 Hello, and welcome. It's a Monday, or I'm going to call it a Monday, because I think we should celebrate every day, including the start of the week. Today's guest is Matt Scott, author and co-founder of Cosmic. And we're here to talk about his book launch. Really excited to have this, the high growth nonprofit, even reviewed by one of our previous guests, Jake Wood. So glad to have, you know, this dialogue with us, the conversation. So before we dive into this conversation with Matt, we want to remind all of you, our viewers and our listeners, that Julia Patrick is here today. Julia, thank you for creating this platform day in, day out. She's the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I get to play alongside with her in this sandbox of the nonprofit show. I'm Jarrett Ransom, you're a nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group, and really proud to have the ongoing support from so many of our sponsors. So thank you so very much. I'm going to give a verbal shout out. 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Again, for those of you watching and listening, co-founder of Cosmic Matt Scott. Welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm stoked to be here. You know, we know writing a book is really hard. Really, really hard. And so whenever we have a chance to have a book launch that comes in, comes our way, or we get to talk to somebody who's in our sector, who's really taken the time and the arduous task of writing a book, we want to celebrate that because it's not easy. And this book is great. It looks good and it reads good. So congratulations. Oh, thank you. Yeah. It was, it took me about twice as long as I thought it would. So I appreciate that shout out. Yeah. You know, you always are like, there's so much locked in here. I just need quiet time to type it out and it'll be good. Exactly. Yeah, not the case. Well, let's get into this because your book, The High Growth Nonprofit, Proven Steps to Quickly Double Your Revenue and Drive Impact. We hear these words used together. We hear this challenge. We talk about this in leadership. We don't always know how to get there or why we should get there. So I got to ask out the gate, Matt. Why do we associate growth with success? I mean, it just seems like a very American precept. Yeah, that's a great, great and thoughtful question, by the way. So I appreciate that. You know, I think the way that I think about growth and why it ties to success is really around driving impact. And so many of us who work in this social sector in this nonprofit community are driven to do good. And what intrigues me most about the opportunity in the space that I operate in and what I tried to capture in this book was taking best in class for profit methods, which is all focused on growth. Exactly what you're, you know, alluding to, especially here in the US and applying those to the nonprofit sector. Without that, without the money, frankly, without the generous support, right, we're not going to be able to execute our missions. We're not going to be able to go out there and drive impact. And so for me, I think why it's so important to focus on growth is because you need the resources, the people, the brand awareness, the financial dollars in order to go out there and achieve your mission. Hopefully your mission is big and grand and requires requires a lot. Yeah, it's true. We talk a lot here, like there's 1.8 million nonprofits registered in the US, and I was reading some statistics over the weekend. 1.5 of those are 501 C threes. So 1.8 million registered and 1.5 or 501 C threes. So we talk a lot about, you know, competition. And so to stand out, I feel that growth is part of standing out. You know, it's like the larger your brand, the larger the awareness, the larger the impact, the more people tend to know about you. So I appreciate that and I really appreciate Julia, you know, your connection there to how that's measured here in America. It is fascinating because, you know, we have really grown a global audience. Both you and I do work out of the country. And this is not part of the discussion. Infrequently, does it come up or be discussed now in Canada? Yeah, probably a little bit more. But certainly as you move across Europe and into Africa, that doesn't get talked about the way or promoted. Maybe that's the better word, Matt. So I've got to ask you this next follow up question to that. And, and is it, is it ever okay not to grow or to be on that trajectory or promote that? I think the easy answer is absolutely yes. The whether or not to grow, I think it comes down to, you know, I used to work at a nonprofit, which I talk a lot about in the book called Team Rubicon. And when we saw that when we when we when we created the organization and we're seeking to build the organization. We had this bold and audacious idea to be the best disaster relief organization in the world. And to do that we knew that we needed critical mass we needed a large number of in this case we repurpose the skills of military veterans to respond to natural disasters. We needed a significant number of folks to be able to respond to any disaster in any community, in particular those that are smaller, like size disasters because the big ones, everybody, you know, comes comes to support. Yeah, yeah. So when we were thinking about growth, it was always with this idea of, are we leaving communities affected by disaster behind. And so I think when you're thinking about whether or not to grow or do you always have to grow. It comes down to, you know, what is your north star, what's your big audacious goal, and do you need growth in order to achieve that. Sometimes the answer is no, maybe you're an on profit that serves a very small community in a specific niche, and maybe you have the resources that you need and what you don't what you need is sustainability what you don't need is growth. So, I think it's about evaluating where you're at in your trajectory and understanding, you know whether or not you need to focus on on sustainability versus growth. You know, one interesting thing I'm seeing now, Matt here in my community is a huge influx of growth due to ARPA funding cares act. You know, like all of the government funding has just been a huge influx and so organizations have gone from like 1.5 to 8 million in the last 24 months. And now they're starting to see a steady decline of those resources and so, you know, to have that communication now that maybe maybe they're not growing but they're now coming back down to kind of