Video: Preparing for Transition: Smart Succession Planning Strategies for Nonprofit Finance Offices | Duration: 3568s | Summary: Preparing for Transition: Smart Succession Planning Strategies for Nonprofit Finance Offices

Transcript for "Preparing for Transition: Smart Succession Planning Strategies for Nonprofit Finance Offices": Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. This is the 4th installment in our CFO series. We're gonna begin our discussion about smart strategies for succession planning in a few minutes. I'm gonna go through a few housekeeping items while we give folks the chance to log on, and then we'll get started with Andrew. So the first is that you should see a whole panel of what we call our engagement tools as part of the webinar today. I believe it's on the right hand side of your screen. It may move around as we speak, but it should look something like the picture on the slide. You should see the chat, which I see most of you have already found that and are engaging with us, so thank you for doing that. It's nice to see everybody there. You should see the docs tab right after that. You can find a PDF of today's slides there if you'd like to go ahead and download those, so that you can take notes and follow along. You also should be able to see a number of other resources in that tab, that we've got curated for you, including links to our upcoming webinars at the beginning of 2025 if you wanna register for those, and I will touch on those briefly at the end of the session. We will be sending out a recording of today's session. You'll get an email, at the same address that you used to register, and you'll be able to watch on demand there. You can also share that with coworkers if you'd like for them to watch as well. The polls, I'll cover this a little bit more in the CPE section. You cannot see those in the tabs right now because they're not live, but they will pop up right after the docs tab. Whenever we turn those on, we'll verbally cue you, that those are live and remind you, and you should see them pop up on your screen as well. I'll go over that in a little more detail in a minute. Lastly, if you have any questions, the last tab of that engagement panel says q and a. You can submit questions there. I also will occasionally if I see a good comment or question in the chat, I'll move you over to that q and a panel for Andrew to answer you. We'll try to hit those throughout the session, and then we'll have time at the end for live q and a. So if you think of something that you'd like to ask as we're going through, drop that in the q and a, and I'll flag it for Andrew or I to answer at the end. Alright. The next thing is that we have one of our representatives on the line today, Miranda. If you don't mind popping on stage, Miranda, just for a minute and waving to everybody so they can see. So, anyways, Miranda is on the line today. Thank you for for joining us. And, if you are interested in working with Blackbaud in any capacity or finding out more about our software solutions, she is the best way for you to do that. You can set up a quick meeting. There's a link to her calendar in the docs tab. She can help you with setting up demo, questions about pricing, anything like that. And she is typically available within just a few business days and can get can get you connected with someone for a further conversation as well. And 2 more things, and we'll get going. The next thing is if you're a current customer and you have any sort of questions about, your solution or how to do something, our support chat is the fastest way for you to get those answered. I try to if I see people ask questions in the chat, fill those, but we have so many folks attending today, that I'm likely to miss it. So if you will, screenshot this and for a phone number and a link to chat the support team, that is the fastest way to get your questions answered, because I can be a little bit of a bottleneck there. Alright. And then if you're hoping for continuing education and CPE credits today, we are offering 1. You do have to attend for the full 50 minutes, so please make sure you do that. I do have to check that. And if you're short, I cannot award the certificate. So just make sure you're staying on for the full 50 minutes and then responding to all 3 of the CPE poll questions. Again, I'll let you know, and Andrew will let you know when those are live. And I normally leave them live for a few minutes even when they're not on the screen anymore. You can get to them in that engagement panel, and make sure you answer those there. There is no submit button. I know in some webinars, you have to press submit. Our platform does not require that. You click on the answer you want, and the system logs it. So no worries there. You don't have to press submit. And I try to get that certificate out to you within 2 weeks, sometimes a little faster, but no later than 2 weeks. And there's an email address on the screen. If you wanna write that down that comes to me if you have any questions about CPE. I'll get back to you there. Alright. Andrew, I'm going to kick it over to you to introduce yourself for the few people who are joining at the end of our series and haven't met you yet. And go ahead and get started on our topic of succession planning. Alright. