hard. It's not about, you know, generating. It's about spending, you know that comes from the Protestant. Let's spend our excess and put it into charitable hands, and it really for the benefit of the donor, not so much the benefit of the nonprofit.

Mick Spiers: 22:50

That's really fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that history. I knew none of that. It was absolutely amazing. It does stem a very curious question for me about philanthropy and whether it is altruistic, or whether it's really making the person that gave the donation or did the service, because it's not always money, of course, it can be in kind or in labor or all kinds of ways. Is it altruistic for most people, or to be honest, is that I feel good because I served at the soup kitchen today.

Sarah Olivieri: 23:23

Yeah, I think there's two levels. I think the one that really helps nonprofits is that group of donors, philanthropists, who they do want to feel good, they are getting something, and they get to say, I helped make that happen. And the only difference between them and the staff at the organization, because nonprofit staff members are very motivated by their part of making that happen, right? And donors get to make that happen through their dollars instead of their hands. And I think that's a great thing, right? It feels great. And what a good service nonprofits do to philanthropists, because you might go after buying a new pair of shoes, you know, or a shopping spree, and that makes you feel good, but usually not as long as the feel good that comes from supporting a nonprofit. There are still plenty of people, though, who donate kind of from this older mindset, or older tradition of they're trying to gain power and influence. They want to be able to brag and say, Oh, I'm on the board of this charity, or I support this organization, not because they can say, or love being able to say, help make that happen, but because they're kind of looking to gain their status through that. And I always encourage my clients to avoid those donors, because those donors mission is their personal status, whereas a donor who says, I want to help make that happen, that donor's mission is the same mission as the charity. And the more we have everybody in alignment with the same mission, the more sustainable it's going to be. Those donors who have same mission is the charity. They're going to stick around longer, and they're ultimately going to give more, and they're going to be there in good times, and they're going to be there in bad times.

Mick Spiers: 25:08

Yeah, I love that. It's very in line with what I was thinking as you were talking. I was thinking two things. The first thought that jumped into my head being very open with year. The first thought that jumped into my head was, it doesn't matter if their motives were ulterior, and I don't mean in a negative way. I just mean they had a different motive. It doesn't matter as long as the impact happens. But if they're not doing it for the right reason, the impact might not be as big or as sustainable.

Sarah Olivieri: 25:37

That's right, and we can use a term, which I love to bring to my nonprofit, you know, lifetime value. Right in the for profit world to talk about, what's the lifetime value of a customer, or we absolutely have to talk about the lifetime value of a donor, and donors who are mission aligned tend to have much greater lifetime values. Same principle applies to, you know, in the for profit space, where we have subscription based services, right, those tend to be smaller amounts, like per month or per week, but they tend to increase lifetime value. Same in the nonprofit space when it comes to donors, right? If you get a donor who donates monthly as opposed to yearly, their total lifetime value is going to be significantly more than that person who's asked to donate yearly. So these principles apply, and they apply to the impact piece as well. You just have to translate them, right? Somebody, the lifetime impact that you're providing for somebody that's something as well that we can attempt to measure, although sometimes, you know, dollars are easy to measure, measuring happiness, measuring health, measuring, you know, someone's satisfaction with their life is much harder to measure, but we can still try.

Mick Spiers: 26:54

Yeah, brilliant. Okay, thank you. Now that leads me, I think a good bridge towards something I had on my mind as well about and funnily enough, the bridge is the right word I'm looking for here is, let's now assume that we've got either a wealthy donor or a corporation who wants to do the right thing for the right reason, not for the greenwashing reason, or Any other reason, they genuinely want to make an impact, but they don't necessarily know how. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we may have a lot of very driven people that have solutions and know how to have an impact, but don't necessarily have either the resources or the business acumen to use that term again, to make it happen. So at one end, people with resources and business acumen that want to make a difference, but don't know where to start. At the other end, people that know how to start, and I just want to change the world, but I don't have the resources or the business acumen. How do we smash that together?

