Prior to founding Inperium, a company that conventional wisdom views as a nonprofit consolidator (a conventional view I challenge), I had spent twenty-five years growing another nonprofit, Supportive Concepts for Families (SCFF). SCFF is a provider for consumers who require intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) services. Within a decade of its founding, SCFF had moved from serving a single consumer to becoming one of the largest IDD providers in Pennsylvania. This wasn’t growth for growth’s sake. I recognized that high-quality services in an uncertain, rapidly changing funding environment required scale to achieve sustainability.
IDD services are expensive by nature. They require a sizable, dedicated workforce to maintain consumer/provider ratios that support the level of assistance its consumers require, and its infrastructure demands—accessible housing and vehicles, expensive assistance apparatus to name two—are expensive and capital-intensive. Costs elevate annually, and government reimbursement models change regularly. Despite SCFF’s growth, I knew our scale was not sufficient to meet demand. Whether you are manufacturing widgets or assisting people with complex health needs, scale is required to reduce costs and create efficiency and resilience.
In the pursuit of the required scale, I had considered a traditional merger or acquisition. Every time I came up short. Why? Because every potential “partner” demanded that SCFF change what made “us” who we were. Those doing the acquiring had a mindset that SCFF would become a subsidiary. My nature tends to challenge the status quo. My eureka moment came when I realized we needed to flip the script—SCFF should do the “acquiring.” But first, we needed to redefine consolidated relationships.
From an Acquisition Mindset to a Constellation Vision
During the growth of SCFF, we acquired several other providers and supportive businesses. We’d been successful in growing services and revenue, but true sustainability remained an aspiration.
In the nonprofit sector, the distance between viability and sustainability is vast. Most nonprofits are one crisis or one loss of revenue stream away from eventual failure. In devising a strategy for a sustainable future, I imagined a network of partners that could reduce each other’s operating costs while helping them expand. I understood that such a network would need to find a way to realize the benefits of being part of a larger organization without sacrificing the identity, values, and mission of its individual enterprises.
I began to imagine a network of service consolidation providers through the metaphor of a constellation. I pictured the night sky and envisioned a cluster of organizations in a fixed system buoyed by the gravitational force of one another. Together, we could be stronger. I thought we could harness tremendous power if we formed a galactic network of affiliated organizations all working in unison and supported by a unifying, balanced axis that created stability and coordination. What emerged was Inperium.
Inperium is not a service provider. It is a nonprofit holding company that affiliates with mission-driven service providers that benefit from a robust centralized back-office infrastructure, access to a robust capital stack, tax-exempt financing, and economies of scale. We do not form subsidiaries. We refer to providers who join Inperium as affiliates, in keeping with the word’s literal meaning and the vision of organizations attached to a larger body.
Before you think that my insistence on applying this language of constellation and affiliation is semantic, let me clarify distinctions that matter to how Inperium has accomplished what it has accomplished. A “network” is a group or system of interconnected people or things without a traditional hierarchy. In contrast, a constellation is a system with a center hub of infrastructure—that unifying, balanced axis that creates stability and coordination. While Inperium does “partner” with its companies in our determination to help them accomplish their mission goals, Inperium owns and controls the operational infrastructure and sets standards, like financial performance expectations. “Partnership” suggests equality in authority, which simply is not the case. While affiliates maintain autonomy over mission, Inperium assumes authority over business operations. In this way, Inperium provides the gravitational force that holds the whole constellation together.
Unusual? Yes. Disruptive. Definitely. Inperium is unusual and disruptive precisely because the nature of nonprofit human services in the US is unique, an amalgam of systems on which whole communities are dependent, and one that is funded in a public/private interface that has few equivalents in other sectors.
Unique circumstances require innovative solutions. Disruption only becomes useful when it generates results. The revenue of our constellation has indeed grown exponentially year by year. Still, the real measure of results is that, because of additional revenue, our affiliates have expanded their services to reach more people in need, touching and improving exponentially more lives.