A strong Board is key to the success of an organization in the education, non-profit and business sectors. We assist new non-profits, founder-run organizations, and well-established ones, to achieve best practices in recruiting, evaluating, structuring, and retiring board members. We will professionalize your board by setting expectations for new and existing board members, sharing fiscal information, recognizing board contributions, and assisting in board transitions. These practices will enhance your organization's commitment to fairness and represent the standards that Peter Drucker identifies in order to attract generous people who remain faithful to an organization's mission in the face of the inevitable problems that will buffet it.
Working with all of your key players, we help to sharpen your organization's sense of its identity. We employ interviews and focus groups to take advantage of the collective self-understanding of all organizational constituents, and work through verbal and visual iterations of how you to be viewed in the competitive marketplace of ideas and resources. Once the central idea emerges, we work with a designer to represent an organization's mission and map out strategies to take the imaged idea public.
When you need to fill either executive or vital middle-management positions, we screen and identify qualified candidates based on agreed-upon job specifications that we jointly develop at the start of a search. This helps you avoid costly and time-consuming vetting that normally takes staff away from the performance of normal duties. Once we identify an appropriate set of candidates, you preview the chosen letters and resumes and then we set up a series of interviews with your leadership. Our goal is to know your staffing needs and fill them with the right people. Fees for successful searches are based on a sliding scale according to the job level being filled and are fully payable only after candidate passes a 90 day trial. We also work on a retainer basis and manage hiring in specific areas of staffing needs, such as clerical, IT, and social services.
If you need assistance with establishing your external financial/regulatory reporting, controls evaluation and implementation, process evaluation and improvement, or dealing with external auditors, bankers, attorneys, or recruiters, we can help. You may desire a second look at your internal reporting, we can assist you with budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, identification and evaluation of cost drivers, establishment of key performance indicators, margin improvement, cost reduction analysis or establishment/improvement of an informative management reporting system. You may have acquired another business and require assistance with systems integration, assimilating employees into the mainstream, staff development and training or financial recruitment. Maybe you desire assistance with routine operations and cash flow projection and analysis. We can assist you in all aspects of your financial operations and reporting needs.
Whether it involves submitting a response to a CDFA federal grant, crafting Letters of Inquiry, collecting all the S.M.A.R.T. objectives for a proposal, or constructing a Logic Model as the backbone of a proposal, we interview key Board and staff members, do the necessary research, create a case statement, assemble all relevant information, construct a narrative with supporting documentation, develop outcome measures and submit a reviewed and approved grant proposal to a foundation, or to city, state, or federal agencies as appropriate. We also offer preliminary prospect research and work with you to develop funding leads and an overall fund development strategy from both public and private sources.
Effective organizations and businesses run on the strength and loyalty of their people, their flesh and blood resources. We help you to look at your personnel policies and practices, review your Employee Handbook, and help you to determine your competitiveness and improve your employee retention. We can do this in a number of ways: by analyzing your benefit packages and their costs, reviewing your recruitment costs, and analyzing your compensation/bonus structure.
In addition, we can evaluate your staff training needs and provide training seminars in a number of important practice areas: harassment prevention, effective interviewing skills, supervisory skills training, dealing with difficult employees and presentation skills training.
If you are contemplating replacing/upgrading your information management system, or just certain business modules, or if you would like to create web-based applications, we work with you to develop the work flow documentation to help prepare you to move from your current environment to a new one. We specialize in process articulation and simplification aimed at meeting business needs in efficient and effective ways. Our staff has the ability to work at the top level in terms of process overview but can also drill down to the minutia of detail required to create user requirements for your technical staff. We focus on helping users prepare themselves for the new ways they will do their work. Process and work flow techniques are employed to map from the old ways to the new ones and to also help identity any lost functionalities that may result. We help you create the documentation/user requirements needed by your web developers, systems analysts/programmers and DBAs.
From time to time, every organization must grow or contract depending on its fortunes and its fund-raising prowess. And because every problem solved breeds new, and often more complicated ones, refitting the organization to its mission and its budget can be a daunting challenge. Working with both board and administration, we examine your staff to product ratio, identify efficiencies or additions, and present you with a plan and time line for reaching your goals.
Though not all metrics of success are quantifiable, we help you identify and measure those aspects of your product or service delivery which best indicate how well your mission and vision are being accomplished. We also help identify your leadership's untapped potential, its challenges and performance gaps, how well your staff are empowered to perform optimally, your employment of best practices and your adaptive capabilities in your professional marketplace.
We will assess your organizational needs, confer with you and the greater community as to your organizational aspirations, and carry out a planning process resulting in a map of the future for the organization and a time line for accomplishing your stated goals. In particular, we will help you measure how effectively you are using your most important capital: your personnel, their productivity and commitment to your mission and their investment in carrying out strategic planning and its goals.