Transcript Episode 180 – Making the Pivot to Nonprofit Consulting with Julia Devine on The Prosperous Nonprofit

[00:00:00] Stephanie Skryzowski: Welcome to the Prosperous Nonprofit, the podcast for leaders who are building financially sustainable and impactful nonprofits and changing the world. I’m Stephanie Skrzewski, a chief financial officer and founder and CEO of 100 Degrees Consulting. My personal mission is to empower leaders to better understand their numbers, to grow their impact and their income.

On this show, we talk to people who are leading the nonprofit sector in new, uh, Innovative, disruptive, and entrepreneurial ways, creating organizations that fuel their lives, their hearts, and their communities. Let’s dive in.

Hello. Welcome back to the Prosperous Nonprofit. Today I have in the show, Julia Devine, and she is one half of the of the duo behind Relatable Nonprofit. Now before I talk to you about our [00:01:00] conversation, I want you to go over to Instagram and look for Relatable underscore nonprofit. And it is a really funny, really silly meme page all about nonprofit life.

And so Julia and her business partner, Catalina, are going to talk to you about it. We’re on this amazing organization, this amazing company that provides services to nonprofit organizations, as well as a mentorship program for nonprofit consultants, which I think is so cool. And they also happen to have this really funny Instagram page.

So Julia and I, in our conversation today, talk about basically consulting for nonprofit leaders as a viable business. A career change and what her journey has looked like pivoting out of the nonprofit sector as a young professional in her twenties and starting her own company again as a young professional, which I think is awesome because oftentimes we do see people moving into consulting after they’ve been working in the sector and any sector for, [00:02:00] you And Julia and her business partner, Catalina, made this pivot when they were in their twenties.

And so I think that just gives them such a fresh perspective. And um, I really love, you’re going to hear her talking about the highlighter girl. And so if you are a highlighter girl, I’m a highlighter girl, I think you’re really going to like this episode. So listen more to hear about the highlighter girl.

Let me tell you a little bit about Julia before we dive in. So Julia Devine quit her six figure nonprofit job to pursue consulting at age 25. After building a successful agency to serve nonprofits, she decided to teach others how to do it. Besides running the business, she’s gardening, practicing yoga, or reading a good book.

And Relatable Nonprofit, her company, empowers growth driven women with nonprofit hearts to succeed in consulting. Has been featured and Relatable Nonprofit has been featured in Motherly, Canvas Rebel, Bloomerang, Bonterra, Kiela, Nonprofit Hug, Virtuous, and others. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and talk to Julia.[00:03:00] 

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Prosperous Nonprofit. I am really excited to talk to Julia Divine today from Relatable Nonprofit. Julia, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. Yes, I’m so excited to chat. I think we probably have quite a bit in common. Um, so I would love for you to start us at the beginning and tell us a little bit about your journey, your career journey and what it has looked like and kind of how you landed into doing what you’re doing now.

[00:03:32] Julia Devine: Yeah, so I got into nonprofit work, actually, while I was still in college, it wasn’t something I was looking for. But I think for a lot of people, it’s the kind of thing that just finds you right place, right time, and you kind of get into it. For me, it was a development internship that I took my sophomore year.

And I had no idea really what fundraising was. And I remember my first day getting there and it’s a, you know, I thought it was digital marketing maybe, but I sat down and they [00:04:00] started talking to me about fundraising, philanthropy, and this entire world and industry that I just knew nothing about. But I stayed with this internship for the remainder of my college years.

And when I graduated, they offered me a job as a grant writer. I think they kind of Invented the position for me at the time just to keep me and that’s like the lowest level So I was able to stay and I started as a grant writer And then I just really fell in love with fundraising with development work and so I started getting my hands into everyone else’s business and tried a little bit of the major gift stuff tried the fundraising in the digital marketing realm And then email marketing and so forth until, um, four years or so.

And I was actually, um, the development director for the organization. So I did that for a little over a year. And at that time I was hitting that point that I think a lot of people hit in nonprofit work and particularly fundraising work where I was responsible for raising the 7 million [00:05:00] budget. I had a team reporting to me.

I was fairly young. And, you know, there’d been a lot of turnover in the organization, and it was mid pandemic, and I really just felt like I’d had enough. I’d been working remotely, and my husband and I both said, you know what, I think it’s time for a change. I had no idea what I was going to do, I just knew I wanted to leave.

So I, uh, Did put in notice, gave them like three months, and then worked out a situation where I went to grad school for a brief period while I was trying to figure out what to do. And I was thinking I was going to leave the sector entirely just because of how, I hate the word burned out, but just how tired I was from the kind of work that we’d been doing.

And I didn’t really know how to stay in the industry. I’d only ever worked with one organization. And that was when Catalina texted me and she had also recently quit her job. Similarly, she was working with a foundation doing program work and had very similar experiences. And we decided [00:06:00] she had heard from someone in the nonprofit space who needed a consultant.

She said, Hey, I think I’m going to take this. Do you want to do it with me? I heard you just quit. And so I said, okay, sure. We’ll give it a try. I’m not doing anything else. And we had a business up and running in six weeks. We started supporting this one client and then we said, okay, well, let’s see how many more we can get.

