BridgeBuilding Strategies

09/16/2026

Know yourself.

“Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment." – Marcus Aurelius

To celebrate the start of the school year, I’m sharing some of the best learning experiences I’ve had, and I’ll start with the start…knowing yourself. Four assessments really helped bring clarity for me and people I support: Myers-Briggs, Clifton Strengths (formerly StrengthsFinder) Enneagram and purpose assessment.
Myers-Briggs can be incredibly helpful for personal understanding, and from knowing how to best manage your drivers of energy…and to really understand why you may plan everything out to the nth degree and relish quiet time, while your partner likes to wing it and socialize. INTJ.

From a career perspective, Clifton Strengths posits that it is generally more impactful to focus on and build from your strengths, and find roles that best fit those strengths vs. trying to remedy weaknesses. The assessment provides insights on which types of roles will be the best fit, and the who might best complement you. Categories include: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. One of my most satisfying work moments was working with a colleague who was considering a role change. He was completely focused on technical roles so he could use his engineering degree….until his assessment came back with all people-related strengths. Context, Achiever, Responsibility, Analytical, Learner.

I have found that an Enneagram assessment really complements both Myers-Briggs and Clifton Strengths, bringing together the personal and professional in a very insightful way. 5 -Quiet Specialist.

A purpose assessment brings it all together. Thank you, Doris Hage, for an eye-opening reading that’s helping me navigate a number of recent transitions.

Next week, I'll share some thoughts on great educational opportunities to work with others.

09/09/2026

In My Life

"The most important things cannot be measured." W. Edwards Deming

I've recently shared thoughts about things that can and should be measured, and how to track them on a scorecard for either a small business or nonprofit. Lots to do with the head.

Surprise! The most important work I have done over the past three years has nothing to do with numbers or the head, but with the heart. The universe has seen fit to connect me with some amazing people who are building impactful organizations - for-profit, non-profit, and often both. I've been gifted with the chance to be there and help with things that go beyond the business entity. As I share these stories, I'm using "they" to keep these examples as anonymous as possible.

My first client was a successful business owner/nonprofit founder/community leader. They took care of everyone and were frazzled and overwhelmed. We did an exercise to enable more powerful "nos," and established criteria for new requests for this leader's time. We never initiated a scorecard - didn't need it.

The most impactful client engagement I've had involved scheduling a medical appointment, but I didn't know it at the time. I was helping a successful/overwhelmed business leader sort out a number of issues and set a vision for less chaotic operations. I found that they were not taking care of themself. I helped them get insurance and schedule appointments. They were relieved to get an overdue dental procedure done that helped with headaches. They were shocked when they finally got their physical and found that their feelings of exhaustion were due to an untreated, potentially dangerous chronic health issue. When they addressed the issue, many other pieces fell into place. No metrics, no run charts.

The second most important engagement I had was helping an overwhelmed local business owner and nonprofit/community leader simplify a complex situation to find a path that prioritized their well-being. Again, this client took care of everyone else, and carried a tremendous financial and personal burden to do so. They also carried a legacy from a loved one that they felt was important to honor. I listened to their story, acknowledged their grief, and we got started. I helped them sort out personal financials, an exit strategy from each entity, and a plan forward that allowed them to set boundaries. Metrics focused on the person, not the enterprise.

Finally, I've been working with an overwhelmed business leader who has succeeded beyond their planned vision. We are building a scorecard that includes the usual suspects but also includes "joy."

I hope you've noticed my excessive use of the word overwhelmed. That is a key pain point for most of the leaders I support, and it is a blessing to help them clarify and find a path forward.

This note concludes my series on business metrics. In honor of the academic year starting, I'll focus my next series on highly impactful learning opportunities.

09/02/2026

I'm the Map! I'm the Map! I'm the Map!

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men. Gang aft a-gley.” Robert Burns

Somewhere in my corporate life, I had a cube neighbor with the sign "You don't plan to fail, you fail to plan." Also "Hope is not a strategy." Obvious. Of course. Yeesh.

But when you are wearing all the hats of a small business owner or nonprofit leader, some days all you can plan is when you might be able to grab a glass of water, and even that is a stretch. But failing to plan sometimes keeps you in chaos, because it's hard to separate the urgent from the important.

Your strategic plan is the map to connect today's work to tomorrow's success. If it is a 2-inch binder on the shelf that you never look at, it's not a plan, it's a bookend. Keeping key elements of the plan on the scorecard keeps that vision alive and relevant to today.

Some items in the "plan" section might be key milestones for a larger project timeline, areas of focus for the quarter, or anything large enough that you need to keep in view, but small enough to actually get it done. You can even use a kanban board for this section of the scorecard, if you are taking an agile approach to planning.

The key is to keep it front and mind, so when you finally do get that glass of water, you know what you should do next.

Next week, I'll share some "off scorecard" stories of how strategic planning/decision tool approaches have helped small business and nonprofit owners pull out of the chaos, find clarity, and identify their best next step.

Better together,
Colleen

08/27/2026

Where innovation and mission intersect!