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, everybody, for joining us, in this next part of our CFO series talking about transition, succession planning. We see a lot of this with our nonprofit, so it's a very big topic. Just a little bit about me. I am based in New York, originally from Philadelphia. I think today you're getting the 4th most important horror behind my wife, my child and my dog. I do have to apologize. My daughter, my 2 and a half year old daughter decided picture day wasn't for her. So if you hear some screaming in the background, she came home from daycare because she wasn't having a good day, but hopefully she, goes down for her nap and we can talk about succession planning. Really excited to be here today. Like I said, this is a topic for a lot of our nonprofits. The one thing I wanna add at the top is we are and I'm working with Sarah to plan our kind of our next phase of our CFO series. If there's any topics that you think might be relevant or you wanna hear about along the lines of what we talked about, feel free to put them in the q and a and chat, and we can see what we can plan for next year. But I'm really excited to be here. This has been a really good series, and I've met a lot of you and had great conversations. So we're gonna dive right in. So what we're gonna talk about today is kind of, first, kind of talking about the great resignation, what we're seeing in the employment with employment, especially at nonprofits these days, how people are moving around. And then we're gonna talk about job succession planning and what that really means. We do a lot of it here at Fort Vis Mazaars and what we do for our clients, kind of that pathway to continuity. And then when we break it down, we see 3 major areas where when you're thinking about job succession planning, where to really hit home. So that's that's where we'll talk about next. And then, oh, no. You've had an immediate departure. Somebody's either quit, moved on, got promoted, moved departments. What now? And some kind of fire drill tips and tricks, if you will, to help you. If we have time, we'll get into a few case studies and then we'll leave it open for some question and answer and some follow-up stuff, at the end. So, hopefully, it's an exciting webinar and you take away at least something for for your the hour of your time. Call it what you will, the great resignation, people job hopping, just the I would say the employment market, especially at nonprofits, has changed in the past 5 to 10 years. I think when I first came into to public accounting and industry about 15 years ago, especially at nonprofits, most of the employees were what you call lifers. They would be there forever. They knew the organization backwards and forwards. They knew everything that was going on, and they had worked there forever. And I think we still do see that at nonprofits, but I would say we're seeing a lot less of that. And you see here a little comic. People are resigning due to personal reasons, so let's find people with no personal life. And I think I don't think you're gonna find that, especially at nonprofits. A lot of people go to work at a nonprofit. Unfortunately, none of us do it for money. If we did, the world would be a lot better place if we could get paid top dollar for what we do at nonprofits, but we don't. We do it because at the end of the day, we like helping people and we like furthering the mission even from a finance office. I know when I was in a nonprofit before I came to Forbus Mazars, one of the things I loved was when I was having a tough day, I knew that it was helping somebody at the end of the day. Not the same thing in a public accounting firm, but to each his own. But I love that feeling. And I think while that I think drives people to look at the nonprofit industry, and I'm sure most of you that's why you've ended up there. At the end of the day, we're seeing so much of people jump either for money or remote work or hybrid work or just seeing what else is out there. And sometimes just people just wanna make a jump. They get bored. And figuring out how to kind of counteract that. And we're seeing, like I said, we're seeing less and less of those career lifers at one organization. And how does an organization do that? Because quite frankly, every organization needs to be set up that if somebody takes a leave of absence, wins the lottery, that we can keep going, that the ball is gonna keep rolling, and making sure that we've worked that institutional knowledge into our policies and procedures. So just thinking about that, and that kind of leads us to our 1st poll question. I know Sarah said she's gonna launch it. So for everybody that was looking for that CPE credit, the first poll question will be in the polls tab. How has the great resignation impacted your nonprofit financing? And maybe not even the great resignation. How is have you seen staff turnover in the in the past few years? We've just been seeing a lot of that, especially younger staff just jumping. They either get a new title, they get a raise. We're seeing some nonprofits who haven't kind of gone through that digital transformation. They're seeing younger staff make a jump to organizations that have. And I I see JT you put in the chat that, cultivating that internal path. We see that too. I talk to a lot of staff and senior accounts at nonprofits where you have a CFO that's been there for 20, 30 years. They don't see a future. And they're gonna jump ship to be an assistant controller or a controller somewhere that where quite frankly, they do have a path that's just not laid out. And sometimes when you get below that controller level, sometimes the finance development is a little loosey goosey, and that can lead to people just not knowing what's next for them. And just they wanna they wanna jump ship. They wanna get more dollars in the short term, and it's not always the best way to do it. Well, chart, little outdated, but it just shows, and this trend has only increased, that people are just switching jobs. That I think we're seeing more job movement, whether it's a generational thing with higher, demands, whether it's, people at retirement. I I know or quite frankly from COVID, I