And within six months, we had a full business going. And within a year, both of us were working full time for the business. And that is. What we were doing for the last few years, and then more recently, we have rolled out a new program where we’re supporting other nonprofit professionals who are going through the same kind of experience of burnout and career transition, stay in the sector by starting their own similar consulting businesses.

So that’s what we’re doing now with Relatable Nonprofit. 

[00:06:48] Stephanie Skryzowski: That’s so interesting that you worked with one organization because I feel like, I think especially nowadays, people sort of bounce around to lots of different things and don’t [00:07:00] stay, um, in one place. And so do you think that was part of what sort of led to just being like over it all?

Or do you think that was sort of indicative of the work in the sector, you know, overall? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:07:14] Julia Devine: I just really put it all to the pandemic. I mean, I don’t think I would have questioned it so much if we hadn’t gone through that experience, which I know everyone went through in some way or another.

But working full time, was living several hours away from home, away from all of our families and, you know, You know, I, I just think the, the level of, of expectation was even during the pandemic, just went up and up and up. You still need to perform, but now we’re working from home on a folding table and, you know, I can’t go into the office and just everything shifted.

But being able to go home, we did, my husband and I went home, visited family, got out of the city and we were working in DC in the time. Just that decompression period of just being able to realize that, oh, [00:08:00] when I’m not living in this tyranny of the urgent constantly on taking slack messages at midnight in bed, you know, just like waking up and hearing slack chirp and having to pick it up and answer it because, oh, we have this urgent request, uh, realizing that that was really weighing on me and affecting me in personal ways and affecting my relationships and not being able to turn off.

And I don’t think that that’s only nonprofit work. But I do certainly think that that was for me what did it not so much that I didn’t like fundraising or didn’t like working in the sector. But at that time, my creative feeling about my life and my work and my career was just at such a low point because I just couldn’t take on anymore.

I just had to take a break and take a step back. Um, so I’m so grateful for what I learned and I think I really had very excellent training and I got to study under some great people when I was there. But, um, But I don’t think now, knowing how consulting has changed my life and how the benefits that have come with that and building my own [00:09:00] business, I don’t think I would ever go back in house.

Mm hmm. 

[00:09:04] Stephanie Skryzowski: And I feel like that’s really relatable for a lot of nonprofit people, I think, especially post pandemic, but also like I started my business, you know, several years, five years before the pandemic. And so I was in a similar place where I was literally traveling the world and wanted to start a family and was like, well, this is just literally not feasible.

I cannot bring a newborn to Nepal with me, so I need to do something different. And so that kind of led me. In my direction as well, and so speaking of relatable, I wanted to ask about the, your, the name of your company, Relatable Nonprofit. Tell me about this. What does this mean? 

[00:09:41] Julia Devine: Yeah, so this actually grew out of an Instagram account that we started a little over a year ago and there wasn’t, Exactly a business purpose at the time when we started it, but we had no social presence.

Our entire business was coming from referrals and partnerships with different media, um, CRM companies. We were doing a lot of CRM [00:10:00] tech work at the time. And we had seen that people were talking about meme accounts and we knew about a couple of meme accounts that we followed. And we’re like, well, you know, we don’t really know of any that are really nonprofit specific.

There are a couple, but, um, they’re, you know, more branded around a person. And so we just started posting like jokes that we heard like jokes that we would make to ourselves jokes that we would hear when we were chatting with clients just talking about the real behind the scenes sort of real talk about non profit life that you don’t see discussed on LinkedIn so much or in webinars so much this is really like oh yeah this is the reality and it just took off like in a way that we did not expect.

We had another little Instagram account that was like our professional services account and that just took off. This just blew it out of the water. We just ended up, we just like stopped posting on that account and just went all in on this meme account because of how much engagement it was getting. And it has about 5, 000 followers now, [00:11:00] almost entirely organic.

And it’s just incredible people from all over the country, from other countries. I mean, just commenting and saying, Oh, this happened to me. Oh, at my last job, this, and people just going back and forth and really talking about it. And I don’t think you get to hear from employees that much that you hear from a lot of nonprofit leaders, but we’re just really seeing this chat going on in the feed and our DMS.

Uh, and so we rebranded our whole business around this account because of how strongly we believed in what it was generating in terms of conversation. And it also helped us to realize that the real issue that we were helping to fix was this You know, what’s causing retention problems in nonprofits is that these conversations were giving us kind of those answers, seeing why people leave and move jobs or burn out of the sector entirely.

Um, this conversation was all happening on the Instagram account. So we’ve connected with so many people through that. That’s really our Our anchor now is [00:12:00] this account and, um, it’s just been a lot of fun and it’s just been really fun to build it and we’ve met so many great nonprofit professionals through it.

So, um, so yeah, so that led us to building out the mentorship program where we’re kind of helping people who follow the account and other people who find us how to make this transition and if it’s right for them, teaching them how to do it. Um, 

[00:12:22] Stephanie Skryzowski: yeah, I love that you sort of pivoted and rebranded your business around the Instagram account.

Um, and as someone who is currently like I’m currently working on very intentionally growing my number of followers, not because I necessarily care about the number, but because, um, I’m writing a book and the book publishers are asking for higher numbers. I’m really focused on it. It is not easy. Like it is not easy at all.

