I know there is a lot of talk about getting your value and what you are worth. But when you are just starting out, and you are trying to get clients and prove yourself, as well as figure out your pricing, it's very possible there will be times you undercut yourself. Sometimes it will be worth it and other times not so much.
As I began to establish my credibility and footing, everything around me began to increase, including my rates.
One thing in business you'll have to look out for is “upside-down contracts.” This is where your cost to do the work exceeds the price you are charging, and thus your business loses money in the execution of the work. These types of agreements are easier to recover from when it's just you working on a project, but when you layer employees or other hired consultants on top it can be difficult to recover from.
A few years into my business, I started resigning from contracts because of this. Not because the clients were horrible, but because they didn't make economic sense. One of my close advisors told me a long time ago that you get into business to make a profit. This may be your first reason, or it may be one of many reasons after the initial passion and your purpose drives you to start it. Either way, it's a business for a reason.
As SGI started to grow, we started to reevaluate SGI Cares, the arm that focused solely on nonprofits. SGI was growing—a very uncomfortable growth, but growing nevertheless. A few years in, we had landed our first seven-figure, multi-year contract with a healthcare provider seeking to provide Medicaid services via a government contract. They found us through a state website that listed Hudson initiative–approved companies. The program encourages state agencies to contract with certified small businesses, as well as encouraging contractors who receive contracts from the state to use good-faith efforts to utilize certified small businesses in the performance of the contract. If that contract taught us anything, it was the importance of cash flow and billing. When you are dealing with government contracts and large agencies, the billing cycles are much longer. Yet, because of the size of the contract, you have to hire employees and/or contractors to do the work. We also had to execute media buying and other vendor purchases as an agreement of the contract. It's very important to have someone, if not yourself, who knows the intricacies of buying media and appropriately running a tight ship with budgeting and billing. Otherwise, this can cause various headaches, from delayed payments from the client to your business struggling to meet important deadlines such as payroll because you're awaiting payment.
So, as SGI continued to grow I decided that we needed to go in a different direction with our SGI Cares arm. Via this arm, we were serving nonprofits in various ways. But not all nonprofits are created (or treated) equal, and many struggle to find additional room in their budgets to hire consultants. When they do, consultants can find themselves wanting to go above and beyond to help the nonprofit organization, because they can really get drawn into the work. As SGI began to grow we no longer had the capacity to service nonprofits in the way we had become accustomed to; when you're acting as a back office it's very natural that circumstances change and that the workload changes as well. So, I started thinking about ways we could continue to support these entities.
I really began to think about the future of our space as I saw it: software as a service.
We were providing a service and we began to think about how we could productize that service and deliver it through a software solution. We are seeing technology being evolved for various sectors by the experts in those sectors, thus what a technology founder once looked like is changing. Experts in their particular area of expertise are thinking about how they can create technology solutions for their antiquated sector in order to evolve it through the use of technology, and simplify a lot of the problems that they're having through solution-based products.
So, I began to think about how I could do this in the nonprofit and philanthropy sector, and ultimately how this technology could extend into other verticals such as government.
Yet, the first service that we took a stab at productizing was one that we offered under SGI Cares, called nonprofit creation services. We were helping nonprofits go through tedious paperwork to file for incorporation and exemption for their nonprofit, which today we call formation services.
We had created a system, and were receiving referrals from attorneys and accountants and other clients to provide this service. We were working with schools. We were working with health clinics. Many of them came to us because they wanted to create a nonprofit arm; the same for small businesses, restaurants—you name it.
And so we felt that there was perhaps an opportunity to create technology around this service, as we were doing it manually, which was very time-consuming. Then people were coming to us because they had tried their luck with products like LegalZoom which was heavily focused on just prepping the services, and customers still had no idea what to do next.
So as we continued to think about how we could release the manual touches that we were having with this service, productization seemed like the most likely solution. In November 2016, we launched what was then called Exempt Me Now to the public. We were doing something really simple and that was productizing or “TurboTaxing,” as we would say, the process of incorporation and exemption nonprofits. We launched the product in all 50 states, allowing our customers to now go online and “do it yourself, but not by yourself.”
I talk a bit about how we assembled the team to get this product launched later.
We were ultimately trying to solve for the bottleneck of communication that existed via emails and calls, standardizing the process, improving approval timelines, thus drastically reducing the time it took an average customer to go through the complete process from prep to filing to securing their exemption.
We wanted to go beyond just being a prep service, instead taking those customers from A through Z from prep to filing, and educating them throughout the process, so they understood what would be next as founders of nonprofits. Now that product was in market those customers began asking for other services. They were asking, What happens next? How do I run effective board meetings? How do I raise money?
How do I create brand and awareness for my cause in my community? And so we continued to think about how we could further productize the services that we were offering as consultants and continue to deliver these services through a software solution. And so the next product that we were thinking about was the nonprofit platform (NPX). The NPX platform was a natural second product because we could now begin delivering the capacity support that we were offering as consultants through a subscription-based platform, whether that was fundraising, curriculum design, or providing resources such as conflict interest statements to development materials, and finance tools to help manage budgets and funding, and how to stay on track and align to reporting milestones that are required for certain grants.
Yet, there was still something missing. As consultants, we knew that there were major silos that existed between organizations and the funders that granted to them. Additionally, there was usually a number of us hired to do various projects related to one program whether that was evaluation, technical assistance, or some other task.
The enterprise platform would be the next product we would launch in the market. This product would compliment the NPX platform to allow funders to provide the capacity support and technical assistance that we were providing to organizations on a touch-and-go basis year-round. Additionally, funders would have access to their own dashboard, which would allow them to capture insights and evaluations, report information in real time regarding their projects, and easily manage stakeholders such as board members. So, whether you were a public charity, foundation, government entity, or corporation, you could benefit from this product. This one-app solution would be geared toward solving a few hurdles: scaling impact, measuring impact over time, and allowing grant recipients to deliver reports directly to their funders without the heavy load of reporting and in the manner funders want to see it.
I was asked by Keely Anson, an investor at Incite Partners, why I wanted to democratize philanthropy. She admitted that her question was almost rhetorical in a sense because she knew why. Incite, though