know I was at a nonprofit that was very in person, high touch. I was burnt out. Like, be by the time we got to August of 2020, I was just dead because I had just done so much to keep it afloat. And we were going so fast and there were 18 hour days and I was literally working from my kitchen table and there was no break. And it's just I ended up coming to Forbus Bazaars partly because I enjoy working with so many nonprofits, but I was just burnt out and there was just no end in sight. So thinking about how to keep those employees engaged, I think is a big, theme we'll talk about. So when we think about job succession planning, there's multiple reasons you'd wanna do it. 1, you have a planned staff, departure, whether that's, you know, you're gonna have to let somebody go for one reason or another. You have people nearing retirement or at retirement. You have sometimes people wanna get out of finance and move over to the program side or development and just move throughout the organization. Or there's just there are other reasons. They win the lottery. I used to I used to say if I got hit by a bus, how would we job succession plan? I was told that was morbid, so I'm told in consulting I should use win the lottery. But what would happen and how can we plan for that? And then there's also the unplanned, that the staff just decides to leave. And I think one of the things I always talk to my staff about is there's always something else out there. Like, I don't know what's going on in your personal life. I hope they tell me they're gonna leave, but they're not always going to. Sometimes it's gonna be a surprise and sometimes they're not gonna give notice and they can just walk away. So how do we prevent that payroll keeps getting paid, that our vendors keep getting paid, that we're able to do give our reporting to the state and federal government as needed? That's really the goal. So what are our goals of job succession planning? Biggest one, how do we limit our fraud and risk? When you're thinking about job succession planning, who has access to what? Who has bank account logins? Who has access to our financial edge? Our Raiser's Edge with all our donor information. I think we all assume, that people don't have malintent. I I think a lot of nonprofits, people wanna do good. That's why we work at nonprofits. It's why I work with nonprofits. But at the end of the day, you do need to protect yourself. What happens if somebody leaves and takes your donor database to another organization? What happens if they have bank access that's not cut off? They have access to your financial edge with a lot of information about your financial dealings. How do we limit that and just know, hey. Somebody leaves. What is the list that we're gonna have to shut off? I know when I was at a nonprofit, one of the things we had was we had a list of who had what bank access, who had what system access. So if somebody left or was leaving, that was the first thing we did. We shut down their access. Reduce access of unauthorized personnel and personnel not only to the staff, to donors, to but personnel data. I think a big thing, especially in finance, sometimes you have access to HR data. You have access to HIPAA data, social security numbers, making sure that you can blockade that and make sure that your your employees' data is protected if somebody leaves. And sometimes, like I said, it's not it's not that somebody has bad intent, but you don't want them having access to your ADP database or your your payroll database if they leave. You have to you have to know what who has access to what in order to shut it down. And I think another big thing is how do you maintain that timely accounting? Okay. Our payroll clerk leads. You know what? I know how to press the button in payroll. I know how to update salaries, approve vacations, all that. But do I know how to get my payroll data into my financial edge? Do I know how to do the allocations necessary to allocate the grants? How can I make sure that my monthly report will keep on going? That my board will still get the budget to actual they need to make the decision. That my executive director or CEO or president gets the information they need to move forward. I think that's what we that's what I think of when I think of that timely accounting functionality. If you take a piece out of the wheel, a cog out of the wheel, what happens? And I think I see in the chat, cross training the much, that's the next thing I'm gonna hit is empower staff to have that minimal disruption to operation. And this to me, I think not only hits on job succession, but going back when I was talking about burnout, I think this is a big key is, hey, do we have cross training? Does everybody have a backup? Now maybe the backup doesn't know a 100% how to do it, but are there written procedures? I wouldn't even say policies, procedures. Do you have a flowchart that somebody can go, you know what? I've seen this done a few times. I have a video of it being done. You just open up Zoom or Teams and record it. Hey, I can do this task. It might take me an extra hour or 2, but we have that backup. So when my payroll clerk wants to go on vacation for their sibling's wedding, you know what they're not gonna have to do? Log in and do payroll. Being able to, maintain that continuity so you can plan for job succession, but also make sure that, hey. If somebody wants to take a vacation, they can truly take a vacation. And I think with nonprofits, the pushback I hear with this one especially is, hey. We have a small staff. This is not possible. Figuring out how to do it, whether you have to you know what? We have to bring somebody from HR into into a process or somebody from operations or even the president and CEO. You know, sometimes