And so I give you like a lot of credit for organically growing to 5, 000 followers. And I was actually just talking to Like a really, really, um, high level social media expert today. And she’s like, memes, memes are where [00:13:00] it’s at. Like if you can do memes and reels and really shareable content, which I’ve got your relatable nonprofit Instagram page popped up right now.

I’d like, this is so shareable. It’s like very clear graphics with clear, big text and a quick sentence. And you’re like, yes, this, and I’m sure you get so many shares. Have you worked with other nonprofits to teach them this piece of things? Because it’s like, I feel like so many organizations could benefit from your strategy, which maybe it didn’t even, maybe it didn’t even intend to set out with a strategy.

It was like, let’s just do this and see what happens. But I mean, Yeah, I love the sort of the consistency, the clarity on here. Yeah, I love that. Have you talked to other orgs about what they’re doing with their social? 

[00:13:44] Julia Devine: Yeah, it’s funny. I feel like, you know, when you’re running a business, there’s like the 25 things you try that just don’t ever pan out and then there’s that one or two things which just occasionally come along and it’s like proof of concept just on day one and that is the kind of [00:14:00] thing with this account where we had like a little bit of help we watched the YouTube videos and we’re just kind of I mean we love to just see what other accounts are doing so we’ll religiously Catalina’s like This is how she spends her free time.

She’ll just go and like, learn everything she can about someone else’s business and someone else’s account and oh, they’re doing this, they’re doing that and then take samples and really analyze. Oh, this post looks like it did really good. So just a lot of holistic, like stalking of other people and what they’re up to.

There’s probably a better word for that. But, um, So no, we don’t, we definitely don’t do social media. I, that was my least favorite job. Like I dabbled in a little bit when I was working in house and oh, I just think it’s such a high stress job. I don’t, I, people who do it, I give them a lot of credit for the content creation, the posting, and then having.

the demands of whoever wants you to be doing the posting in house at a non profit, especially when there’s multiple programmatic departments where you might have a government relations team or grassroots team or [00:15:00] you might have, um, you know, any other event coming up. I just think that the people managing social really have to have a very strong backbone to manage all of those competing interests.

So I personally stay very far away from social media and I would not offer it as a service for that reason, but, um, We do work on some other things like email marketing, building funnels, more organic things. Um, we’ve done a little bit with ads. Uh, there was one ad. There was one that we did run. I mean, we spent like no money on this thing, like maybe a dollar a day.

But it said, in my non profit era, and it just was when, you know, Taylor Swift’s always big. But for whatever reason, that ad Like just a dollar like just I think no money whatsoever, but just we just bumped it a little bit and just left it on and anytime that was running and she’s in the news, just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom followers.

So I do attribute like, if that’s a strategy, just like in my nonprofit era and that more than anything else, that little boosted [00:16:00] post, I would be responsible for, I think, all of the traffic that we got that wasn’t organic. So. That’s my tip. It’s not a strategy. It’s just post something related to Taylor Swift and you’ll probably get back.

[00:16:14] Stephanie Skryzowski: Um, yeah, that is, that’s so good. Well, I think the lesson is like, okay, what’s trending right now and, and how do we stay on top of it? That’s where I like, we don’t need to go down a social media rabbit hole, but that’s where I really get stuck. I’m like, I don’t know what’s trending. I can’t possibly follow every single thing that’s trending.

I don’t personally even enjoy social media. So I’m not like Catalina where I’m like, let me research and, you know, yeah. Look at this stuff in my spare time. And so I, I never know what’s trending or I know it like after, you know, my parents know it. Like I’m not right. Definitely not like not up to speed.

And so I actually just hired a social media manager because I’m like, I cannot do 

[00:16:50] Julia Devine: that. We had, uh, Catalina’s sister, she’s in college and we would ask her a lot of times like, Hey, here’s the content. Here are the jokes here. Like. [00:17:00] You know, here’s the setup or the situation that someone might be mad about like board meetings like one we have.

It’s like, um, you know, when we start the strategic planning session with talking about why we didn’t follow last year’s strategic plan or whatever, just like a joke like that, but we would tell her that kind of content and she would go out and find on tick tock the latest trending posts and then just apply the joke to that and she can make them in half the time as us and she would just send them to us.

It was, you know, Um, she still does them for us, but those were, we would be like, wow, you’re going to do that for us and we just have to post them. And then she, you know, that definitely is a time saver. Um, I would say the metric to look for when building your feed, just from what we’ve learned is. Again, the sharing, like you mentioned, it’s not so much how many likes you’re getting.

That’s like the least interesting thing. Comments are the more interesting thing, if people are commenting. But if you can see that people are DMing it to each other on Instagram in particular, Instagram is the best feature that it [00:18:00] has. Like, it’s claim to fame is really the DM feature. That’s where people basically hold their second, like, texting conversations.

Like, I’ll be texting my friend, but then I’ll pick up the conversation with her on Instagram. So that let people do that all day long. So if you can see on a post, it doesn’t really matter. Low likes, low comments, but 100 people send it to each other. That’s a pretty good indicator that it’s great content that people are sharing it.