08/19/2026

“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.” Jack Welch

I've been truly blessed to have had the last three years to working with leaders of non-profits and small businesses. The joy is sometimes tempered by sadness, when I work with a business owner to help them discern whether they truly have a going concern, or whether it is an expensive hobby.

This week, I'll share some reflections on knowing when enough is enough, and how financial metrics and other insights can help a business owner discern reality.

1. Symptoms: Indicators in the financial section of your scorecard that you have a hobby, not a business:
-There is no financial scorecard
-You do not really know your past or current financial metrics: e.g., profit, revenue, cost of operations, your cash level, and how many days of operating cash you have
-The salary portion of expenses is $0: people have worked for free in hopes of a transition to a paid role or other benefits
-Owner draws are consistently $0
-Personal and business financials are intertwined

2. More symptoms:

-You don't really know what you need to do to turnaround the business, so hope becomes a strategy
-You continue to liquidate assets into the business: retirement, house sale proceeds, inheritance
-You continue to build debt

3. Potential root causes

-You started with a product or service vision from your interests, passions, or an emotional point not an observed pain point
-You started with a partner/backer who had the vision or business acumen and they are no longer involved and you are trying to go it alone
-If you have a physical storefront, it was based strictly on cost, convenience or emotion, not customer proximity or an objective assessment
-Your product or service has become irrelevant due to societal, technology, or other reasons
-You have had unrecognized embezzlement
-You or your family have had health or other issues that has taken your focus off the business.
-One of the "5 Ds" of a forced business exit: death, disability, divorce, distress, disagreement

There is a lot of discussion online about how the labor market is causing people to consider working for themselves. The good news: according to the SBA, is that approximately 1.1 million new small businesses opened in the United States in 2025. The sobering reality is that 982,940 small businesses closed. About 20.4% of new U.S. businesses fail in their first year, 49.4% fail within five years, and 65.3% fail within ten years, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Opening a business is a bold move - knowing when and how to close it is a wise one.

Next week, I'll share some thoughts on the product section of the scorecard.

08/12/2026

"No money, no mission."

Those words, coming from a leader in our nonprofit community, form the basis for my thoughts today. I also like these words: "There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich." Marlene Dietrich

As part of some thoughts about operating metrics, this week's topic is the financial section of the business scorecard, and how it applies to non-profit businesses.

The money: Key financial metrics for businesses, both non-profit and for profit, should include things like profit, cash flow, and revenue. Yep, non-profits can make a profit...but they cannot distribute it to stakeholders. Just like for-profit businesses, cash flow is just as important an indicator of viability and risk as revenue and profit...sometimes more. (In case you're curious about your favorite charity's financial metrics, many follow the best practice of including IRS 990 tax forms on the organization's website. They are also available on Candid)

The mission: For-profit business decisions often include return on a business case using investment (ROI) and payback as criteria...you can think of mission measurement as the "ROI" of a nonprofit. When someone starts a nonprofit, it's generally to address a gap they see in society and to achieve a vision for a better world. The mission is the form of the work the nonprofit does to address the gap. It is another best practice to break the mission and vision down to a process model called a logic model, with vision/mission, inputs, process/programming, outputs, outcomes and impacts.

As an example, think about an emergency food provider. The gap they see is a lack of food security.

-Their vision is a community with food security for all.
-Their mission is to provide healthy food.
-The inputs are food/cash donations and volunteer hours.
-The programs/processes include logistics to get the food to the recipient.
-The outputs include people served and amount of food provided.

But how do you measure the outcomes and impacts of the work? At a purely "I care about my neighbor" level, it is incomprehensible that we can have hungry people in the midst of our national wealth. But if you must see a business case...here it is. A study a number of years ago estimated the annual cost of hunger at $180B in direct health costs, lost work time, and educational impacts. You can apply that number to the fraction of the national number of people experiencing food insecurity and look at the value of the work in our community in a strictly dollar amount.

I was privileged to serve on the board of another organization that houses expecting mothers and provides support through birth and the first year of the baby's life. The outcomes and impacts in this case are priceless.

Our society is truly richer because of the work our non-profits do. See the comments for more examples.

Next week, I'll share some last thoughts on profitability metrics.

08/05/2026

Money, it's gas
..or, better stated...."Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.” – Peter Drucker

Previously, I shared that the typical scorecard metrics for my for-profit clients include categories around people, profit, product and plan, and shared some thoughts on people metrics. Thanks for your comments!

This week, it's all about the cash. Spoiler alert: If you find this week's topic boring and/or unimportant, you probably should not own a business.

Also, please be seated when you read this next line: a lot of small business owners may have only a rough sense of their business' profitability. Early on, they are completely focused on operations and cash flow, justifiably so - must keep the doors open. But when this becomes the long-term norm, the owner may actually have not a viable business, but a very expensive hobby.

One of the first steps in a client engagement is to get clarity around the long-term goal needed for retirement and estate purposes, and sometimes we loop back and forth with a financial planner. This is an incredibly important discussion for the small business owner who intends to pursue a transfer, ESOP or outright sale at the end of their engagement - it's not possible to start too early. It often gets missed by the owner who intends to wind the business down when they leave.