they're gonna have to log in and do something. And making sure that you've set yourself up for success and being able to move keep the ball moving when people either need, like, hey. My daughter need to be picked up picked up from daycare today. My team was able to pick up all the work we had to do because I've empowered them to just kind of, with direction, do what they need to do. It wasn't that big a deal that I had to step away for an hour to go pick her up. So thinking about that and it's not easy. And it also means you're you're stepping back and not doing your job to plan all this, but I think it's key for that long term goals of the organization. So we think about that pathway to continuity. I think of the things on this list, the hardest one I'd say is that first one, that stable workforce. I think as a finance leader, that is the hardest one to control. Because you can give the best environment. You can give the greatest raises, bonuses, benefits, but somebody just has a reason that they they're leaving. You can't control what's going on in somebody's personal life or what's going on in their head. You can control what you do, but you can't control your workforce. But you can provide an environment that leads towards that stable workforce. But I'd say out of everything here, it's probably the one that it's hardest to kind of lock down. Next one, staff familiarity with processes and each other. And I think a great example of this, we're working with an organization doing a diagnostic right now and we're looking at their budgeting process. And I have the flowchart actually next to me. There are 27 steps in this budgeting process, which is a lot. 25 of them are on the CFO. The CFO does this entire process by themselves. And I think that to me is the first red flag I have when we're talking about gaps in this process, but it doesn't let staff in. And it creates so much pressure on the CFO that, hey, come budget time, nothing else gets done. It's hard for them to get AP approved. It's hard for the controller to get their journal entries approved. It's hard for budget to actuals to get approved to go out to the programmatic people. If you can bring more people into the process and cross train so that, hey. Okay. It's budget time. I don't wanna give up my budget process. But you know what I can do? I can give up some of my approval processes and put in some redundancies and put in some checks and balances that you know what? I can offload some tasks. And that as a CFO, I'm not required during budget season to work 90 to a 100 hours. I always say that nonprofit finance teams especially are never gonna be properly staffed. I wouldn't even say overstaffed, properly staffed. But there are ways to kinda divvy up the work to make that a much more continuous cycle and to be able to kind of plug and play where you need to. Now it's not always gonna be seamless. There's gonna be bumps in the road if somebody leaves, but I think there's a way to do it. And I think some of this process sharing and upskilling creates a competitive advantage. When you talk about young, especially younger staff, they want to know where they're going. They want to know what's next, what's the next to learn, how do I progress my career. And I think being able to bring them into some of those processes and hand it off, I think, gives you a competitive advantage when you're thinking about what's next for the organization. And I also think it does create a, an environment where people wanna be there. They wanna learn. They wanna grow the next thing. I always told my staff, and I tell my staff right now, my goal as a manager and as a director now is to make myself obsolete. If I can pass down all of my work to my managers, to my senior, to my staff, I've done my job. If they can do a good job, that means they're gonna progress in their career. Because you know what? From my managing director, from my national partner, there's always gonna be more work and they're gonna be able to pass it down to me, which means they're gonna be able to do more. If you're at a CFO level and you're able to get take something off your CEO, your president's plate, your COO's plate because you've passed down your budgeting process to your controller and you're now just reviewing, that unlocks so much for the organization. That I always say, like, if you can make yourself obsolete, especially when it comes to just that cross skilling, cross skilled and cross training, I think there's there's a great success in creating an organization that people wanna be at because they can grow. And I think it just creates an organization that that increases that sustainability and scalability. If you have people who know how to do everybody's job, as you grow and change, it allows you to kind of restructure that you're not tied down to Rachel has always done APN. She's the only one that needs to do it, but now we have 7 more sites that Rachel just has 7 more sites to do because we've never cross trained. So I think thinking about that, it I know most of you have nonprofits. You wanna grow. You wanna raise more money. You wanna help more people. You wanna get more arts into the communities. Whatever your mission is, you wanna grow that. That's why you're in a nonprofit. So thinking about how you would be able to scale and grow with a good, continuous team, I think, is key. So when we when we go into job succession, we've seen a bunch of these. Unfortunately, we've seen a lot of CFOs leave, controllers leave, staff accountants leave. What are those major areas? And usually, sometimes we're called in before it happens because somebody gives enough notice. Or sometimes I've been called in, hey. We have a week to figure out what this person does and they're gone. And