So, um, how you figure that out. I mean, for us, it’s the jokes. Definitely. That’s the stuff that gets the most shares. Um, More so than us being like, hi, follow us for our services. You know, that stuff, like no one cares. 

[00:18:36] Stephanie Skryzowski: Nobody cares about that at all. No. Oh my gosh. That’s so good. You’re right. That’s so funny because I do, I’ll like be on my phone in the evenings and I’ll have one conversation going via text message.

And then the same friend and I will have a separate conversation thread going in the DMS of Instagram. So. Oh, 100%. I love that. Okay. Yeah. We do not need to like go into all the social media things. Although it, like I said, it’s [00:19:00] very top of mind for me personally right now in my business. Sure. Yeah. So when you made that shift from working in house to being like, okay, I can’t do this anymore.

I, I want to like try my hand at consulting. I would imagine and I know, I know this from my own personal experience that it was quite scary because I’m like, what the heck do I know about like finding my own, like finding clients and doing sales and like, I don’t know what, I know what I’m doing in my job, but I don’t know what I’m doing about running a business.

Did you ever feel like sort of outside of your comfort zone? Because I would imagine anyone listening who’s like, I’ve always thought about this, but like, I just don’t think I can do it. Have you ever felt outside of your comfort zone and what was it that pushed you to actually make the move and do it?

[00:19:46] Julia Devine: Absolutely. I mean, I still do. Every time that we get to a point where we feel comfortable with the business, we immediately, something will happen or, you know, we, We decide not to renew a client, or we want to switch something or, [00:20:00] or something in our personal lives change. So we want to restructure the business around this new aspect of our lives.

Like Catalina had just had her first baby and then she had her second one in the middle of starting the business was sort of unexpected. So, you know, we had to pivot around that and we always have these curve balls kind of coming to us. So you definitely can’t just build a business and set it and forget it.

You’re. Constantly growing and constantly having to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. And sometimes you just want to be like, I don’t want to go through this again. I just got done with the last comfort zone adjustment and now we’re going to the next one, but it is worth it every time. And then you kind of hit a nice flow, uh, in the new space.

That you’re in, um, we were very fortunate, but I, I don’t think this is unique that we were able to reach out to our networks and contacts that we had. And, you know, we were fairly young to get started. I know that’s like a lot of people perceive consulting is something you do when you’re getting close to retirement, [00:21:00] which is, you know, is true and is something that a lot of people with many years of experience do opt to do several people in our program are in that boat.

Highly recommend it. Uh, but for someone who is more at the early stages of their career and they don’t have a huge network with all this proven track record, it’s a little bit different, but just anyone that would take a call with us, not even to pitch service. It wouldn’t even know what services we would pitch, but just to.

Do a little bit of market research about what people were seeing in their roles and understanding where the gaps were and what we might be able to offer and what was something was a problem that we could fix what nonprofits were looking for anything that we could get our hands on. Was the 1st thing that we did and then the 2nd thing was talking to anyone else who’d ever had a business and just asking them and my father was actually he did antenna cabling.

So it was very different kind of business than what obviously we’re doing. And he and I fight all the time about overhead because. He’s always saying like, what’s [00:22:00] your cost? You have to know your cost, but he’s thinking about building massive cell towers and cable and the cost of equipment and all that.

And I’m like, dad, there’s really not that much of a cost to doing consulting work. It’s like paying for your laptop and things like that. The overhead is just much lower, but him just beating into my head, at least very early on that you need to have proper risk analysis. You need to have insurance. You need to have contracts in place.

You never know what could happen in a business. You always have to preempt things and anticipate everything that could go right or wrong in a relationship. And so really having that advice from him and from a few other people in our networks was the other side of consulting, which is like, Oh yeah, sure.

I know fundraising. I know how to do email campaigns. I know how to do different things. And even other work too. We ended up going with CRM migrations and setups because that was a big need. Never forgetting that early. You know, hammering into my head for money from my dad being like, you don’t know what could happen.

You have to get all these [00:23:00] things in order. And so getting peer reviewed contracts and having the proper insurance in place, all of those things up front in the first six weeks, I think really set us up for more success than someone who just goes out and thinks that they’re just shopping their labor for an hourly rate.

That’s, that’s, you know, That’s a part of consulting, but that is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’re actually doing to build something successful. 

[00:23:27] Stephanie Skryzowski: Mm hmm. A hundred percent. And I feel like people often start with basically shopping your services around. This is what I can do. And then do some of that other stuff later.

And I know for me, I did that to a degree. It’s like, okay, well, uh, I know what services I could offer. Let me just get some money in the door before I like deal with all this, like legal stuff. And, um, that’s one thing whenever, whenever anyone asks me, like, what do you wish you’d done differently? I’m always like, I wish I’d had better contracts and better agreements from day one.[00:24:00] 

I was like, Everyone’s so nice. I’m not ever going to need to like enforce anything in here. And so then you like cobbled together something that, you know, a few different things that you go with is what I did. I like cobbled together some agreements that I like found online that sounded nice. And then, you know, they are basically garbage in the legal world.

And there’s no like, yeah, you, you have no, you have no ground if anything ever does go wrong. And. It definitely will. Like, it will go 

[00:24:28] Julia Devine: wrong. It always will. And it’s not because they’re bad people or you’re bad people, but I’m obsessed with contracts. Like, that is the first thing, because anytime anything goes awry, and it could be for a good reason.