At the risk of a "Captain Obvious" moment, I recommend we include some combination of three metrics related to profit on the scorecard: EBITDA, cash flow, and net income - each for their own reason. For the owner who plans to wind down, we can skip the EBITDA.

For supporting metrics, I recommend using an influence diagram to pick the most important drivers of profit and cash flow. For some businesses, it makes sense to include revenue and/or key drivers of revenue such as volume and price. For the professional service provider, profit per billable hour can be a good way to evaluate the book of business. We can pick metrics around expenses and investment based on unique business needs.

One last thought from Stephen Covey: "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."

Next week, I'll share some thoughts around how this part of the scorecard relates to nonprofits.

07/29/2026

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Albert Einstein

Last week, I shared a LOT of thoughts on how my clients manage their people. This week, we will talk about how my clients manage themselves.

Bottom line? The small business and nonprofit leaders I have supported have the worst boss in their career - themselves. They've learned to do it all - design/build/sell/bookkeep/market/clean....and the next day, do it all again. So it is EXCRUCIATINGLY hard to separate themselves from the operations of the business - in other words, work "ON" the business, not "IN" the business.

The only way out is through, and so we nearly always start with the punishing task of writing it all down - every task, every meeting, every day. There are then three simple tools I have used with my clients to organize their thoughts:

Eisenhower Matrix - classify tasks by urgent and important. It's a nice extra tough to create the matrix, but not necessary.
1. For those items that urgent + important = leader focus
2. For those that are important but not urgent = schedule
3. For those that are urgent but not important = delegate
4. You know what to do with the rest.

One client was able to winnow 200+ items down and organize them to prepare for a successful grand opening.

Timebox/Time Architecture - For items 1 and 2 above, timeboxing (or time architecture) can be a great way to drive focus and build a better cadence of work.

A large organization used this to drive better meeting scheduling: Monday - Staff, Tuesday - Technical, Wednesday - Cross Functional, Thursday - Senior Leader Reviews, Friday - "Hands on" product reviews.

A leader I worked with used this approach to protect the Important + Urgent work of writing a book.

Another one used this to enable growth into another sector of business.

Functional Org Charts - As team members join, tasks tend to get passed to the "next available," vs. the "best aligned."

A functional org chart that focuses on the work and aligns it to business functions can help better drive both productivity and better future hires - "production." "financial," "marketing," "purchasing."

None of these engagements require sophisticated approaches or big spending. They were as simple as possible, but not simpler. And they all drove better balance.

07/25/2026

07/22/2026

"The People Have the Power." Thanks, Patti Smith!

Last week, I shared the key categories of typical operating scorecards for my clients: People, Profit, Product, and Plan. In this age of AI job consumption and mass impersonal corporate layoffs, it feels strange to talk about people metrics. But for my clients with employees, metrics relevant to people tend to measure presence or performance.

"Presence" metrics include who's there or not there: employee headcount and/or volunteer hours/numbers, payroll/overtime, open positions, attendance/absenteeism. Those are the easiest to find.

The performance metrics that really drive the organization, however, often take a great deal of effort to gather. These include measures of turnover/retention, goal achievement, engagement, on time or quality performance, customer feedback, recognitions, wins/challenges, progress toward goals, training or certification completion, flight risk. Taking the time to determine which ones matter, and finding a way to measure them, pays off in the long run.

For one client, we tied performance to the enterprise scorecard with customer-based satisfaction metrics around on-time and quality. We built a simple tracking process for each deliverable that could be rolled up to an overall organizational assessment and broken out by team member, with specifics, for performance discussions. We also built a mechanism to incorporate cross functional feedback. No more halos and horns - each employee's objective data formed the basis for quarterly performance reviews and regular 1:1 discussions.

For another, a deep dive of turnover levels by role illuminated two critical issues:
With an average tenure of less than one year, the firm was bleeding money through recruiting/onboarding costs and the tough-to-measure cost of chaos as work was dropped and picked up again.

With poor/no requirements assessment, people were brought into the firm and almost immediately found that the job that was presented did not fit the reality. They left or were separated, or even worse, were placed in some other job for which they were equally not suited. See item 1.

In this case, we developed a functional org chart (without names) to better organize the work. We then used each functional work description to build standardized and specific job descriptions that could be rolled all the way through the process: posting, behavior-based interviewing, and performance management.
For another client, we built some leadership communication norms and internal communications moments of truth to temporarily fill the gap while a performance management system was developed.

For non-profits, it’s equally important to focus on volunteers, who often do critical work. For a local community garden, we deployed a simple job structure and online calendar signup with social media support and links to the calendar to sign up...and a great deal of recognition, "thank yous" and an end of season celebration.

For the solopreneur, it’s a different thing entirely – most will agree they have the worst bosses of their careers! Next week, I’ll share more about how I work with solopreneurs to better allocate their time.

It may seem strange to put people first on the scorecard. Businesses exist to generate income, and nonprofits to generate impacts, but I’ve learned that the other parts of the work fall in place if we get the people part right first.