like, you know something that is more sustainable. Are you seeing that as well and I'm curious if you are and and how we can also see that as success. Wow, what a good question. Actually, I think what, because of the nature of the type of work that we do, like cosmic is really a growth consultancy for midsize nonprofits that are looking to double very quickly. Those organizations that have received an influx of funding, whether it's from government or individual contributors due to, you know, these sort of macro, you know, outside the organization events right right. The, the thing that we're seeing is organizations that we're willing to invest in their growth infrastructure are seeing sustained growth. Yeah, I'll share like my own example right when the pandemic first hit, you know, as a social impact business which means that we're for profit business but we care about our people we care about the planet we care about the triple bottom line. And, you know, when the pandemic first hit, we lost 65% of our pipeline overnight, and it was terrifying. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, I was always, I would say that I'm a more risk adverse entrepreneur, and, and so I was trying to invest strategically in the business but when we got PPP funding in total we had to two PPP loans, the total about $60,000. Well, we went from a staff of three to a staff of 16, and we've more than doubled our revenue each year. But that's because just that small amount of capital that was completely like, you know, as a business you don't have to pay it back you don't have to. It's not an equity play the ability to take that money and invest in our growth to make bold calculated risk to me was really there was a small amount of money that, that had this huge net impact so I again going back to that for profit, use it for the nonprofit mindset I think if you're an organization that is willing to, to reinvest some of that capital in the infrastructure and the people to process the technology in order to continue to grow that you're more likely to see that that growth trajectory move forward. That isn't to say that if you're seeing a decline in revenue that you're that it's a bad thing or that you're doing something wrong. It might just be that your organization is, is motivated, or the need is different, you know, and so therefore your approach is different. I love that response and thank you for that. I've seen it so much and I really appreciate that investment in infrastructure. I am a huge advocate for that as well right like that's that's how we look at capacity building. But let's talk about, you know, Canada nonprofit. Let's move into you know Canada nonprofit drive revenue without harming impact. Talk to us about that because that was really interesting in the book as well. Yeah, I think that a nonprofit can drive revenue without harming impact, but it's important to again to have an idea of, okay. What are we trying to achieve. How are we going to measure impact and communicate that with our supporters right the easy stuff. I'll go back again to my example when I was at Team Rubicon. The easy thing is, is measuring outcomes like how many disasters did we respond to how many volunteers were deployed how many, you know, hours were served right that was easy. But that wasn't actually the impact on the community it wasn't the impact on the military veterans who we were restoring a sense of purpose community and self identity, as they transitioned out of the not, you know the military and into civilian life. And part of the impact was, okay, what kind of, what kind of impact are we having there, but then there was also this idea of what kind of impact are we having on the, on the communities, are we helping them become more resilient are we helping them recover faster from disaster. What, so we came up with ways of measuring that impact. And when I think about, you know, when you think about growth without sacrificing impact, I think growth for growth sake. If you're not thinking about, how is this increase in revenue increase in staffing increase and however you're measuring growth, going to tie back to the mission and the impact that we're making because of that work I mean you can't lose sight of that it always has to be your guiding north star it has to be, what is the impact we're trying to have on and what's our mission and will this unlock greater impact, or not. Yeah, that's my thought on it. It's interesting because we talked about impact, impact, impact, I mean, and now, you know, donors are using that language and we're, we're changing all of this movement towards this concept. But at the bottom, at the end of the day, and that bottom line, we are not defining impact. You said, you know, the actual things that are super hard to measure about your own volunteers, the veterans, and all of the issues that that that group has to deal with measuring that and understanding impact. That's a really heavy lift. So how, how did you navigate that. Oh, we got it wrong a few times, which I think you'll see throughout the book I was talking about like you know I so much military cultures in the book because of my time at Team Rubicon but you know it's like they'll fast as long as you're feeling forward you know I you know we would we would sit around and try and come up with how is that that we're measuring impact and what are we trying to do and what we ultimately, you know, we, we always tried to use, we knew data was a critical component in order to prove or quantify the impact that we were having so, you know, we partnered up with Palantir this this for profit intelligence, you know, gathering and tool used by the US military to track essentially terrorists to be honest around the world but we repurposed that to be able to figure out who has the biggest need, right because when you go into like Wimberley Texas affected by a hurricane, you know, the folks who have money, and you can see a clear divide. They've got contractors there ripping out mucking out their home early right. It's entirely different if you're somebody who doesn't have those resources if you're uninsured if you're in a rent to own situation if you're just, you know, don't have the money. And so in that situation what we tried to do was identify okay what's the value, the dollar value so we collected data and began to understand who needs, who has the greatest need. And then what is the value the economic value of this. And then we start to use stories from people to really quantify the data so to humanize it