Dream. Execute. Sustain.

Let’s scale the mountain together.

Visionaries need integrators and integrators need visionaries.

What’s the value of imagining the view from the peak of the mountain if you don’t have the tools or sherpa to guide you to the summit?

Similarly, where are you going if you have the tools and the sherpa but no vision for what you are seeking? Are you going up or down? Climbing in place?

The Fractional Advantage highlights how both are key to achieving aspirational goals and milestones and how a fractional executive team can ensure clarity, forward momentum, and sustainability.

This is a sneak peak into how I believe success is achieved and how those beliefs have evolved over time. Without further ado, welcome to The Fractional Advantage!

Let’s dream, execute, and sustain together. Discover your fractional advantage.

1. Celebrating two years with a new mission

This month marks two years since Ethan Bush and I decided to scale the entrepreneurial mountain together. When we launched, we did so aligned in our belief that nonprofits and the world of philanthropy are key to healthy communities.

Paramount to that belief was that nonprofit leaders should have for-profit mindsets. Thirty Three Strategies (33S) would exist to help integrate this mindset in nonprofits and discover measurable results that move the impact needle.

And that we’ve done.

Our opposite strengths - Ethan’s visionary to my integrator - have provided our clients with a unique blend of strategizing and executing on big aspirations.

Two year in and our core beliefs remain the same:

• Growth and for-profit mindsets are imperative in the nonprofit community
• Perceived limitations should be challenged
• A vision is only big if it feels nearly out of reach

Like anything else, though, time will refine your purpose. While those core beliefs remain, our purpose - the why behind what we do - has evolved in search for deep, sustainable success for our clients.

When we first started, we called ourselves consultants. After all, that’s what we were, right? We advised, consulted, and provided direction recommendations to our clients. But something felt hollow about this.

We felt as though we were leaving them with more questions than answers. More work than relief.

Executing on what we left behind often added to the workload of teams whose bandwidth was already stretched thin. They paid for clarity and relief and instead of relief, they realized the climb to the peak of the mountain was steeper than imagined.

We were seeing in real time that our clients needed less consulting and more executing. So, we asked: how can we pivot?

Enter a fractional executive team with the agility to address the before, during, and after of an organizational need.

Dream. Execute. Sustain.

Traditional consulting services with a team that can execute and sustain a new plan, bold idea, or a new initiative.

Think bonus team members at a fraction of the cost of creating a full-time salary line.

This, we believe, is the fractional advantage that can lead to deep work, sustainable impact, and raise the expectation of what can be achieved. To highlight this advantage - and to celebrate two years of impact - we’re launching The Fractional Advantage Substack publication that we hope will give permission to dream about what’s possible.

It’s all of a mindset, a way of achieving, and journey to raising the standard and changing expectations.

2. An nod to baseball

I was fortunate to play baseball with and against some of the best from around the world - high school, college, and the professional ranks.

Austin Nola hit a home run off me in high school that may still be in orbit. Funny how people remember the hit more than the outcome of the game, a 7-2 victory by my team. Austin is now a do-it-all, Swiss Army knife kind of player in the major leagues.

I tossed a complete-game at UCF during my senior season at Tulane. The win was coincidentally coach Rick Jones’s 800th career victory. The opposing pitcher that night? Ben Lively, now a 12-year veteran in professional baseball and still going.

I faced Jorge Soler in the minor leagues who, in person, resembles more of a member of The Transformers than a human being. I sat in on conversations with big leaguers Miguel Montero, Trevor Cahill, and Paul Goldschmidt while they were on rehab stints.

I won’t forget the feeling of knowing I was good, but realizing the ball that I threw didn't make the same kind of noise, or had the same kind of bite, that others threw. Baseball is a hard game to play. I will forever remain in awe of the 780 players who get to do so each year on a 26-man roster for one of the 30 Major League Baseball clubs.

Though I’ve seen the best of them, I’ve seen even more players at every level who didn’t make it. Many of them did all they could - countless hours in the cages or on the mounds, watching film, making adjustments, all in pursuit of achieving a lifelong vision of making it to the big leagues.

But the work never translated. Their visions never realized.

In baseball, you can create the perfect swing in the lab but can’t figure out how to hit the 87-mph slider that you weren’t expecting.

You can develop an elite pitch to throw to hitters only for it to become pointless because hitters wisely choose to look for your other pitches which, as it turns out, are just average.

As a manager, you can have an elite bullpen rendered useless because your starting pitching can’t work deep into games.

And sometimes, players have what we call “white line fever” - as soon as they step over the white foul lines, they can’t produce. Nerves, crowd noise, intimidating players, whatever it may be, they just can’t make their game translate to the field.

Enough about baseball, what’s your point?

My point is, the biggest of visions and the best of intentions don’t always translate. In baseball, there are more uncontrollable factors that impact your success than ones that are controllable (why we harp on controlling what you can). Like baseball, life - and business - is messy.

Unlike baseball, though, there’s a path to achieving big visions and aspirational goals in nonprofit and for-profit work. Yes, the vision is important. But where vision often fails is in how it is implemented or integrated into daily operating structures.

Sometimes, we have an inspiring vision and invest countless hours in “the shop” only to be left with a half-baked outcome or, worse, a vision dead on arrival.

Is your vision the right vision? Can you define the measurable outcomes of it? Do you have the right team on board to execute the vision?

The Fractional Advantage will make a the case for why fractional executive teams can be your solution in the messiness that comes with chasing big league dreams.

3. So, who is this for?

The Fractional Advantage is for any executive who has a big idea, a dream, or a vision that you believe can lead to transformational impact.

Mission-driven founders, executive directors, chief executives. Philanthropic entrepreneurs, civic leaders, board members, or strategic operational leads.

But let me offer a counter question: what’s your big idea?

Why aren’t you chasing it?

If you are, what’s holding you back from achieving it?

Ultimately, this is for leaders who dream big and to discover ways to accomplish those dreams and move the impact needle.

4. Subscribe today!

Don’t misunderstand fractional leadership as “just another consultant.” Subscribe, follow along, join the conversation. Experience how strategic, short-term access to fractional executives can lead to measurable and sustainable impact.

Let’s climb the mountain together and achieve your big idea!