Books / The First 90 Days of a Nonprofit Consultant
The First 90 Days of a Nonprofit Consultant
by Steve Kennedy
Find. Fix. Train.
A new nonprofit consultant's first ninety days, one week at a time, for the experienced nonprofit leader opening a practice. Find your focus and your first clients, fix what the records hide, train the people who stay, and build a practice that lasts. Each week has a short story from an invented nonprofit facing the same problem you are, the work in plain steps with the reason behind each one, the mistakes people make, and five things to have done by Friday.
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Thirteen weeks
Find · Days 1 to 28
- Week 1Choosing What You Fix
- Week 2Finding the First Three Clients
- Week 3The Minutes Before the Price
- Week 4The Price and the Contract
Fix · Days 29 to 63
- Week 5What the Records Hide
- Week 6Listening Like an Outsider
- Week 7A Strategic Plan, Kept Short
- Week 8One Platform, Not Seven Spreadsheets
- Week 9When the Client Pushes Back
Train · Days 64 to 90
- Week 10Training the People Who Stay
- Week 11Leaving the Client Better Than You Found It
- Week 12Building the Practice
- Week 13Day 90: The Practice Review
A sample: how Week 1 begins
Week 1: Choosing What You Fix. The story.
Elena Marsh ran the Harlan Valley Regional Food Bank for eleven years. She took it from a church warehouse with two trucks to a distribution center that fed forty thousand people a month across four counties. She hired its first finance director, rebuilt its board twice, survived one audit finding and one flood, and moved the whole organization from a dozen spreadsheets onto a single system in a single painful summer.
At fifty, she resigned. She was proud of the food bank and tired of running it. And she had noticed, over eleven years, that the part of the job she loved most was the part she did for other organizations, unpaid, over coffee: helping a young executive director untangle a board, helping a treasurer read a statement of activities, helping a founder see that the spreadsheet was the problem.
She decided to do that for a living.
What comes with the book
- The 90-day checklist: every "Before Friday" list in one file.
- A printable 13-week calendar.
- Practice focus worksheet.
- First conversation guide.
- Discovery questions and document request.
- Proposal template.
- Consulting agreement checklist.
- Interview guide.
- Short strategic plan template.
- Records map worksheet.
- Change order template.
- Final report template.
- Practice review worksheet.
- Download every file from the book's bonus page; the link is in Appendix D.
- Works on paper, in a spreadsheet or in any system you use now. Each week ends with a short note on where All In One Nonprofit does that week's work.
- General guidance, not legal, tax or accounting advice.
Free on an annual plan
Organizations on a paid annual plan of All In One Nonprofit get every book in the series free, inside the platform. The book's offer: the Consultant Partner Program, a seat in each client's organization, free to join. See the plans at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/pricing/.
About the author
Steve Kennedy is the founder of All In One Nonprofit. He has served volunteer-run organizations for decades, as a director, as president and as the person everyone called when the tools were too technical. More about Steve
The whole series
Six books, for the founder, the board, the executive director, the treasurer, the development director and the consultant: https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/books/