142 – The Hidden Bottleneck Hurting Your Non-Profit with Jeremy Hass

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast, brought to you by wowdigital.com, your best place for non-profit websites and design, now including fractional CMO support. Are you working hard but still feeling stuck? Your operations are probably the bottleneck. Jeremy Haas breaks down how better systems automation and financial clarity can unlock growth and protect donor trust. So stay tuned and let’s fix what’s slowing you down. Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. As always, I’m your host David, and in this episode we’re going to be talking about operational efficiency, automation, and scaling without losing control. And I’ve got Jeremy Hass here with me. But before we continue, I just want to mention that our podcast needs your help. If you find this episode or any of our others insightful, interesting, or helpful, please like, subscribe, share, and comment. It really does help out our podcast. Jeremy Hass is the founder of PrefixOps, turned a failed startup into operations obsession. He now helps founders install systems automation and find the— and get financial clarity to scale aggressively without losing control. Jeremy, I love the phrase operations obsession. It sounds like we’re about to uncover some really, we’ll call it uncomfortable truths.

David Pisarek: So thank you so much for joining today.

Jeremy Hass: Well, it’s a pleasure to be on here. And yes, I mean, being obsessed with operations is being obsessed with the entire business and how it functions.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And we need to get clarity on what is it that we do? How do we do it? Can we systematize this? One of the things that I love to talk about are SOPs, standard operating procedures, and I’m sure we’ll get into that quite a bit here. But before we jump, that’s probably like jumping ahead a little bit, but What are some of the most common operational breakdowns that you see inside non-profits that, you know, tend to limit fundraising or marketing performance and ultimately overall impact?

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, I mean, with non-profits, it’s a unique world because generally speaking, your funding is tied to specific tasks and specific outcomes, and it’s hard to get quality staff, quality employees with how much they can pay, especially here in the US. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t find those people. So it’s one of the big things I I see is people don’t feel engaged enough to feel that the lower sort of salary is worth it. So people are being overworked, underpaid, and they don’t feel that sense of, of worth in their world. So it’s ensuring that leadership can still bring out the best in their team by making them feel like they belong.

David Pisarek: Knowing that you’re serving a higher purpose, that you’re, you’re helping, you’re, you’re creating impact and change, whatever it is that the non-profit is focused on, is often a really big attraction. It’s a magnet to get people to work for you, whether, you know, we know that funds in non-profits and charities are quite limited. So there’s definitely something to, you know, fighting the good cause that the organizations fight. But that really does only go so far. People still have bills that they have to pay and all of that. And I love the idea that you mentioned about Maybe I’m going to take it one step further, like camaraderie, feeling like you’re a part of the bigger picture, that you have impact, that you— that your opinions can help shape the organization or help more than they could if you worked for, let’s say, a Fortune 500.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, I mean, that’s the perfect thing to say. And one thing I typically see with non-profits, and I’ve been around a handful of them, been involved with a lot, and a lot of them become very bureaucratic and sort of follow this hierarchy where I understand executive directors, the leadership, they’re the face of it, they’re working with donors and everything to get the funding. Some of the best non-profits that execute very well, especially on the camaraderie side, are very flat organizations. So everyone has a voice and the leadership is willing to listen and implement what they’re talking about. So if a lowly employee Jeremy comes in and it’s his first day and he has a great idea. A good leadership team will actually listen to them, not be like, hey, learn, learn your lane first and understand what you’re doing. Then maybe we’ll, we’ll hear you out. That’s what happens a lot of times. But if you listen to your team, you’ll be surprised how many great ideas they have to further the mission, because people join non-profits not for the money. They join for the mission of what you’re trying to do.