Sarah Olivieri: 27:58

Yeah, well, I want to start by kind of busting some myths that are out there that I think prevent the truly deserving nonprofits from maybe getting from or for the for that match that we're talking about to happen between the donor, philanthropist and the charities. So one of those unfortunate things that have been out there is that, you know, if you've ever heard an ad like every dollar goes to our programming, that just does the nonprofit sector such a disservice. So imagine if I buy your product or service from your business, but I say you're not allowed to spend any of the money I just paid you on marketing or management, your company is going to fall apart pretty quickly, and your service is going to disappear if you're not allowed to spend any money, or if I say maximum, you know, 5% of my money can go to management and marketing. It's not sustainable because management, leadership and marketing activities. And for nonprofits, fundraising activities are essentially important, and if you don't fund those, you lose out. So I want to listeners out there from the for profit space. Don't think about how much money is going to the program specifically versus the old term is overhead, but a much better term is like infrastructure or operations, marketing and fundraising. I always say, if I don't believe in restricting donations, which is a thing, some people give their money and they say exactly how it can be spent and how it can't be spent, I think that's terrible practice, so don't restrict your donation. But I always say, if I were to be forced to restrict a donation, I would say my donation can only go to the fundraising department, which is often called development in the nonprofit space, because fundraising department can turn my dollar into $4 whereas if I give to the program specifically, my dollar only makes $1 of impact, whereas it could make $3 of impact, essentially in the fundraising department, and $1 will go into running the fundraising. So would you rather have your dollar make $3 of impact or $1 of impact? So that's where you know, taking your business acumen and applying it to nonprofits, they aren't just like businesses, they are businesses, and they need marketing, management, leadership, professional development in order to have incredible services, in order for their services to be scalable and make that bigger impact, they're not going to do it if they're not invested. And research and development and bringing in that money and marketing and all those things. So be aware of that, and don't fall for that concept that the more money goes to the program, the better it is. In fact, I'd say the more percentage of money going to the program, the greater chance that nonprofit is going to go under or not make much of an impact. Or those nonprofits who advertise that usually they have some really big donors and really big corporate sponsors who are funding that back end. And so it's not really that they're able to put so much percentage of money. It's just that someone else is paying for all the back end stuff that makes it run.

Mick Spiers: 31:20

Yeah, if someone else is covering the operating costs and the marketing costs, etc, then it makes sense. But I think your your message is really powerful, Sarah. I'm going to challenge you a little bit and say where I think some of that came from. There have been some unethical charities in our history, and some of those are well publicized, without naming names, and where it turns out that only five cents on the dollar was actually going anywhere near having an impact, or maybe even sometimes less than that. So there were some quite unscrupulous charitable organizations that probably led us to ask those questions, how do I know that my dollar is making an impact, but fully agree with you? If, if 100% of donations are going to impact, yeah, the organization's going to go out of business. If an organization wasn't paying their their overheads, even if it's the electricity bill to keep the building open, they're going to shut their doors. So I like the balance that you're bringing. But can I bring back to the question around we did have a history where there were some pretty unethical charities out there?

Sarah Olivieri: 32:31

Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up. So there are, there are a few cases, right? And, of course, the negative stories get a lot of attention. So two points to this. One is the nonprofit space is a highly financially regulated industry, so those cases, you know, compared to the for profit space, are like teeny, tiny any not, I'm not sure what the latest number is. It used to be any nonprofit who's operating or revenue exceeded $600,000 had to have a full external audit every year. I think that number might be a little different now in the US, but like, you know, how many for profit businesses, you know, we're talking under a million have to get a full external audit every year. And the disclosures here in the US on the tax forms are, you know, pretty thorough. The IRS here watches very closely to make sure that there isn't not just fraud, right? Because usually, wherever there's potentially fraud, there's tax evasion going on. So the IRS cares and is watching really closely. It's only teeny, tiny organizations who can fill out a simplified form, you know, with budgets like under 100,000 who aren't maybe watched quite as closely, but they're still filing, you know, tax returns with details. You know, nonprofits have to disclose in their returns the salaries of their highest paid employees. You know what for? For profits? Don't have to do that. You know, if they're not public organizations, but nonprofits do. So there is a lot of transparency. If you're thinking about donating to a nonprofit, you can see their tax return. Every nonprofit in the US, their tax return is public record, so you can see it yourself and take a look. So I would say, you know, those cases are the minority, for sure. And the other thing is, I know some of those cases that were widely publicized, the situation was not as extreme like I'm no one. I'm blanking on the details because I don't really that's most of you know. That's not the world I circle in, but like they were saying, Oh, they were taking, you know, corporate jets or something like private jets. And really it was like an executive flying first class or business class over coach, right, you know? And the reality is it's okay, people, for nonprofit executives, CEOs, to be flying business or first class, they probably have a good reason. It's okay for them to be making quite a good salary, because these are extremely competent, capable people who could easily be lured away for to the for profit industry for much more money. So, you know, one of those issues we look at, you know, what is, what are people being paid in nonprofits? And it's a huge problem that nonprofits often underpay people because it leads to high staff turnover, and that ultimately costs the nonprofit a lot more in the long run. So. I encourage people not to be too sensitive. And really, most nonprofits should be paying their staff a market rate that's the same as the for profit market rate. And so that's what we need to be comparing. Is a nonprofit paying above the for profit market rate for the same job, then I would have concern. But if they are paying the same as the for profit industry, then by all means that's probably a great thing.