It could be that they love you so much that they want you to do all these other projects. But then they’re like, oh, we don’t need a second contract for that. Just, just lump that in under the first contract. But then you do the work, and then they’re like, Oh, well, that’s just part of the price from the original project, right?

No, no, no, no, no. I just added 30 hours of work and a whole different scope and [00:25:00] absolutely not. But I, the, the contract is like the Bible of the project and I go back to it every time. I’m like, see, I, I, my hands are tied. Unfortunately, that’s what we agreed to. It doesn’t come up. Terribly often but when it comes up it doesn’t put you in that terribly uncomfortable situation of having to get into an altercation with your client because you’re like sorry I wish I could wish I could help you but there’s the contract there’s the rules that we all do so it just gives you leeway and um yeah I mean I swear by them and just because I hate those terribly uncomfortable altercations and I I think that’s what scares people a lot I don’t I don’t ever want to have a problem so if there’s a contract up front there’s no problem.

[00:25:41] Stephanie Skryzowski: Mm hmm. Exactly. Yeah. I 100 percent agree. I’m also like, I do not like having those difficult conversations. And so those contracts, those agreements are some protection around that because they’re sort of your buffer. Yeah. I think that’s great. That’s a fantastic advice for anybody just getting started.

Yes. You can certainly like start with, [00:26:00] okay, what am I going to do? And go out and find some clients, but simultaneously you need to set up your systems. And I always say, um, when it comes to like your financial systems, we were just talking about legal, but financial. Same thing. I’m like, just track your money from day one.

Like don’t wait until you’ve been collecting money and spending money for a year to get something set up because you like, don’t feel like a legit business yet because you’re going to need to report on that. So, um, I always recommend that as well. Like QuickBooks from day one, just, It’s a business expense.

Get over it. Just do it. 

[00:26:33] Julia Devine: I think, yeah. And when we started, we each put in, I think we each committed 1, 500. So it was a total of like, okay, we’re putting 3, 000 in a shared pot. And that was the first thing we paid 600 to a lawyer to help us. Develop a general contracting agreement. And the next thing was a QuickBooks online subscription and take, it’s scary to like, take yourself seriously from that early on, like, who do you think you are?

And we definitely kind of got that from a few people when we were starting out, like, who do you two think [00:27:00] you are just taking yourself so seriously, but if you don’t, who will? And yeah, you’re right. I mean, the stories I hear about people who are consulting and like, don’t send in, I mean, any industry, but like, don’t send the invoice.

It like blows my mind, like people will actually forget to send invoices for their work. And that’s the whole point. I know. Exactly. Yeah. I’m sure you know about that, working in accounting. So I just, yeah, yeah, 

[00:27:27] Stephanie Skryzowski: a hundred percent. Exactly. Exactly. And there’s no better time to set them up than in the beginning.

And you do kind of feel like a little bit stupid. Like who do I think I am? Like, are you kidding me? I just like, I have one client. I don’t even have any clients yet. Why do I, but like you, so you do feel kind of dumb, but you’re going to feel real Smart at the end of the year when your tax accountant asked for your info or, um, Yeah, whatever.

Like, when you need to figure out, yeah, who still owes you money, when you have a system that you have been using, like, you will be very grateful and you will not feel so stupid [00:28:00] anymore. So, it almost feels like, in the beginning, it almost feels like you’re like playing work or you’re like playing a game.

playing company. Like I’m playing CEO right now because you’re like, what am I doing? But it’s, it’s so important. So yeah, I love that. And I so agree with you.

Are you tired of navigating the labyrinth of software options? Wondering what works best together and how to afford it all? It is a dizzying task from choosing the right accounting software to ensuring seamless integration between all the systems. Feeling lost in the jargon. Fear not introducing the best tools for an efficient and prosperous nonprofit.

This free resource is a curated collection of top notch software solutions personally endorsed by our team at 100 degrees consulting. Visit 100degreesconsulting. com slash tools to access our handpicked list designed to streamline your operations and boost your nonprofit success. [00:29:00] Without adding a ton of extra cost or extra team.

Don’t miss out. Head to 100degreesconsulting. com slash tools now to download the best tools for an efficient and prosperous nonprofit. Let’s elevate your nonprofit to new heights.

So who do you say, like, what kind of nonprofit professionals would you say are right for building a consulting business? What qualities do you see? Cause I know you have your membership and so what qualities in, you know, whether it’s um, sort of like softer qualities, like, okay, well they’re really burnt out or harder things like specific skill sets or types of roles that they had in the past.

What type of people would you say are right for thinking about consulting? 

[00:29:47] Julia Devine: Yeah, this one’s, I mean, this is what I say colloquially to Catalina, sort of as a joke, but I say to her all the time that the right people for the program and the right people to be consultants are highlighter people, [00:30:00] people who like use highlighters and take good notes.

And like, I just, in my head are like the highlighter girls from high school. I mean, yeah, like any girl who has their own woman who has their own business, like she was a highlighter girl. Like, I just know it. And that’s what we were doing. Our target audience target market analysis for this piece of the business, the mentorship.

