7 Lessons I Learned as a Non-Profit Founder
By: Stephanie Tolk
Tags: Work, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Business, Self

I spent much of my 20s confused about a suitable career choice. I graduated college with a degree in English and a minor in Psychology and hoped my subsequent stint in the Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa would clarify a career path.

Prior to that adventure, I’d lived abroad as an exchange student twice in high school and once in college, so the international realm held interest for me.

While I felt hopeful about a career in international development, my years in Africa, which illuminated the complexity of international travel and global aid, disavowed me of that notion.

As I settled down in the U.S., I knew one thing: world travel had changed me so positively and so irrevocably that I wished everyone could immerse deeply into other cultures. I understood the power of travel to create tolerance, nurture empathy, open minds, and broaden worldviews, and I knew too many Americans who needed their ethnocentric tendencies challenged and their stereotypes shattered.

So when I met a woman a couple of years after moving to Portland who asked me what I wanted to do after graduate school, I replied,

“I want to start an organization that takes young people out of the country who would never otherwise have the chance to travel abroad.”

She paused, smiled, and said, “I’ve always had the same dream.”

Shortly thereafter, The Pangaea Project was born. I was 29 years old.

My co-founder and I rode the wave of leadership for almost 10 years, and the trajectory, challenges, successes, and surprises that emerged during my time with The Pangaea Project are rich fodder for another story on another day. This article is about leadership, entrepreneurship, and the lessons that come with starting something of your own.

You’ll get a lot of support from the wrong people.

If you start anything — be it a restaurant, a tech start-up, a non-profit organization, a social business — you’ll naturally invite involvement from people you know in the nascent phase. You ask friends and family to join your Facebook page or newsletter list. You sell them your earliest products. You invite them to become focus group members or donors. And those individuals show up just as they should: with love, words of encouragement, completed surveys, online sharing, and dollars.

But those kind-hearted souls are almost never the target audience. Nor can they sustain your vision.

Continue to understand, communicate with, cultivate, and woo your target audience (customers, clients, donors, what have you) from the first day.

If you don’t know your strengths and weaknesses yet, you will soon.

As a founder, almost all challenges cross your desk in the beginning, simply because you don’t have colleagues to whom you can delegate. That means that one day you may be negotiating for a lease on office space while the next day you may be appeasing a disgruntled vendor. You may lay people off, write an annual report, meet with city officials, win a substantial contract or grant, and call a plumber, all in the same week.

Very quickly you grasp your professional strengths as well as your weaknesses. If you’re lucky, your weaknesses reveal themselves early in your tenure, as only then you can hire people who complement you.

Few people will tell you the truth.

Many people have great ideas, and most people never execute them. Those who do are lauded. As an entrepreneur, you’ll receive compliments and kudos, be asked to share your story, and generally feel very good about yourself. People focus on what you’re building, and may not initially share thoughts on any duplicative, unneeded, or harmful elements of your work.

Laster, you’ll be everyone’s boss, and few people tell their boss the whole truth.

Surround yourself with truth-tellers. While you may have them on your Board of Directors or among your staff, invite an outside advisor or mentor, with little personal investment in your project, to tell you the truth regularly. Due to their impartiality, these individuals make strong allies.

The hardest task involves establishing an impeccable team.

As your idea germinates, you’ll share it with colleagues, friends, family, or individuals you like, know, and trust. Perhaps friends help you develop your website or tour office spaces for you, and it may be tempting to invite those people on as IT or operations staff. Fight the urge, and squelch any burgeoning sense of duty.

Only welcome your friends into important positions if they’re the most suitable candidate for those positions. Top-notch employees — those who can propel your business forward, produce genius ideas, solve monumental problems, and persist loyally during the company’s growing pains — are probably not your closest friends. And a friendship doesn’t usually survive a layoff.

As Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times piece on the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings,

“Mr. Hastings writes of his managers: ‘To feel good about cutting someone they like and respect requires them to desire to help the organization and to recognize that everyone at Netflix is happier and more successful when there is a star in every position.’”

You don’t build the product or provide the service.

Failed founders are those who create a business so that they can provide the service or make the product: the apparel CEO who wants to do the sewing, the design/build president who hopes to swing the hammer, the non-profit executive who wishes to work with the children.

Leaders tend to be enmeshed in the same sorts of tasks across industries. They anticipate the future, set course, understand audiences or customers, manage budgets, digest data, change direction, and take the punches. They don’t sew, build, or work with children, at least not for very long.

The Pangaea Project inspired teenagers from low-income families to become changemakers. We trained and supported groups of young people locally, accompanied them for several weeks each summer to South America or Asia to learn about social and environmental challenges, and assisted them in creating change upon return.

And what did I do? I served as a chief strategist, fundraiser, marketer, and operations head for most of my tenure.

Knowing the right people is more important than knowing the right information.

No one can know everything, and the most successful leaders surround themselves with individuals who know more about specific topics where the leader lacks wisdom. It might be obvious to hire heads of finance and human resources, but the most successful entrepreneur notices the small but vital gaps in their knowledge.

Finally, you’re not exceptional.

Founders come in all shapes and sizes. Some are confident and self-assured, others are socially awkward. Some can vision but not execute; others can execute but not vision. Some can network with charisma; others function more effectively behind their screens. Some seem to be able to do it all; others are quietly drowning.

We’re all merely people. Messy, complicated people.

With all the praise and with few people speaking hard truths, you may begin to feel the ego swell. In truth, founders are expendable, just like any staff person anywhere. We think that the baby we birthed must be raised by us, but often, when the founder moves on, the organization benefits from a fresh vision.

Anybody can start something. We all have seeds of entrepreneurship within us. Those who water those seeds are more willing to take risks, to try, to fail, and to try again. We’re not exceptional; we’re just persistent.