it's also gonna be contentious. It's happened. Where do we go as for businessmen are is when I think, okay. What are the major areas considered to avoid having to call me and pay my rate because somebody quit? Because that's what I that's what I wanna avoid by this this webinar. As much as I love having the work, I think if I can give you the tools and tricks so that if somebody quits, you don't have to call us for an emergency product project. I've done my job in this webinar. So thinking about there's 3, three things that we look for that cross organizational impact. Who does this person talk to? Who do they communicate with? Who relies on them to do their jobs? And making sure you have that covered if they leave. Obviously, internal controls, we talked about a fraud and making sure that things are done properly and things like that I think is key. And then the last one, which I know is a a bunch of buzzwords thrown into a section, but it really is true that recruitment, attraction and retention. How are we, a, keeping the people we have that we wanna keep, but making sure we're attracting the right people? I know the the hiring market is just downright awful for especially for nonprofit finance. It's hard to find people. It's hard to find good people. It's hard to find good people that wanna stay. So, a, how do you find them? How do you make the job attractive? But then, how do you retain them? And I think these are the things we're really gonna hit as we roll into this webinar. So first one, cross organizational impact. So what is the challenge? I think the challenge is, especially at most nonprofits, when a finance team is really humming along and going well, there is that interdepartmental, interagency organization data sharing. And that development can call it finance or programs can call it finance, and it's a good two way street that everybody feels comfortable talking. But let's just say Andrew is the linchpin. Andrew is my go between between development and finance. And development knows, you know what, we need reports, we need projections, we need information to do our job. We can call Andrew. He'll get it for us. We can talk through it. It's not a one-sided conversation. We can work together. Alright. Everything's humming along. Andrew leaves. And me as a CFO doesn't recognize that Andrew is the linchpin of that relationship, and development just starts not getting what they need. And then the internal strife starts to come, and development's getting angry at finance, and all that goodwill that you built up and worked towards and built processes go right out the window. Because, I mean, we've all been there. You can have the best systems and processes, but once they fail, people will begin to question them. And especially when you don't realize they fail. The first time, especially at large organizations, you know, when Andrew leaves and Christina emails Andrew for reports for a, donor meeting next week and no one replies. Gets an out of office. Andrew no longer works here. No one replies. Well, now Christina in development feels like she's just left out in the cold And the next time she needs something, she might just make it up. She might get angry. It just creates that internal strife and struggle. And I think being able to know kind of what data is coming into finance and where, but also realize what data is going out. Who relies on this? What do the program people get? What does your director of programs or your COO need to do their job to make those tough decisions, I think, is key to to realize and to kinda plan for that next step. So what is the solution here? How do we solve this kinda cross organizational problem when we're thinking about job succession planning? I think first is kind of laying out your policies and your your processes, policies and procedures, processes, what have you. Where does data come in? Where does data go out? Knowing what happens, knowing where it's going, having transparency in that successor selection and knowing I think there are times when there are personnel changes at an organization and they aren't always public for one reason or another. But if you don't know who relies on that person to do their job for whatever reason you don't wanna make it public, you might put the stops to a really critical part of the organization. And I see it in the chat, so I'm just gonna mention it. We've only had one poll so far. So if you've only seen one poll, no problem. Not missing anything yet. Having transparency, and I know I'm seeing I'm seeing it in the chat out of the corner of my eyes. I know it's not always smooth. When you say you're gonna retire or move on, people don't always bring you into things. You get excluded. I've been there. I gave when I was in nonprofit, I gave it 8 weeks notice because there was no controller under me and I didn't want to leave them high and dry. And I know I got a little, I'll say it, jealous because they hired somebody, I trained them, and in the last 4 weeks, I I was kind of sitting on the sidelines. Like, I was still helping. I would answer any questions. I was tidying up policy and procedures. But I just felt like I should be included. This is my baby. But I'm like, I decided to move on. But I gave them the proper time to have that transparency and, hey. Let's move on. Here are the skills I think we need. So what can be the result? If you do this right, you'll have that integration of financial results. If somebody leaves, that ball will keep going. You will have thing data going in, data going out. No one will kind of be angry that they're not being responded to. I think it's maintaining that reputation. If you have a reputation for being a responsive finance department, being able to deliver on what people