That’s I was like, I want the highlighter people because they’re organized. They come prepared. They bring all the materials they need. They’ve thought of everything that could go wrong. And that’s and that’s really more so part of the business. Of course, they need to have skills. I don’t know that you need to, like, have all of them 100 percent baked with 10, 20 years of experience to be good at it, particularly with digital marketing being something and just digital assets in general being something that’s becoming more in demand.

I don’t know how you could have, like, 20 years of experience doing, like, using AI for, like, you know, there’s just, like, Things are so new and changing all the time, [00:31:00] and you could because of just how much information is freely available online. I think that people can learn new things and offer them as services that being said, you obviously need to have somewhere with all within the industry.

If I think if you worked in a nonprofit, that’s that’s obviously great. Um, You have some. I mean, we try to teach people in our program that the most important thing you need to do is niche down very early on. We didn’t, you know, we got that first client and then we made our website and we show in our course like the what we wrote for the landing page for our services, which is basically three columns with about 35 bullet points of every possible thing we knew how to do related to fundraising, marketing and comms.

Which is the stupidest thing you could possibly do. We’re just, Oh, we’ll just give them like an on, you know, a cart of like things to pick from. And you could do this service or that service. And we’re like, just don’t, don’t do that because you’re completely diluting your brand and no one knows what to associate you with.

[00:32:00] And you’re just sort of this generalist, like jack of all trades. Uh, so the sooner that you niche down, I think the better so someone that feels like they can establish a niche that they like and that they’re good at or that they can become very good at in the next six months to a year and then offer those skills.

I think that that is a great candidate, you know, maybe 5 years of experience and work. Definitely not like right out of college, but I don’t, I don’t think you need to wait that long either. Um, particularly now, like, if you’ve got. I’m saying if you’re a highlighter girl who wants to do the work, it’s not easy, but, uh, I totally think it’s doable.

And I think for, for in art, we’re seeing, you know, people who are nearing retirement, people, moms with young kids. Uh, it’s excellent for that’s really our motivation for Catalina and I personally that she’s got two young kids. I want to start having children and being able to have a business that allows us to support ourselves by Both full time, working probably [00:33:00] less than 25 hours a week.

We’re doing now and we’re thinking we can probably get it down even less when we really hone our services even better. And you’re able to be home with your kids and have minimal child care. I mean the cost savings on not having to put your kids in daycare while you’re going to an office every day is just astronomical.

So for us it’s really a strategy that We’re building a business that we can keep going, but not in a way that’s going to take 70, 80 hours a week where we’re not going to be in our homes because we also want to be present parents. So that’s appealing to a lot of people. I know. So I know a lot of women in that situation.

Um, yeah, I think it takes, it’s a mix of specialties, a mix of age groups, a mix of, uh, experience levels, but it’s going to be understanding that it does take a lot of work and that there is a process to building a business. Mm hmm. 

[00:33:54] Stephanie Skryzowski: Yeah. I love that. I love the highlighter girl. I think you make a really interesting point that you’re right.

We [00:34:00] often see it with older people where it’s like, okay, well they’ve got 15, 20 years of experience, but really, you know, you don’t need that much. I think especially to your point of like being in sort of new and ever evolving industries related to AI, related to digital marketing, that kind of thing.

Yeah, you don’t need to have a whole bunch of experience. I think about my own journey to becoming a consultant and what that has looked like over the years. And you mentioned like having limited childcare and that has been my experience. And one thing that I have been so grateful for, um, for, to my business for, and to the business that I’ve created is that, you know, I have two daughters, um, and they are four and seven and I’ve never had full time childcare.

They’ve never been in daycare. Um, we have definitely had help from family, which You know, as a massive privilege, I understand one that like not everyone has, and they’ve got to preschool and things, but they, I’ve never had full time childcare and also I’ve been able to grow, you know, into a [00:35:00] multi seven figure company with 17 full time employees, like been able to do a lot in the last, like, seven years without that.

And so that is largely because of two different things that I think about. One is people and two is systems. And so really making sure that, you know, you’ve got the right systems set up in your business so that, you know, you’re talking about, okay, working 25 hours, but shaving that down a bit. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

How are you going to work less and continue growing the business? Like what things are you putting in place, whether that’s people or systems or something else? 

[00:35:35] Julia Devine: Yes, so the first thing we did was put people in place and that is with social media, which was Catalina’s sister for a time, and we’ll probably either bring her back in or grow that out to someone else, but really taking our hands off of the things that we don’t need to be touching every day.

And then the next was hiring our executive assistant, Katie, who literally changed our business. That was another one where we felt we were a little bit too [00:36:00] soon. Like, oh, do we really need an assistant? We’ve got the time for this. You know, we don’t, we could work at night. It wasn’t really about the time.

It was about the mental load of having to think about every little. And sending out that contract and making sure to send them like, I don’t like sending invoices. I do it, but I don’t enjoy it. It makes me nervous. And I don’t like tracking the time when we were doing time tracking, whatever, having an executive assistant who I could train, who could then go and do that.

And she just tells me that it’s done. Like makes me happier. And then I get happier about the work that I do have to do. So there’s just that that really saves your mental capacity. So hiring a little bit. And so we’ve built a little bit of a team there. And then Catalina and I used to do everything together.

