4 Lessons for a Sustainable 2024

2023 has been an amazing year for growth and reflection on my efforts. As a consultant and executive coach, one of the key goals of my work is to help organizations and their leaders make a bigger impact in their communities. Throughout the year I work with nonprofit and impact-driven businesses to assess their operations, identify areas for improvement, and develop strategies to help them achieve their goals.

Here are a few reflections from the work I’ve done with clients this year and a few stories about how sustainability continues to be a vibe rather than a destination. I hope the work you’ve done this year has been full of accomplishments, celebrations, and lessons learned from the challenges you’ve faced. Sustainability isn’t about getting to the end of your pool of outcomes, it’s all about getting to the next phase of the work. Sometimes that means growth, other times it means tightening down to the core of what is needed.?

May your 2024 be full of wonderful surprises and huge opportunities to level up your impact.?

Lesson #1: Ideas are What You Make of Them

One of the key ways that I help executives and organizations make a bigger impact is by helping them focus on their vision and hone their ideas. I call this process Idea Surgery because we take the intricate parts of the ideas that fuel your work and magically make them seen. This visual note-taking technique has helped over a dozen organizations and founders in 2023 get clarity on what their organization’s services, programs, and initiatives look like now and what they visualize them looking like in the future.??

Idea Surgery is the first step to creating an individualized strategy for the organizations I work with because it can be easy to get bogged down in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Starting with this practice during coaching and consulting has helped individuals, teams, and coalitions to focus their efforts and resources on the programs and initiatives that will have the biggest impact and are the most sustainable.

In order to turn the ideas into reality, it’s important to first take a look at everything in totality and ask a few important questions:?

• Do I have the time and resources to do all of these things?
• What or who can make this easier to execute??
• What is the #1 priority right now? (start here)

My favorite session this year was an in-person two-part session with a business owner I met through the Universities at Shady Grove Equity Accelerator, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Jocelyn owns an educational tutoring and test preparation business and is a second-generation business owner. Her father’s vision is not Jocelyn’s vision, she’s interested in making a bigger impact through the business and making business processes easier to manage.

The best part about watching Jocelyn think through her vision is that her mind map was color-coded, well-organized, and full of bulleted lists the first time we did it. The second time she added space for personal development and family/friends to make sure her vision was a reflection of her time and energy as a human and social entrepreneur.?

What’s Next for Idea Surgery??

In 2024 I will be licensing the process for fellow social entrepreneurs to use in their own organizations and to facilitate groups through the same process. If you’re interested in learning more, sign up for the waitlist here.?

We’ll also be using Idea Surgery during my first in-person event this winter.

Elevate H.E.R. Worth (2-4-24 in Germantown, MD)

This Holistic. Energy. Reset. empowers you to identify and break free from the barriers holding back your business. Gain strategic insights, overcome obstacles, and set intentional priorities for a thriving 2024.?

This is an in-person 4-hour one-of-a-kind experience including updated headshots, a tailored mind map and strategy for your organization, and a tasty afternoon snack with our champagne toast. If you are interested tickets can be purchased here.?

Lesson #2: Get Help with Grant Readiness & Implementation Planning

Another way that I help organizations make a bigger impact is by providing guidance and support on grant strategy, grant readiness, and implementation planning. Funding is crucial to the sustainability of any nonprofit organization. Grants are part of an effective fundraising strategy that can be helpful for achieving an organization's goals. However, grant readiness is only the first part of the journey.

This year I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing nonprofit organizations that are scaling to apply for state and federal grants. This work ranged from coaching organizations to increase their grant writing capacity internally to developing a formal grant readiness assessment for scaling organizations. The main lesson this work taught me is that Artificial Intelligence is very helpful for this portfolio, but the experience a human brings to strategy and grant writing is still unparalleled. Federal grants are especially complex and take a significant amount of attention to the strategy. Strategy requires decisions and details which still requires a lot of human input.?

One of my favorite workshops to deliver this year was an AI workshop for nonprofits through a partnership with Nonprofit Montgomery. In this workshop we went through how to use AI in grant writing, marketing, and setting up basic business processes. If you’re interested in booking a similar workshop, reach out.?

Lesson #3: Strategy is Everything

Speaking of strategy, one of my favorite things to do is support organizations to develop their strategy to deliver effective programs and initiatives. This includes identifying the needs of the community, developing program goals and objectives, and getting ready to implement and evaluate programs to ensure that they can meet their goals.

The reason I work with both social businesses and nonprofits is because these fundamentals transfer across both types of organizations. They are delivered a little differently, but the goal to reach outcomes and help more people is the same.?

Helping Clients Grow Impact Online & In-person

One of my favorite small business clients is Nancy, one of my girlfriends whom I met through my network of powerful Latinas. This year we launched her website and her business - a children’s mobile art studio made from a renovated Ravens tailgating bus purchased on Facebook marketplace. After launching Nancy’s website - TheMagicArtBus.com and several months of booking community events at local breweries Nancy landed a 250+ person event at Meta’s D.C. offices. Meta found Nancy through the website we launched and contracted her to provide crafts for their family-friendly Halloween event. Helping Nancy execute her vision at Meta’s office was one of my favorite client triumphs of 2023.?

No matter what kind of organization you have, an executive coach can help you level up your strategy and make your ideas come to life.?

Lesson #4: Sustainability is Unique to You

When I launched this newsletter, the intent was to share a model for sustainability with the world that is “do-able”. Consulting on sustainability using the model I created was the first consulting service I provided to my clients and has continued to be a core facet of my business. The ability to break down sustainable actions for organizations to focus on the key components that they need to hone has helped hone the organization’s strategy.?

This winter I had the opportunity to facilitate an in-person sustainability workshop in Houston for a coalition called Babies in Baytown. BIB is a Communities of Care initiative funded by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and implemented with the support of the Prevention Institute.

The goal of our work was to create a strategy that Babies in Baytown can use to take their work into the next phase including identifying a new backbone organization and advancing their strategies for connecting families and service providers. By leveraging Idea Surgery and the sustainability model, I created an in-person session that engaged parents and service providers in the same strategic planning conversation including a follow-up virtual session for additional buy-in.?

Sustainability is a story that is unique to every organization. Although I developed the dimensions of sustainability model, there are still a million stories out there like Babies in Baytown.

Let's Connect in 2024

If you are looking for your own unique path to sustainability, check out my website for updated resources in 2024 and to book your own sustainability consultation.

That’s a wrap for 2023! Wishing you and yours many blessings in the new year.?

More newsletters to come in 2024! Stay tuned!?

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