right so this is how many folks we served. But the story of Maria this woman that I personally spent about four hours with who was in this rent to own situation whose home was completely destroyed. So that time spent with her was a story that ultimately got shared with supporters and I think through that story in the narrative form we began to understand that, wow by mucking out this woman's home by helping her she was in a situation where the homeowner that she was in a rental apartment on her landlord was not going to pay for anything and she didn't have the insurance and so her car was flooded. She had no way to get to work I mean. So when you think about telling like stories of impact it's like, okay what's the data that's going to be able to to share like the scale of your impact, but then what are the human stories that are going to actually humanize it for people and make it relatable for folks You know that story that you just shared it wasn't is probably last week and the news my local news reporter was commenting on a disaster in California and literally said just what you said like oh this is a really nice neighborhood it'll be fixed soon and I was like, how horrible that that is just known, you know and then you look now at the tornadoes that hit in the southeast this weekend and there are so many communities that have been literally uprooted and there's so much need and some of these communities are very vulnerable populations. Exactly. Yeah. It's interesting that the the trajectory of your book and the discovery that you've made over the course of time and I love love love that you admitted right out the gate with our last question that you know this was an evolution you made mistakes you stumbled you Failed fast failed forward those things taking that I think having that specter of expectation and understanding the ethos behind some of those decisions allow you to grow faster and not work in fear. So that's super cool to have that discussion with you but you mentioned something and I can't wait to kind of pivot to this and you call the power of keep knowing to keep growing. Yeah. Gosh it can mean so many things like one of our cultural principles that cosmic is the future belongs to the curious. Another one is success is not final. And so when you combine those two this keep knowing to keep growing idea. You know we we we try to remain curious about what's going on right AI is totally like we were chatting before everyone came on it's changing. It's probably the most revolutionary thing that's happening to the knowledge economy. You know it's right up there with the Internet and when we think about like what do we do how do you how do you put that in a practice that you're a nonprofit and how does it impact well we do these things called retros and after every single campaign that we run after every you know digital transformation that we do every sprint that we do we as a team gather stakeholders together and we say okay let's build out a timeline what worked what didn't what was confusing what's missing how can we improve upon this. What what went really well what can we build systems can we build a methodology around what went really well. And again this this is something that I learned a team Rubicon we used to do after action reports which is something that they do in the military. Yeah, yeah, exactly and so it's a simple exercise but it's it's time well spent it takes about an hour and you can gather your team around a whiteboard and you can identify where you need to lean in and where you need to adapt and change and and then always be, you know, another thing that we do here at Cosmic that I think really benefits our clients it's an easy thing for any organization and nonprofit to do is to make sure that you put a dedicated amount of human time, your people time to continuous learning. And having them spend at least 40 hours a year, really learning something coming back sharing it with the team, sharing what they what they learned and turning that I those ideas and those learnings into action is what really matters you know. Yeah. Yeah, you know I so appreciate that concept and having the nonprofit show since March of 2020 and the ability to have conversations like this one with you, honestly Matt and so many leaders across the nation. I personally have witnessed, you know, through this consistency, so many changes and so much like wealth of knowledge from people in different places of the world right and I think when we when we like land in our own little cosmic area. Not to be associated with your little nucleus right, then I think it's like we we only see and know what we've always seen and known but we have to go beyond that nucleus. Yes. It's really interesting. Now I got to ask, as a follow up question with your team. What are you looking at and what do you see as successful for your team members going out and you can include yourself on this of learning new things and getting trained like what does that look like and what are you having them do. What a great question I the first thing we share with our our managers, but also with the clients that we do a lot of change management work. And the first thing you need to identify is that people learn in different ways. So for some folks, you know they attend conferences for others trainings for some it's about books. And for so many of us it's actually about tactile hands on the, you know, working on something and improving it so the first thing I think you need to do is just identify on an individual basis. Share with me what your learning style is as a manager so that you can help that person get the most out of that investment because it's a serious investment for any organization right. The thing is, we were so we help clients develop this one page strategic plan. What is it that we're trying to achieve and then we build out, you know, project backlog where we score individual items against impact and effort and then have a KPI tracker. And when you're thinking about your professional development and your learning. It's really critical that folks that you have identified. Okay, what's the difference between a specialist and a senior specialist, for example, what are those individual skills for a gift officer versus. You know, a manager of the gift gift program if that's if that's like the natural trajectory trajectory within your organization you got to identify what those skill gaps are in order to help that person get there. And then you pair that with their individual learning style and