Why I Chose to Start a Nonprofit

In discussing Gairm with mentors, peers, colleagues and friends, quite a few asked why I chose the nonprofit path. The mission is important, but the mission could have been for-profit too. That’s why this post isn’t about the purpose and mission of helping veterans and people with disabilities; it’s about why the organization is a nonprofit at all.

I want to ensure the nonprofit serves all stakeholders, operates with transparency and most importantly to me - trust (something I yearn for in my personal and professional life too).

Stakeholders

When you run a for-profit company, there’s a danger that the only stakeholder you really care about is yourself as the founder (or your shareholders, if you’re public). A nonprofit doesn’t allow that; its stakeholders are vast - employees, customers, regulators, the people your customers serve, and their customers in turn. That reach is a big part of why I’ve done this. I care about all of them, because my customers care about all of them.

“You don’t work or act like a partner or a vendor. You act like one of us.”

Here’s what that looks like in practice. I was on a sales call with a partner who brought me into the final stages of the sales process. I talked with the customer about what they wanted, with realism about the product and timeline. The next day the partner emailed me: “Chris, every time you talk to my customer, I spend the day doing damage control.”

That wasn’t what was happening. I was asking the right questions and giving truthful answers to the customer’s questions. This particular partner employee had a stakeholder of one: themselves (there’s nothing wrong with a stakeholder of one, it’s just not how I choose to operate). That deal wasn’t right for the customer, and it wasn’t right for us as an organization - rushing to sign a deal leads to weak SOWs that give the Service Delivery team additional stress and leads to unhappy customers. It ultimately isn’t right for the partner organization either, and I have no issue making that point. Often loudly. So that’s stakeholders, in practice.

Transparency

Nonprofits are required to be transparent about revenues, executive pay, and a whole number of things. It’s part of the annual IRS filings, and it’s public. That requirement matters to me because I’ve seen the opposite. I previously worked in an organization where the leader feigned transparency all the time but in hindsight, everything was done to ingratiate themselves at the expense of others - employees, their leadership team and customers. A nonprofit takes that option off the table (the filings don’t care how good a story the leader can spin).

Trust

I’ve worked with nonprofits from the vendor side, and one comment has stayed with me. The main stakeholder at one of them told me, “You don’t work or act like a partner or a vendor. You act like one of us.” I was at a for-profit at the time, but I operated with the nonprofit’s best intentions in mind. If a deal wasn’t right for them, it wasn’t right for us. Plenty of companies would take the win and move on; that’s not how I operate. Trust is something I value deeply, and I want it to stay simple: when Chris says it, you can rely on it.

Servant leadership

There’s a thread that ties all three together: servant leadership. Colleagues, employees, and partners have each described my style that way, unprompted. I truly exist to serve my team and my customers.

Seen through that lens, the three reasons are really one. Stakeholders is servant leadership as structure (deciding who the organization exists for). Transparency is servant leadership with the books open (you can’t serve people while hiding things from them). And trust is what serving people consistently earns.

A nonprofit doesn’t make anyone a servant leader, but it’s the structure that matches the style: no shareholders to enrich, and stakeholders everywhere you look. So there are three reasons why I’ve decided to start a nonprofit. Underneath them is just one: I exist to serve, and now the structure of the organization says the same.