Mick Spiers: 36:05

That's a really great way of looking at it, Sarah. I'm going to ask one more question around this whole philanthropy part, and then I want to get to some very specific leadership questions about not for profits. So now, and this could be financial, or it could be through to volunteering with everything that we've just said, if someone does want to make a difference, and there's so many charities out there, what advice can you give our listeners to how they might go about down selecting which charity they're going to give their time or money to?

Sarah Olivieri: 36:39

Yeah, I would start, you know, with a search. Could be Google, or could just be asking around. Find an organization whose mission you really feel in alignment with. Fine, you'll probably find a few, because there are a lot of nonprofits, and I recommend that you start by subscribing to their newsletter and see how you feel. Do you feel aligned a well run nonprofit, or who's reached that stage with their their emails should be and their website should be able to tell you stories about the kind of impact they're making, the effect that they're having. They should be able to have some anecdotal stories as well as some data, potentially, about the difference they're making, or they might be experimenting with something new. They might be trying something new and not have data or stories yet. I tell nonprofits, which I'll tell you, most donors have either the investor mindset, meaning you're the type who wants to make something happen that's new, right? A lot of entrepreneurs are investor mindset people, and then there's Sustainer mindset people who want to keep something that's been working continue to work right. And so I encourage you to think for yourself right now. Are you more of an investor type, or are you more of a sustainer type? And you'll notice as you research nonprofits who have a similar mission that, you know, some are in a mode with their programs, where they're building something new, and some are more in Sustainer mode, and some have both. And so you'll be attracted more to one than the other, and that's great. You could be both, which is good, too. And then, you know, engage with that nonprofit and go, you know, kind of with your gut, like, how is it feeling? And then as far as doing your due diligence, you can look at their tax returns. You can, you know, things to look for to make sure that they're growing year over year. So they're, like, top line revenue should be generally growing. Their profit margins might be taking a dip. So just like a for profit, if they're if the nonprofit is in growth mode, they should be dipping into their assets and their reserves because it costs money to grow, or they might be in Sustainer mode. I get worried about nonprofits whose top line revenue is coming down and they're not spending more to fix the problem. So right when you're shrinking, when you have business problems, you need to start investing and solving those problems. So and if you aren't, that's a bad sign, because some nonprofits have, you know, receiving this poverty mindset message, and they're like, well, we're not going to dip into our rainy day fund. If your revenue is going down, it's a rainy day, right? But they don't always get that message, so I would be on the lookout for that. And you can reach out and talk to them. You can call up. You can talk to their development director, that's the who, the person who's head of donors and fundraising. You can talk to the executive director, that's usually this, that's the CEO of a nonprofit. And, you know, engage. And if what you see makes sense, then I encourage you to support it.

Mick Spiers: 39:43

Excellent, Sarah. That was wonderful advice, we really got exactly what I was after. I want to switch now to leadership. This is The Leadership Project. So we talk a lot to leaders. We've covered a little bit around the business acumen side and some of the different perspectives of business acumen, leadership of a not for profit. I'd like to now understand the differences, or the commonality, between leadership in the for profit versus the not for profit work. I'm going to give an example, but I don't want us to stick at just the example. So not for profits. Often we'll have a workforce that is part voluntary, part paid workers. How do we, as a leader, address that not everyone's a paid employee. They're here giving up their weekend or their evenings or their mornings, whatever it may be. They're not a paid employee. So you know, it's a little different. How do we address that?

