Scott, you're running cods essentially on your own — under three years old, under $250K, volunteer-run, and still standing. That's not a small thing. The fact that you're already asking diagnostic questions about board engagement, revenue, and hiring tells me you're thinking a few steps ahead of where most founders are at this stage. What you named as your biggest challenge — I can't — is one of the most honest things a founder can say. Let's look at what's actually behind that wall.
Jesse Lane founder of goodmakerU, has a message to walk you through your report to let you know whats here, and how to use it.
When you selected board engagement as a top priority and named it as a pain point, you were pointing at the single biggest structural gap for an early-stage organization. Board dysfunction — and at cods, it sounds less like dysfunction and more like absence — is almost never about bad people. It's almost always about unclear expectations and a recruitment process that prioritized availability over commitment. That means this is fixable. The specific-ask principle is where this starts: 'Make two donor introductions this quarter' allows yes or no. 'Help more with fundraising' allows nodding and inaction. Right now, you are carrying what a board of six to nine people should be distributing. An unengaged board doesn't just fail to help — it keeps the entire organization weight-bearing on one person. That one person is you, and you already told us what that feels like.
With your primary funding coming from individuals and families, and your revenue concentration in the 0–10% range suggesting the base is still being built, the concentration risk here isn't about one donor being too dominant — it's about the entire revenue base being too thin. At under three years old and under $250K, that's developmentally normal. But you also named increasing grant funding as a top priority, which is the right instinct. The sequenced path GoodmakerU calls Protection → One New Stream → Patience applies directly: stabilize what's already working with individual donors first, then build one new stream — grants, in your case — rather than chasing three at once. Eighteen to twenty-four months to meaningful diversification is honest. And starting that grant pipeline now, even with one application, is the move that future-you will thank present-you for.
Here's the thing about cods at this stage: you've built something real in under three years with no staff and limited budget. The ceiling you're bumping into isn't a failure — it's the proof that you've outgrown the founding model. The $500K Question from GoodmakerU is worth sitting with: if someone handed you $500,000 tomorrow, what would break first? For most organizations at your stage, the answer is everything, because it all runs through me. That's not a character flaw — it's a structure problem. The path forward involves two things happening in parallel: getting a board that actually distributes the load, and adding at least one key staff position so the organization doesn't entirely collapse if you take ten days off. You named hiring as a priority. That instinct is correct. The sequence matters — board first, then hire, then scale.
Here's how these three connect: the board gap is creating the revenue ceiling, and the revenue ceiling is making the hiring feel impossible. Because your board isn't engaged in fundraising or donor introductions, the individual giving base grows slowly and entirely through your effort. Because revenue growth is slow, bringing on a staff person feels financially out of reach. And because you have no staff, everything continues running through you — which means you have no bandwidth to work on the board problem or the grant pipeline. It's a closed loop. The way out is not to try to fix all three simultaneously. It's to break the loop at the board level first, because an activated board is the only lever that creates momentum in both the revenue and the capacity directions at the same time. One engaged board member who makes two introductions a quarter changes the math.
Get your team and your board in on this conversation. Reports like this one work best when the whole organization can tackle issues together.