David Pisarek: 100%. You know, it’s one thing to have a comment box up on the wall. You know, people fill out a paper and they put it in and nothing ever ends up happening and it’s just going into a black void. The organizations that actually internalize, take the feedback, get back in touch with the per— if it’s not anon-ymous, right? Like get in touch with the person, let them know what the plans are, whether they’ll do it or not do it, right? But the fact that they even just listened and took a few moments to think about the insight, the idea, right? It goes a long way.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah. I mean, there’s so much penny-pinching that you have to do with a non-profit. And yeah, the standard sort of common box is what the general population does, even within larger companies. But there’s usually no outlet to receive feedback for the leadership team. And at the same time, employees don’t feel that they are safe enough to bring up something that’s wrong. It’s like, hey, our computers are are really old. Can we get some new computers? And a lot of times those people are demonized, not just within non-profits, but just in general. And just being around the tech world, just being able to empower your team, that’s something I see so much with tech founders that it needs to be brought over into the non-profit world. So that way, again, we all love making money, we all have profits, like there’s no doubt about that. But again, the non-profit world, you are serving a higher purpose here, and that’s something that they need to adopt from the tech world is empower your team on so many different levels.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. As a business owner, as a founder, we’re often the bottleneck, right? So if you look at an organization with, you know, you’ve got the executive director, you’ve got the board of directors above that, you’ve got the executive C-suite in there, then you have the VPs, then you have the directors, then you have the managers, then you have the employees. There’s a lot of bottleneck and red tape and things that happen in there. So I’m curious, how can we affect or modify or adjust internal systems to help with that?

Jeremy Hass: Number one, it’s, uh, understanding the size of your organization. Some people have this sort of title inflation of, hey, I’ve been around for a number of years now, just call me a VP, but I’m not necessarily doing the work of a VP. Within smaller organizations, you don’t need that many layers. Again, some of the best non-profits, even larger ones, are very flat in terms of the hierarchical standards. But the— what I see a lot of times is when you have this hierarchy structure, like with the C-suite, directors, VPs, you get this sense of ego of like, the decision has to come to me and I’m the one who has to make the decision. So what happens, again, going back to empowering your team, is even little things like getting water for the fridge for your team needs to be approved by someone like the executive director. It’s like, do we have the money for this? It’s like, why should that person the executive director, the C-suite team, the leadership, or even the board of directors for all that matters. Why would they be the ones to decide if we need to get more water or have the funding for it?

Jeremy Hass: Little decisions like that are usually kept high up the chain when you can delegate that to other people. Some places they do delegate that. They have like someone, some lowly team member, they’re like the snack bar liaison. I’ve, I’ve seen, uh, when I work for the Air Force, that’s what we had. We had a little snack bar liaison and we had a little government travel card. Or government credit card where we went out and got snacks. So you could do little things like that where very basic tasks that may require a little more approval, just give them a set, set approval to say, hey, anything under $100, go ahead and get. It speeds up time to execution. It gives you more efficiency and it doesn’t bother the executive team with some stupid decisions. And that’s what happens a lot of times. You’re waiting on the executives, you’re waiting on your leadership because they have so many decisions to make and most of them are things that can be delegated down.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. So when we think about internal systems, how could those be used to improve donor trust retention and lead to long-term donation and funding growth?

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, so I mean, you can use, use and leverage simple automations. Again, setting thresholds for certain dollar amounts, saying, hey, if it’s over this dollar amount, the next person up has to approve it. You can set up a system where It’s like, hey, we’re getting— again, using the, the water example, we’re getting water for the fridge. It’s less than $100. You put it in the system, say, go ahead and go do it yourself. Hey, it’s over $100. Go ask your supervisor for approval. Hey, it’s like $1,000 for whatever reason. Now you go involve the next level. But this way you have that sort of track of what you’re doing. You’re still logging the expense, but now everything is speed to execution. And those simple automations can notify the next person up like, hey, approve this or deny this. And then you can have that report that you can send to to donors and say, look, here’s where your money’s going, here’s how it’s being spent, and here’s some things that we could even try to improve on. Having that sense of clarity where the money is going is usually one person’s sole job at a non-profit of tracking every penny.

Jeremy Hass: If you can make their job easier, you can make so much more happen.

David Pisarek: Let’s put systems in place. It could be as easy as like a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet that has, you know, some calculations in there to help some of that decision process making. But if we can put some of these pieces like what you’re talking about in place, that person who’s responsible for making sure all the funds are aligned and the numbers all match up and all that, they can spend their time doing the bigger priorities that they have that are part of their plate that they’re tasked with. Right. And let’s make better use of everybody’s time.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, it’s all about using our time efficiently. Look, we’re all adults. We’re there to work. Trust us to do our job and get our job done. Again, another thing that happens is a lot of managers are really not taught how to manage, especially in the non-profit world. It’s— you sort of learn from the person that, that was there previously, and they were never taught properly, and so on and so on. So one of the things is having a leadership team that brings out the best in others is extremely important. And setting up these systems to have those approvals and empower your team goes such a long way. And I mean, look, A lot of people think AI can be expensive. A lot of these tools can be expensive. This sort of simple reporting automation and notification to your supervisors, that’s something I can build for less than like $500 a month. AI can be leveraged so well. Things like Zapier are great tools to build out these systems so that way little, little tasks that we do on a daily basis, we can automate those so we can focus on the bigger picture.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. And when we think about non-profits and the work that they’re doing in you know, like how we help our clients, right? They rely really heavily on human connection, right? So to your point, you know, how can they use automation to improve that kind of efficiency without losing the personal touch that donors and volunteers kind of typically expect?