You know, we, we built the business together. We’d be on every meeting together, dividing and conquering and saying, okay, you’re really better. She loves doing all the digital marketing stuff. I really prefer doing product [00:37:00] development, implementation, like working with the clients, whether that’s a non profit client or a consultant.

So I really focus on that and own that and she owns the marketing stuff. So we update each other, but we’re no longer doing this grueling back and forth process where we’re building every little thing together. And signing off on everything together. I’m like, yeah, I trust you, whatever. Like we know the general budget.

We want to do this, that, whatever, go ahead. And the same thing. So building that out a little bit more where we have our own ownership of different things. And then we just meet in the middle three times a week. We sync Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then Fridays we reserve just for, um, business development and strategy and kind of like the fun stuff where we don’t do any client work that day.

So really taking ownership of our calendars. Because when it used to just be a laundry list that you’re shipping away at, you end up spending so much more time on needless things. But when I have time blocked my calendar for what I want to get done in a week, you realize that you’re wasting a lot of the time, that you really don’t even need to be working.

Uh, so I management was the 2nd [00:38:00] piece and from there, really honing down our services and what clients we want to take on. So developing the mentorship program has been excellent for us because you can build a revenue stream on 1 product rather than having to have individual clients for each. Um, we and we still do have nonprofit clients.

We’re just we’re just. Kind of straddling the two and trying to decide if we want to continue taking those on, but we’re going all in on just developing out this mentorship and resources for nonprofit professionals themselves, which I think we do want to do. That’s where we’re having a lot of fun, but just identifying the things that we don’t have fun with and kind of either finding someone else to do them or evaluating if we even need to continue doing them or all the things that we’ve really talked about pretty much weekly for the last year.

Being very, very intentional about the business and how we use our time, we would be fine to work more if we needed to, but it’s, you know, I don’t really like the phrase work smarter, not harder, but [00:39:00] it’s like being intentional and strategic about how you use your time. Uh, Catalina talks a lot about her.

Work addiction, where she’ll sit at her computer at night, she’ll go back to her computer and sit down because she feels like she has more work to do. And yes, there’s always work to be done, but she’ll even admit to you that a lot of times that she just feels like she’s spinning her wheels and not really being productive anymore.

Even though you’re just sitting there staring at the spreadsheet and you just, you know, it’s not really productive. So understanding what productivity looks like too, are all things that we’ve done to really eliminate a lot of the wasteful time. That we were just spending on our business and yeah, I don’t, I mean, we’re always on, we’re always chatting with each other and talking, but I think dividing it between two people makes it possible to really have that about 25 hours a week each, which is also why I tell people, you know, consider working with someone on your business because I think it is hard to do it alone.

[00:39:55] Stephanie Skryzowski: Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And doing it alone, you really have to be intentional about [00:40:00] building and finding and, you know, being active in creating a community around yourself and it’s not gonna just be handed to you. Like, I have had to be very intentional about finding and cultivating and maintaining business friendships over the years.

And it often costs money to be a part of a mastermind. And that’s all good. It’s like, I’ve been part of lots of masterminds and been, like, amazing and valuable. So I love that you have a partner and as you’re talking about like, Oh, we’re always chatting about things. I’m like, I wish I had somebody to always chat about things with.

That would be so nice. It’s like my husband, he’s like, okay, I’m kind of tired of talking about your business now. Yeah. I do have a couple really good friends now that we like, we have just a constant text chain about our businesses, but it’s fantastic that. That you have a partner. And I just want to highlight, um, one thing you said about, you know, figuring out if you are going to continue doing your client work or work on, you know, your mentorship program and kind of [00:41:00] leaning into the mentorship because it feels more fun.

And I just want to highlight for anybody. listening, who’s thinking about doing some sort of consulting, like, listen to what Julia said, like, you can lean into what’s more fun. Like you have the choice. And that’s like one amazing thing about working for yourself and being a consultant is that you can do what feels good.

Like you don’t have anybody telling you that You have to do X, Y, Z. You don’t have a job description that you have to stick to. Otherwise, you’re going to get fired or you’re not going to get paid or whatever. Like you can do whatever you want. And so I think that’s really fun. Sometimes, you know, entrepreneurs take that a little bit too far and we’re like all over the place.

Um, but you can do that very strategically. And so that’s so cool that you’ve been able to, yeah, really lean into what is being done. feeling good at the moment. And who knows, maybe if you lean fully into the mentorship, like you will come back and lean more into client work in time. So I love to ask one question, um, as I’m wrapping up all of our [00:42:00] episodes and that is, what does a prosperous nonprofit look like to you?

[00:42:04] Julia Devine: Yeah, I saw that question when you texted it or put it in the meeting notes. You know, we worked with so many nonprofits in the last two or three years, and, you know, there’s a lot of ways you can tackle this question. For us, we saw a lot of departments that were missing people, missing roles, and, or, you know, we were usually brought in if they just didn’t have bandwidth to do certain things, or especially setting up a CRM.

But there was just always this sort of, Constant refrain from the people we’d work with that. We just don’t know what leadership wants. We don’t know what direction they’re going in. We’re given work to do, but we’re not understanding the strategy. And it reminds me of this one Harvard Business Review case that I studied in school.

