IMPACT
The organizations we partner with aren’t looking for a report. They’re building something.
What they share: big ambitions, complex change, teams of real people who have to carry it. What we share: the whole journey — not a project, not a sprint. A partnership.
What it looks like when a team grows up together.
In 2020, Felix Lloyd was running a scrappy startup called Beanstack — a Shark Tank alum with a mission to get more people reading, fewer than 15 employees, and a culture held together mostly by trust and energy. He wanted it to hold as the company scaled. He didn't want to find out later that he'd sacrificed the thing that made it good.
We started there. Over six years, we built and refined the systems — the retreat cycles, the performance rhythms, the feedback culture — that let the team grow without losing itself. Through hiring, leadership transitions, rapid revenue growth, and eventually an acquisition and merger that formed Joyful Reading Co., the culture held.
Today they reach more than 17 million readers and employ more than 70 people spread across the country. The team that built it is still building.
If you're scaling fast and you're starting to worry that growth is outpacing culture — this is the work.
Serving hard needs requires a team that can go the distance.
Carey Harris leads the region's largest provider of adult basic education. The population she serves doesn't have the luxury of organizational dysfunction — every person who walks through the door is counting on a team that's focused, functional, and genuinely committed to the work.
Over a multi-year partnership, we helped Literacy Pittsburgh build leadership depth, sharpen the systems that sustain performance, and create a culture that doesn't waver when things get hard.
What Carey needed wasn't someone who would show up with frameworks and leave. She needed a partner who would get into the details — who understood her team, her context, and what it actually takes to deliver at scale for people who are counting on it.
If your mission is urgent and your team is stretched — and the stakes are too high for slow, careful consulting — this is the work.
Delivering real results when the context won't stop changing.
Maine Connectivity Authority launched with a mandate most organizations never face: close the digital divide across an entire state. Broadband infrastructure as economic development, healthcare enabler, educational lifeline. Andrew Butcher was building the organization and delivering on that mandate at the same time — in public, with significant stakeholder scrutiny, against a backdrop of shifting policy and funding that never really stabilized.
We came in at the beginning and have stayed through it all — helping build the alignment and performance systems that let the team execute even as the ground kept moving. The work wasn't about creating ideal conditions. It was about building an organization capable of delivering real results without them.
We still work with MCA today.
If your mandate is ambitious and your context keeps changing — and you need a partner who can help your team deliver anyway — this is the work.
Becoming the version of yourself your ambitions require.
HCM Strategists had been doing important work for years — policy, advocacy, equity in education and workforce systems. Kristin Hultquist knew that to go where they wanted to go, the organization itself needed to level up. Not fix what was broken. Build what wasn't there yet.
They called it HCM 3.0: a three-year journey to deepen their impact, develop their team, and build the financial and organizational systems to sustain growth. We worked alongside them for all three years — facilitating the strategy, designing the systems, building the team performance architecture that would carry the vision into everyday operations.
This is evolution work. It requires patience, honesty, and a partner who can hold the big picture while also being present for the weekly work. It's some of our favorite kind.
If you're a mature organization that has outgrown its current form and is ready to do the deliberate work of becoming something more — this is the work.
When the plan changes, the real work begins.
WPS Institute exists to change the experience of school — to build models where students lead their own learning, where classrooms and communities connect, and where teaching is transformative. That vision was always clear. The path to getting there needed to be reinvented.
When we started working together, WPS was at a genuine inflection point. The direction they'd been heading wasn't going to get them where they needed to go — and they knew it. The organization needed a new strategy it could actually activate, and the internal alignment to pursue it with confidence.
We helped them make the hard choices, build strong hypotheses about what could work, and create the team cohesion that makes bold bets possible.
Then came the activation: years of six-month cycles — action, reflection, adjustment, forward. Learning from evidence. Letting go of what wasn't working. Building on what was.
It's working. WPS is now running deep pilot work in schools across the northeast — connecting students to real-world learning experiences, community partnerships, and pathways that actually mean something to them. The model is getting noticed. The team that built it has the culture and systems to keep building.
If your original vision has run into reality — and you need a partner to help you make the hard choices and build something you can actually activate — this is the work.
Every one of these started with a conversation.
We keep our client list small on purpose. Every partnership gets our full attention. If you recognize your organization in one of these stories — or you're building something that doesn't fit neatly into any of them — we'd like to hear about it.
Start a Conversation →