Jeremy Hass: A lot of people think AI is going to replace the human element, but the way I see it is it’s going to enhance the human element because What I’ve seen, what I’ve actually done with some of my other clients and then in the for-profit world within tech companies, within other businesses, is you spend a lot of time pulling reports. That’s something that can be 100% automated with AI agents now. So if it’s taking me 30 minutes to an hour every single week to pull reports for my manager, guess what? If I automate that, if I use AI, or whatever to do to get it done in a heartbeat. That gives me half an hour to an hour every single week to focus on the outreach, the human element, speaking to our clientele, helping the community. And that’s something that is not necessarily quantifiable. A lot of us will say, oh, well, it’s going to cost this much. I’m like, well, your mission is to serve the community. What if you had an extra 5 hours a week to serve your community. Is that not the important thing here? We have to be cost-conscious, but at its core, your mission is to serve the community.

Jeremy Hass: We have to find a way to empower your team, to allow your team more time to serve the people that you need. And the donors will be happy in the long run because they’ll see a lot more efficiency. You don’t need to hire 20 people to do simple reporting, simple admin stuff. You can have one, maybe two people handle that admin side and then focus the rest of the money on what actually matters.

David Pisarek: So a couple little caveats that I want to mention for everybody listening is we need to be careful what it is that we’re giving AI access to, right? So you don’t necessarily want to give it access to all of your donor information without anonymizing it, right? So you could run a report in your system, say, remove everybody’s names from it, maybe apply ID numbers or something like that instead. And then you can throw that, you know, the last 12 months of donations, throw that in and have it generate a report about, you know, what were the biggest donations each month, which months were the biggest amounts that were fundraised, how much came in from corporate sponsorships versus personal donations versus monthly or annual versus one-time giving. And you can have all those reports. Those are just numbers, right? It’s really easy for a system to generate reports around that, right? You don’t necessarily need a human executing on that type of effort when they could be going after stewarding bigger donors or trying to find corporate sponsors that are local that kind of support the same kind of mission. So I think there’s definitely a much better use of time, but we also just need to be careful with what we’re giving access to.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, you need to be extremely careful. Look, AI has improved drastically over the last 12 months. I mean, me personally, I’m testing out tools every week, and by the time I’m done testing a lot of these tools, they’re completely obsolete. So things are changing rapidly. But my background, I am very cautious about privacy and security. So I am never one to say like, hey, just use AI, don’t even worry about it, let it do its thing, it’ll, it’ll work. No, we have to ensure that we protect everything, especially in a non-profit world where some people want to stay anon-ymous. Being donors. Some people, you’re dealing with so much money coming from so many different avenues. The next, the last thing you want is an AI agent or an AI bot to just go off the rails and be like, well, I can do all this better, so let me, let me go reach out to them myself. And then you have this complete mess. AI has to be leveraged in a very structured manner. It’s, it’s not, hey, you’re going to handle all the fundraising. It’s, hey, you’re going to handle all the reporting. It’s so, so you have to be very careful how you implement it, and that’s what people like me focus on.

David Pisarek: And even from, you know, marketing and communication standpoint, if you can leverage AI to create custom email journey sequences for donors that fall within this range, and it can generate— I’m going to call it a draft of the content. You always need a human to review it before you send it out. There will be mistakes. AI likes to hallucinate. It likes to make stuff up. So, you know, just be again cautious with it, but you can have it do probably 80% of it, maybe more. And just, you know, the final review is done by the team or the person responsible for it.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, I completely agree with you there.

David Pisarek: So if a non-profit leader or somebody even in a non-profit is feeling overwhelmed by CRM spreadsheets, email tools, grant tracking systems. What’s the first step that they should take to try to sort things out and clean things up?