you can begin to help help that person build out a pathway for learning that is going to be both impactful to them and their career trajectory but also impactful from a learning perspective because that's what we're working towards in the time so I think it that's just that's how we approach professional development and how we coach our clients to to as well as you need the organization need and the person's skill to align at the that's when that's when the magic happens right so that's I don't know there's probably many approaches but that's one that we take. I'm advocating it that like who manages this is that going through HR or because because you're right it's a big expense, and it's it's a heavy lift to get everybody on board. I love you identified right away you got to recognize the learning style first. Yeah. How are you seeing organizations manage this so that they can grow. I think it depends on the size right if you're a really large organization with dozens or hundreds of staff members, you're probably going to have a dedicated HR department. I will say though is that I'm a big, obviously a big fan of human resources it's a critical function. But I think it's a little passive. It's a little passive, and I think it's better to have a proactive like we don't actually have an HR department that cosmic, despite we're having five folks right now right. But we're very deliberate about our culture and we take time to empower our managers and department heads to like it's on that they are way more in contact with the employee they're way more in contact with folks who, you know, they have a relationship with the conversation they have the contacts so HR is critical, especially at scale, but I encourage organizations to not be as passive right like how often have you work somewhere where you've like, there's all these resources available, but you don't even know anything about them or it's very much like you got to go to them and I think, you know with people, it's so critical, you got to be more proactive when it comes to training your folks. I see a lot of passive styles and a lot of different ways right in particular passive fundraising but now now I'm going to be, you know, keen on seeing the passive HR and just so many other ways of being passive. One of the questions you had in here I loved it was like an interview but I always are I already work here. Yeah. And I just love that so I know we don't have time to dive into all of this but again, fascinating book highly recommend you get your hands on this would love for you to share with us where our viewers and listeners can get their hands on this and possibly for their entire team, as well as the board. Yes, Matt tell us a little bit more about the book. Yeah, well we're giving this book away for free for anyone who works on a nonprofit volunteers at a nonprofit. Yeah, you can go to cosmic.com. It's up there right there forward slash book, or when you get to cost.com you'll find the book link right there and fill out a form will send you a free copy you can fill one out for everyone on your team. You know, if you if you have a large quantity then just put out the contact for it will just send you the number to fill out a form for every person but yeah we're giving this resource away for free, I've gotten so much out of mentorship out of books out of learning as I mentioned it's part of our cultural principle, but one of ours is show don't tell and so we want to share with books, exactly how they can help grow and you talked about 1.8 million nonprofits, the reality is 85% of those are under a million. And they need help to and so this book is is designed to help organizations that are small and midsize large on there's there's tools and tactics within there and it's it's available for free and the book has a bunch of other free resources in it as well so yeah head over to cosmic.com. Yeah, I love it. I'm super impressed. I think that and I'm showing my age here but I think that this is a great tool for your team to get a copy of and then sit down in like in a in a book called book club format and not to blow through it in one sitting but to say look we're going to go through chapters one through three and you know and really have a guided discussion so that you can kind of start to look at some of the things internally with the tools and the resources you have right because I think that's what's so great about this book is that it gives you some new ways to look at things. But with what you have and so I really really appreciate it again Matt Scott co founder of cosmic cosmic.com check them out book super interesting the high growth nonprofit proven steps to quickly double your revenue and drive impact. It's been what it's been such a pleasure to have you on the nonprofit show thanks for being with us. Thank you so much. It's an honor. I appreciate you having me as well. Hey, it's been a lot of fun. Again, Jarrett and I get to interview and be with people every day just finished up hard to believe it our third year going into our fourth year. You can see us and join us five days a week Monday through Friday and of course you can always get to our archives again we want to thank our sponsors who make these days possible for us. Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy your part time controller nonprofit thought leader fundraising Academy at National University staffing boutique. The nonprofit nerd herself Jarrett Ransom nonprofit tech talk as well. These are the people that keep us growing and they keep you growing as well. So check them out. Hey Matt again congratulations. We know how hard this is. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's a great way to start our week on this Monday. It is and I think it's it gives me hope for again for our sector when I see people thinking about us and thinking about the bigger pictures and how we can navigate the things that we want to do but to do it strategically and thoughtfully and sustainably. And so it's really brilliant that you've shared this knowledge and this observation with our sector because it's it's it's just critical. And as we were talking as we got started you know so often we're in the trenches you know doing with what we have to do and it's really hard to step outside of that drama to be thinking about things. And so I appreciate what you've what you've been able to do with this book. Hey everybody we like to end every episode with our mantra and that is to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Matt thanks so much.