It talks about Microsoft and how Microsoft has this system for projects and new ideas to get approved. And there’s all these sort of sets of criteria. And everyone comes together and decides what they’re [00:43:00] Makes decisions as a team. So there’s all these little decisions that get made and then moved up the chain and at the highest level, they look at the new ideas or are we going to do this project or that project.

And they hold them up to the mission and the overarching vision for the company and compare them and make sure they check all these criteria. A lot of times what I see when working with nonprofits is that no one understands the criteria, even if they understand the general mission or vision of the organization, that they solve a specific problem.

No one understands the criteria for what meets the vision and what doesn’t. And so people end up getting stuck with work, but that work sometimes just doesn’t really. Make any sense or people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. And that’s I think why people get frustrated and they leave because they don’t see the place for their work with the vision, you know, it’s a little bit of a long explanation, but I think sometimes I just wish I would see organizations stop and.

[00:44:00] Sit down and think a little bit and question those things. What are we doing that we don’t need to be doing? What can we let go of? What are things that we used to do that were relevant that someone in the organization still doing like a report that gets generated every week that no one looks at and no one cares about and is not productive in any way.

But it takes three hours of someone’s time. And that’s always just driven me up the wall. And I think that drives a lot of people up the wall because it makes them feel like Their contribution is not super valuable and that they’re not getting a good use of their time and their job is somewhere where they’re spending a very large portion of their year and their day and their week and their life.

And so I would really just, I know nonprofits are strapped for cash and they’re, they’re working on so many things and they’re trying to help everyone, but I really think that nonprofit employees are getting lost in the. Yeah. Mix there and a little bit falling through the cracks, and they’re just expected to [00:45:00] intuit and interpret the direction that the organization is going.

So I think a prosperous nonprofit is one where the team, you know, no matter how big or how small there are these systems in place and these these conversations in place where you’re. Asking people on your team, and maybe that’s just, you know, at the team level, you know, do you like is everything that you’re doing?

Does it feel valuable to you? And does it feel valuable to the organization? Or are there things that you think you could get rid of? And I think everyone would probably come to the table with something that’s like, yes, when I got here, I remember one thing. I started as a grant writer. I was taught this process of logging grants by after I submitted it whenever printing it out, putting it in a manila envelope and putting in a filing cabinet and like I’m like borderline Gen Z.

Okay. Like I’m like to paper manila envelope filing. Like, what is that? Like, and I I’m like, we have PDFs and a CRM that we save all of this to and we save it. the drive. So like they’re saved in [00:46:00] two locations, separate locations. If one of those blows up, we have them in the other place. I’m like, this is, I’m like going through these files and finding literal typewriter paper in there.

I’m like, what are these going back to? They’re like, oh, well, 1979. Uh, and you know, I’m like this stupid kid, but I’m like, why? And. And, you know, everyone looked at me like, well, that’s how Marge always did it, and Marge was here for 25 years, and I’m like, okay, well, I’m sure that that was super relevant and excellent work for Marge to be doing in the 80s and 90s, but, like, you’ve had computer programs and, like, processors for a long time now, so, like, just a little thing like that, I always think back to, because I’m like, I was like, That was like stupid courage I had at 22 to say something like that, and I think a lot of people lose that over time.

I sometimes feel like I’ve lost that over time, but there’s nothing wrong with asking why, and the more that people do that respectfully, I didn’t have to do the PDFs anymore, or the, the PDFs anymore, you know, saves you time, [00:47:00] makes your time feel more valuable, and that’s That moving up the chain, I think it does lead to a more prosperous nonprofit because you’re not wasting people’s time and time is the most precious thing that people have.

So that would be my little long story there, but that’s that’s what I think about a prosperous organization is valuing people’s time. 

[00:47:20] Stephanie Skryzowski: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And like, this is the way we’ve always done it. It’s not really like a reason to do anything, honestly, if it does not make sense. If it’s inefficient, then who cares if this is the way we’ve always done it?

Like let’s do it differently now. Yeah. I love that. Well, thank you so much. So, Julia, tell me. Um. Tell our listeners, where can we find you? Where can we learn more about your work? Um, I mentioned the Relatable Nonprofit Instagram feed earlier. It’s relatable underscore nonprofit, but tell us more about where our listeners can find out more about you and your work.

[00:47:54] Julia Devine: Yeah, so definitely check out Relatable Nonprofit on Instagram if you are [00:48:00] Looking to laugh and looking for some lighthearted commentary from us and the people in the comments. It’s a lot of fun. You can also find our website relatablenonprofit. com and Catalina and I are both on LinkedIn as well. I’m Julia Devine and Catalina Parker.

So if you want to find us there, follow us. We have our email newsletter. You can also subscribe for on our website or through our LinkedIn’s, um, or you can just send us a DM and we can chat. 

[00:48:28] Stephanie Skryzowski: Awesome. Well, Julia, thank you so much for chatting with me today and sharing all of your wisdom and experience in building this amazing consulting business that really fuels your life as well as the nonprofit sector.

So thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Before you go, I just want to thank you for being here to access our show notes and bonus content visit. 100 degrees podcast. com that’s 100 degrees podcast. com and I’ll see you next [00:49:00] time.