Jeremy Hass: I mean, obviously call someone like me because a lot of times we get so overwhelmed, especially as leadership. We get overwhelmed with the millions and millions of things we have to do. So one of the first things I always do is play therapist and sort of like Hey, take a step back, calm down, take a breath. If you try to tackle it yourself in this frantic state, you’re going to make a lot of bad decisions. I’ve done it. My first startup, I made so many bad decisions. And so calling someone like me to kind of help you take a step back, have this outside view of everything, and then we can build a roadmap to automate or make it more efficient. Again, is the answer delegating to someone else to handle all of this? Is the answer leveraging AI to automate it? We don’t know. Everyone, every organization is different. So someone like me, someone who knows what they’re doing in this sort of world, in this chaos, they will ensure that you get a holistic view of your operations to ensure that you’re getting what you need. I don’t do any sort of cookie-cutter sort of results or implementations.

Jeremy Hass: Everything is specific to the organizations I work with because everyone is so different.

David Pisarek: One of the things that if somebody wanted to take this on themselves, or at least start down that path, just make a flowchart of all of your systems, how they all interconnect. I did this maybe about 3 years ago in my agency on my iPad with the Apple Pencil, and I just sketched out the journey, the map, the how we do our sales from start to finish. How do we fulfill our projects from start to finish. And we looked at it and we were like, okay, what and how can we find efficiencies in this? Are we doing these 3 things because, you know, it makes sense to do it? Are we doing them because that’s just what we’ve done and we haven’t questioned it, right? So let’s take a full wholesome review of everything that’s going on. And the best, one of the best things to do is, you know, maybe I’m a little bit biased here, so maybe take it with a grain of salt, but bring in a consultant whose job it is to do and review and manage and help sort out all of these different scenarios, situations, systems, data migration, all of that, because that is their expertise, right?

David Pisarek: It might not necessarily be yours, whereas you’re just doing it off the side of your desk because it’s, you know, the other duties as assigned in your job description. It’ll save time, effort, and I’m not going to call it failures, I’m going to call it lessons that we learn along the way that we can bring to your organization and help you kind of fast-track and skip over those lessons that you shouldn’t necessarily need to learn.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah. And look at, look at it this way as well. I’m biased as well because I avoided actually trying to bring in outside help before. That was the hard lesson I learned is that I need to offload to experts. And one of the big things that consultants, advisors, fractional ops managers, fractional chief of staff, fractional executives, all of us that come from this sort of consulting world, what we’re going to do is give you the ugly truth. When you try to tackle it yourself, yes, you can 100% do it yourself. I will always advocate for people trying to do it themselves. My ultimate goal is you bring me on so you eventually fire me. If you don’t fire me, I’m doing something wrong. But when you try to do it yourself, there’s always going to be those thoughts that I don’t want to admit to myself I’m doing something horribly wrong. I’ll sit there and say, oh, maybe this is something that could be fixed. Oh no, that, that’s not an issue. No, no. Whereas you work with someone like me, I’m going to come in and say, your communication with your team is terrible. We need to fix that. And you will combat me. That’s always going to be a part of it, but we’re going to find a solution to make everyone happy.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. So, you know, what point would you say, because there will be like a point of no return, right? Where like an organization will outgrow, we’re going to get this and this and this and kind of like patch things together to cobble it and make it do what it needs to do. So what point would an organization maybe outgrow that and what should they have in place before they try to scale maybe their campaigns or expand their programs?

Jeremy Hass: I mean, you should be at minimum once a year, you should do a full audit of your systems at least once a year because like you said, everyone outgrows the tools and systems and operations that they have. As companies grow, you add more complexity and so you need different tools, you need different processes. So every year you should do a full deep dive audit. I recommend it maybe quarterly for some organizations. Everyone’s different again, at least once a year. But there’s always a point where it kind of gives me the sense that you need to change something is when the leadership team is overwhelmed by decision-making. If you get bogged down with simple decision-making, that usually tells me something is broken or you’ve outgrown something your current process. It may have worked for a year or two, but it’s like our kids. Like, as our— as children get older, they change. We have to parent them differently. We have to treat them a little differently. It’s the same thing with our operations. We have to adjust it based off of how things are growing.

