12 Essentials to High Growth

Based on our own growth journey at Educate!, we’ve come up with a v1/prototype list of what we think are the 12 essentials to nailing high growth as a social enterprise/non-profit and moving beyond a $1 million budget (as a rough measure of stage and size). This list is very much a draft and we welcome any and all feedback here on this list and other resources that would be useful. 

We will slowly build this resource out over time, taking into account your feedback. 

1. Operating 2-3 page strategic plan, updated at least every 6 months

A 2-3 page plan that details your company’s current priorities, 3 year goals and long-term vision and the core strategic anchors and cultural values that inform who you are. This plan should detail an analysis of the organization’s current situation, its vision/mission/values, key objectives, and strategies for reaching those goals. This should be a practical guide that is utilized to help make decisions, understand trade-offs and achieve organizational alignment. 

Tools:

• Essential 1: Operating Strategic Plan - Step by Step Playbook and Video Overview

• Essential 1: Operating Strategic Plan - Why do it and an Overview of Popular Approaches

2. Repeatable model and some sort of growth story

Ensuring that you have a repeatable model for how you create impact and a story of what growth mechanism/pathway you would use to meaningfully grow this model, with greater financing. 

Tools from Spring Impact:

• Scaling mindset videos

• Open-source toolkits

• Case studies

• Blog Post: The Pros and Cons of Different Pathways to Scale 

Other Tools: 

• SSIR article: Emerging Pathways to Transformative Scale 

3. Numbers story of how with more money, you can great more impact

A story of the quantifiable additional impact you would create with more money, e.g. with $5 million, we could serve 10,000 youth. 

Tools:

• ForImpact.org series on Funding Rationale

• ForImpact.org general learning library
  

4. Master prospect list that you check into monthly

An organized approach to sales where you check monthly into a set list of top existing and potential funders and take any required action you need to advance and manage your relationship with these funders. 

Tools: 

• ForImpact.org approach and template for this 

5. Strategy and approach to conferences and fellowships

A specific and strategic approach about how to engage at conferences and fellowships to make these opportunities optimized and effective. 

Tools: 

• Essential 5: Navigating Conferences Webinar 

6. Recruiting Process

A consistent, equitable and repeatable recruiting process that ensures that you are vetting talent both in terms of technical skill and values/culture-alignment.

Tools:

• Educate! Hiring Process

7. Performance Management Process

At their core, great performance management systems are great communication systems. These processes should be excellent at delivering relevant (timely) feedback and frequent (consistent) feedback, and providing clear steps on what to do if an individual is not meeting expectations in their role.

Tools:

• Essential 7: Performance Management Process - Step by Step Playbook and Video Overview 

8. Approach to organizational design (how to organize your team to accomplish your strategy) 

Organizational design is thinking through how you structure and organize your team to accomplish the work that needs to get done. Organizational design should be responsive to organizational strategy and help with role clarity, collaboration, decision-making and overall organizational effectiveness.

Tools:

• Intro to org design video series

• Blog with intro topics on org design
  

9. Compensation Philosophy 

A clear, pre-determined approach (transparent to all employees) that articulates how your organization determines compensation, changes compensation and makes decisions about compensation, to ensure that all team members are compensated in an equitable way. 

Tools:

• Summary of Educate! approach to compensation and lots of research on compensation.

10. Defined Culture, integrated across key processes

Ensuring that you have clearly defined your company’s core cultural values, that these values are representative of how you work and who you are, and that these are operationally integrated into as many processes and systems (hiring, performance management, compensation) as possible to drive cultural alignment in everything you do. 

Tools:

• 3 min video about LinkedIn Culture 
  

11. Basic before and after impact data measurement

You have a way to show, with data and numbers, how the end user/person you serve has been shown to be better off after engaging with your model. This starts with measuring how well off someone is on key indicators before receiving your model and how that compares to that same measurement after a certain period of time (determined based on your model).

12. Audited financials and quarterly financial reporting

The organization’s financial statements have been verified by an independent auditor, and your finance system generates timely (within 45 days of close) internal financial reporting.