Sarah Olivieri: 40:40

Yeah, such a great question. And in this answer, I want to highlight when we talk about leadership, so often we talk about individuals leadership skills in leading other people and teams, but there's a second really important half to leadership, which is your leadership system, your leadership structures. So usually in business, we all what's that? Although, if you've been an organization deeply influenced by agile, if you're using Scrum, you kind of or like Peter Drucker's leadership, you know, by management, by outcomes, these are business driven leadership systems. If we switch to governments, you'll be like, oh, yeah, I know what a leadership system is, democracy, oligarchy or monarchy, right? These are leadership systems. And then we have leaderless leadership systems. So whenever you're dealing with a complex dynamic which nonprofits are, and if we hone in specifically on, what do we do if we have a staff of volunteers and paid staff, that's complex. It's very complex. So we need to be employing a leadership system as well as leadership skills. But let me just go into the skills for a moment, because I think really, the skills are the same, because people are people. Are people, right? So people need, if you're a leader in a for profit or a nonprofit, you need to be able to have great communication, great listening skills, great honesty skills, Candor skills, and it can be a little trickier. You really have to have top level skills in the nonprofit space sometimes, you know, I think in general, the concept that we need to be careful about who we hire, and hire someone who's a good fit. But what in the nonprofit space, if you're hiring someone who's working for free, or maybe going to be working for a rate that's really low for what they're going to be doing, they're going to be really underpaid. The temptation to hire whoever will do the job is really high, and that's where you really need to use those skills. You need to not take on a volunteer employee just because they're free. If they're not a good fit, it's going to be bad news, just like it would be with a paid employee. But the temptation is strong, so I think holding to leadership principles are the same, the principles are the same, but the temptation can be there can be a lot of temptations to not follow them in the nonprofit space. I can go more into specific leadership principles, but I know you've covered them a lot in the past, but I'll stop there for a moment.

Mick Spiers: 43:16

I think that's really good. I mean, the things that are coming up all kinds of things about how you inspire them and motivate them, and their motivations may be different. It's most likely not going to be transactional, for example, it's most likely going to be transformational or very purpose driven. As examples, I was also thinking about the things like what we do if we have a performance management issue when the person's volunteered their time, but actually their behaviors that align. For example, you still need, still need to address it. Yeah, you still have to address it. Otherwise it's going to infect the culture of everyone else around and it's going to, you know, have some of the other volunteers leave if they see that that person's behavior was not addressed, and it doesn't always mean termination, but it has to be addressed if the behavior is out of the out of sync with the values of the team, right? So yeah, so I think you've answered it beautifully already, Sarah, and I don't think we have to go any further. It just brings it under almost a magnifying glass that it makes it even more important to be on top of your leadership game. Yeah, really powerful. All right. So now, now I'm curious, where does pivot ground come in?

Sarah Olivieri: 44:29

Yeah, so pivot ground is the company that I now run to serve nonprofit leaders in how to run their organizations better. It started out as a marketing company for nonprofits, and I realized in building a marketing agency and serving nonprofits that they couldn't run. Most of my clients couldn't run quickly enough or consistently, quickly or consistently at any speed to take advantage of great marketing. And I started having kind of a crisis of my belief in my own service, not that my services were great, but they weren't really what my clients needed. They weren't really moving the needle because they couldn't take advantage of great marketing because of these business and leadership challenges. And I was kind of, you know, sometimes I say, like, you know, if you own a business, like you were like, pushing the business along, and sometimes it's like a runaway train you're just trying to keep up with. And so I had that moment where I realized I needed and I had the skills from having run several nonprofits as well as for profit businesses, that I had the skills to help them. Them run better, and that that was so much better way to make an impact for me than to help them with their marketing needs. And so I started pivoting my own business pivot ground to become what it is today, where I really provide a hybrid of training, coaching and consulting, which I kind of like to merge together. I know some people are very delineated about them, but I think sometimes you need coaching, and sometimes a great leader just needs another experienced leader to tell them what to do, and that's okay when in the right moment to just say this is, you know, I'm going to do the work for you for a moment and give you a boost. So I kind of merged those things, and most of my clients these days are in a program that is called Thrive, which I, you know, I created what's called the Impact method, which is the business operating system for nonprofits. I had seen great business operating systems evolve for for profit organizations, but none of them really worked for nonprofits out of the box, and none of them were like easy enough to learn. They didn't have all the pieces together. And so nonprofit leaders tend to be overwhelmed because they're managing so much complexity. I was like, I am. I'm a great systems thinker. I'm going to put something together using all the great stuff out there and putting into nonprofit speak and filling in the gaps, because there were some gaps, because nonprofits are mission first, not profit first. And so I put that together. I created the impact method. I beta tested it. Things went really well, although I found what I now call, you know, I call thrive, the Thrive program. I have what I call the Thrive formula, which is, in order to really feel like you're thriving running a complex business, which all nonprofits are, is you need an a leadership system and operating system that's designed for complexity and speed. And you also need training in the things that you need to know, so the things you know you don't know, are little bumps in the road. So you need to fill those gaps, or hire experts if you don't want to become the trained up yourself, and you need to deal with the risks involved with the things you don't know you don't know. And that means having a mentor, or not so much a coach, in this case, a mentor or some sort of expert who can help you see around the corners. For them, they know the things that you don't know. They can or they know the signs to go looking. And so I call that the Thrive formula, when you combine the right leadership system with you with training slash expertise and the kind of outside support, usually that helps you know what you don't you don't know, you don't know, so that it become a manageable problem.