David Pisarek: And that’s really the key, is setting aside time. A lot of organizations, I think every non-profit and charity, they do annual annual planning, right? Where they typically fail is doing quarterly planning and quarterly reviews. And if you’re reviewing the thing every quarter— all right, these are the systems we’re using, are we still using them?— it’s going to be monotonous, it’s going to be irritating, but in the long run you’ll be able to optimize and find efficiencies because you’re reviewing it more frequently. If you want to leave it to once a year, that’s totally fine. If you’re a bigger organization, you’ve got like lots and lots of different systems, you’ve got 100 different people in your team at the organization and, you know, I don’t know, 15, 20, 30 volunteers, right? It’s harder to kind of assess that as frequently. But, you know, even just in your, like, your IT team, your finance team, your administrative team, your marketing team, if they just review their own things, that’s going to kind of help set you up for bigger success in the long run, as long as you’re ultimately bringing all those together. Because we don’t work in silos. A lot of organizations, each department is its own silo. We’ve got to work together, right? You’re all there to fight and to help us the same cause, right? You got to work together.

Jeremy Hass: Yeah, I mean, it’s— if you’re not communicating effectively with your team, if you’re not fighting the good fight, I mean, saving money with different tools, saving time is great, but again, it goes back to the mission. How are we forwarding, moving forward with the mission and helping our community, helping this goal that we have for whatever non-profit you’re with? I have a client, it’s not non-profit, but she’s an immigration attorney. Everything we talk about putting in, in place for her and her clients is always about how can we make their lives easier. It’s not about, not necessarily about saving money or anything like that. Yes, that’s— we’re always cost conscious, but it’s always how can we effectively help make this easier for your clients and how can we educate them more? How can we, how can we make their lives easier and ease, ease their worries about what’s going on? It’s all the same thing with any organization. How can we forward that mission?

David Pisarek: If an organization could only improve one operational system, this year, right? What would you recommend that they focus on first?

Jeremy Hass: That’s always a tough one, again, because everyone’s a little different, but always ensuring you have some sort of communication tool and procedures in place. Because again, if we’re not talking to each other, things are going to break down at some point. Whatever it is, it could even be something as, hey, I assume Jeremy’s going to do his job, and then realistically, Jeremy’s not going to do his job. That happens a lot. The communication breakdowns happen. So having a tool like Slack or project management tools to track donor spending with activity, you can hold people accountable. On the flip side, I’m a big proponent of, again, taking care of your team. So if any organization is not doing even something as simple as like a little pizza party, start doing those things. Take care of your team. The team will take care of your organization.

David Pisarek: Jeremy, amazing insights around operational clarity, automation, scaling, taking care of the team. To your point, I hope that folks listening have been able to get some really great advice and pointers from our conversation. And I like to put my guests kind of on the spot around this point in the podcast. So if you were to give a challenge to everybody listening to this, something you want them to do in the next 24 to 48 hours after listening to this episode, episode, what would that challenge be?

Jeremy Hass: Go in front of your team. If you’re all in a single office, have a little town hall meeting or put everyone on Zoom and within 24-48 hours, ask them, how can I better serve you? Again, if my team does not trust me as a leader, if they’re not willing to tell me the ugly truth and how we can improve, I need to listen. Go ask your team, how can I serve you better? And the result will be you’re going to get a lot of uncomfortable truths. If you get crickets from everyone, something is wrong. No one wants to say anything because ultimately your result will be you will get these things that you can improve on and in turn you’ll get a team that wants to further the mission.

David Pisarek: If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Jeremy Hass: I mean, I’m pretty easy to find. You can find me on LinkedIn, send me a message there. Just find me Jeremy Haas or go through PrefixOps. I manage all of my social media channels, so I’m a solopreneur right now. So anytime you send me a message on LinkedIn, any social media, it’s me responding. So you’re not getting some random chatbot. Don’t worry, we’re nowhere near that yet. But LinkedIn, I’m there. I’m heavily on TikTok. I run a page where I give out a lot of tips for entrepreneurs and leaders around a lot of these intangible communications type of stuff. So you can find me on TikTok. My handle is @daybydaygrowth, and you can always send me a message there as well. Those are the two biggest channels I focus on right now. But if you can find me on Instagram and Facebook, feel free to connect with me there as well. I don’t mind at all. I’m always happy to have conversations with anyone.

David Pisarek: Thank you again so much, Jeremy. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the links to the plethora of Jeremy’s social profiles or want to watch this, listen to it, share it, get the transcript from this episode, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. And until next time, keep on being successful.