Those of us who have dedicated our lives to making the world a better place by choosing to work in the nonprofit sector tend to be optimists. That’s a healthy thing and a desirable trait. But rose-colored vision can make myopia more difficult to diagnose. And myopia can include several hard-to-see realities. Here are two: Our subject-matter expertise doesn’t always make us good executives, and our frequent past ability to squeeze through one more rough patch doesn’t translate into making us good at preparing for the future. Here’s one more, one that shows irony at work: Despite devoting our professional lives to helping others, we’re not very good at recognizing when we need help. One outgrowth of this irony is that, even though we work in organizations that band together, when things get tough, we tend to try to go it alone.
After a 30-year career managing a nonprofit with roots in providing services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD services), ten years ago, I founded a nonprofit—Inperium—which partners with health and human services organizations to create a resource-rich network that benefits everyone involved. Unlike traditional business combinations, our affiliates retain their independent identities and enjoy flexibility, choice, and control over daily operations. They grow sustainably without sacrificing values, identity, or mission. Inperium’s vision turns isolationism (the “We can fix everything we put our minds to” mindset) back to the worldview that brought most of us to nonprofit missions in the first place—we are better together.
Different on Purpose
Those outside the Inperium constellation try to explain us in terms familiar to them, suggesting that we are an aggregator or consolidator, and they view our business approach through the lens of traditional mergers or acquisitions. While it is true that our central offering to organizations is to bring them comprehensive, enterprise-level back-office functionality and a suite of business and technology experts, those views don’t capture the true Inperium story. We purposefully call the organizations that choose to join the Inperium constellation “affiliates” because affiliation describes a relationship that is collaborative and cooperative. Our affiliates retain their executives, their boards, and, most importantly, full control of their missions. Respecting and seeking to enhance their mission-driven success, we seek to help them achieve sustainability by providing scale and functionality to the business aspects that can dilute mission focus or erode an organization’s ability to serve.
Because those who run nonprofits zealously believe in the missions they deliver and the people they serve, they sometimes fear that forming affiliations with others in the nonprofit sector is a sign of weakness or failure. By contrast, what we are proving at Inperium is that affiliation creates strategic strength and longevity. As Inperium closes in on $1 billion in annual revenue, we have achieved the scale to leverage people, processes, and systems that empower our affiliates and enable them to complete their missions more effectively.
Contemporary business culture—nonprofit or otherwise—requires such scale to be competitive. There is even greater truth to this in the sectors Inperium primarily serves—IDD, Child and Youth Services, and Behavioral Health—which are overwhelmingly dependent on government reimbursement. I emphasize the word “primarily” in the previous sentence, for not only are these sectors not the only ones represented in the Inperium constellation, but the model of scale and efficiency we have created can also extend well beyond the nonprofit ecosystem. Much like Berkshire Hathaway’s approach to for-profit corporations, Inperium ensures affiliates gain the stability, resources, and financial strength of a larger enterprise without compromising what makes them unique. We are not so far-distant a cousin to the agricultural, energy, or hardware cooperatives with roots in the 19th and 20th centuries that remain sustainable, recognizable economic forces today, and in a world where a handful of giants dominate multiple sectors, our mindset may create a viable model for Main Street for-profit businesses as much as it can sustain the nonprofit organizations that preserve life, health, and dignity for many of the most vulnerable in our communities.
Innovation through collaboration—that’s power.
Originally posted on Forbes.com