Mick Spiers: 48:31

Absolutely wonderful, Sarah. So, I'm going to share two things with you. First of all, what I see in front of me is a multiplier, so you're helping organizations that are very impact driven, but you're sharing with them the system that will enable them to multiply their impact, to make sure that it is indeed impactful. The second one is having worked for a lot of multinational companies and successful enterprises. They do have operating systems that have been proven over time. That's why they've been successful. Their leaders have usually been through MBAs. They've had lots of training, but then even internally that company, if they've been around for decades, or even more than 100 years, a number of them, they've got operating systems that they've mastered over time. I'm going to say most not for profits. Start out with a purpose in mind, but not necessarily a method.

Sarah Olivieri: 49:27

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so few people in the space mean. Some ways, I'd like to say I'm really smart and I figured all this out, but in another way, it's just that there aren't so many people like me who love business structures and systems and leadership systems, who've applied that to the nonprofit space. So in many ways, it's been easy pickings for me, because people with that mindset tend to go in the for profit space, and that's fine too, but so it's been my pleasure and my joy and my delight to bring these things in a palatable, manageable way to nonprofits. And like you said, I mean, I do serve as a multiplier, and boy, does that feel good when I show up to work.

Mick Spiers: 50:10

Oh, good. You should be very proud, and it should feel good. This has been amazing, Sarah, I've learned so much. I've thank you for allowing me to follow my curiosity as we've had this conversation, I feel much richer now for having this conversation and knowing potentially myself, how I could go and have some impact with a not for profit. I've done some volunteering and things in the past, but it's always been not really knowing how to go about it or how to have an impact. Thank you so much for sharing today, and I hope the audience are hearing this as well and get inspired into action to understand what they can do and the impact that they can have on the world. I'd now like to take us to our Rapid Round. So these are the same four questions we ask all of our guests. The first one is, what do you know now that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Sarah Olivieri: 51:01

When I was 20, I used to say, you know, well, I may not have a lot of money, but I have a lot of time, and I wish that now me went back and told 20 me that time is the most valuable resource you have, and to set now I, you know, I have financial goals, but mostly I have time goals. How much time will I have to do this? How much time will I have to do that? And so I would have loved to tell myself to value my time more.

Mick Spiers: 51:31

I wish I had to learn that one too. That's a really good one. All right, fantastic. What's your favorite book?

Sarah Olivieri: 51:37

I have so many favorite books, but one of my favorite is the great game of business by Jack stack. Really interesting book about building companies and leveraging people's brains. Basically, he took a failing tractor engine remanufacturing company and turned it into one of the most profitable companies ever by teaching all of his blue collar factory workers how to read the budget and the profit and loss statements and the cash flow and be involved with that process and get bonuses in accordance with the company's profit. And he said basically everybody's going to be involved in making this a profitable company. He let go of the hierarchy. He practiced open book management, where every employee could see all of the finances, and he turned that company into a wildly successful company, and set a goal for every employee to be able to own a nice home and volunteer and give back in their communities, and he achieved that many time over. So, really great concepts in that book.

Mick Spiers: 52:43

I love it. I've not read that book. I want to read it already. So that's fantastic. What's your favorite quote?

Sarah Olivieri: 52:49

Well, going back to my advice, you can make up for lost money, but you can't make up for lost time.

Mick Spiers: 52:56

Yeah, well done. So true, you're making me depressed a little bit when you say these things I think about all the time, lost in my life but yeah, thank you. And finally, there's going to be people that are either running not for profits or they want to get involved in the not for profit world. They don't really know what to do. How do people find you? If they'd like to know more.

Sarah Olivieri: 53:18

Sure you can find my website, pivotground.com, or I'm most active on social media, on LinkedIn, and you can just search me up. Sarah Olivieri, Oliveiri and you're welcome to connect with me there and message me there as well.

Mick Spiers: 53:37

Thank you much, Sarah. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've really adored it. You've given me a glimpse into a world that I don't know a lot about, and I really thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you so much.

Sarah Olivieri: 53:50

Thank you.

Mick Spiers: 53:52

You've been listening to The Leadership Project. In the next episode, we'll be joined by Dermot Crowley, one of the world's leading experts on productivity, Dermot will be sharing his wisdom on working smarter rather than harder in a hybrid work environment. You don't want to miss this. If you are enjoying our content, we would love it if you can leave a rating and review on your preferred podcast service, don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where you can catch our video podcast and weekly live stream shows. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP, Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do, take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.