need, I think maintaining those relationships I think is key within organizations because the minute finance seems closed off or unresponsive, the door will shut. And it makes things hard. And I think it just protects that equity with those donors, with the stakeholders, with the board. I think there was something in the chat earlier about it. Somebody in development leaves. Who gets those donor contacts? What does that transition look like? How do you let people know, you know what? They moved on. Because like it or not, nonprofits, it's a small world. So it's that peaceful transition of power, so to speak, even if it not necessarily is peaceful. Hopefully, everybody's on the up and up and being able to pivot and know, okay. Sarah's leaving. What do we need to do? Who relies on her to do that job? And without that proper planning, it's a mad scramble and something's gonna get missed. And it might seem like it's small then it gets missed, but the moment you enter doubt within an organization, that's where the snowball starts. 2nd major area to consider, and this is kind of the obvious one that I am a CPA, so this hits me on the head, internal controls. Somebody leaves, how do we protect what they were working on, what they had access to, our cache, our information, our proprietary systems, what have you. So what's the challenge? Especially in a nonprofit finance team, it's usually gonna be a small tight knit group, especially as most of the people I've met, from these Blackbaud webinars. You're running on a shoestring group and you're doing amazing work, but you don't have the great the most complex internal control system. You don't have the most complex checks and balances because you only have 2 or 3 people. Yes. You have somebody prepare and review. You have sign offs at maybe a board level or CEO level, but it's not like you have 6 people who are interchangeable. So how do you protect your data? I think a big thing is having documented processes and policies and knowing what I'd say not at a 500 foot level and not at a full detailed level, somewhere in between. Having that idea of what people are doing. I always it scares me a little bit when I talk to some CFOs who don't know how their people do what they do. And I think sometimes that's where I see the biggest guess where somebody's leaving, you go to CFO. Okay. How do you process payroll? And they're like, I don't know. So thinking about that and making sure that there's at least somebody who knows what's going on and is able to kind of move things along and know what's going on. And I always say that nonprofits are so much institutional knowledge. How can we get that documented? How can we make sure that's passed on? How can we make sure, you know what, this is how we build stuff to the state because this is how they accept it and it gets streamlined. And then when you think about internal controls, the biggest thing is access. Who has logins? Who has access? Are they using a personal laptop at home that they're remoting in? Or are they using a company laptop? You know what? I we see it too many times. If you're planning to make a forced personnel decision, let's say, are you able to copy their files? I've seen too many spiteful people just delete their hard drives. And it's a real shame, especially coming from a nonprofit to do that. But it happens. And it just it usually it makes me sad when it when it happens because usually something gets lost. But how can we protect our data? How can we protect our organization? And things like that. So that will lead us into the heralded second polling question. How how confident are you in your organization's internal controls to prevent fraud and ensure compliance? And that is a loaded question that can mean so many things, but, feel free to answer. And while we're waiting on that, let me go back to the slides, but I know Sarah will keep that poll open for a little bit. So second polling question has been launched. So internal controls, what is the solution? And I think a big thing is making sure even going back to people's job descriptions, what are their roles and responsibilities? What are people in charge of? And making sure that people know have ownership of their work because that's how you're able to kind of move things around and create that kind of organizational structure that if somebody leaves, you know what needs to be taken over. Having that comes back to cross training, making sure, like I said, they don't need to know exactly how to do it, but, like, with Teams and Zoom, just have somebody pull up a team, share their screen, record it. This is how I do AP. I click here. I go here. Even if no one ever watches it until they win the lottery and decide not to come back to work next week for their AP clerk job because they won $200,000,000, we have a video of how they were using the system. We're able to seamlessly transition it. Allowing people with training and growing. And I think another thing is having that list of who has access to what. And even doing a review, I know me and my CFO used to sit down probably every quarter, and we play a game, how would we steal money? We'd write all I we'd both throw over the wall all the access we had, and we'd play a game. Okay. If Andrew wanted to steal $50,000, how could he jump through hoops to get it? At the end of the day, you're not gonna prevent everybody stealing money, especially if you're a CFO. You usually have signature authority over a bank, able to ACH. But we had determined, especially at my organization, you know what? Andrew could steal $49,999. But based on the fact that Andrew is a CPA and what his salary is, that's not enough money for me to steal to kind of make my life my my life worth it. And knowing where those barriers are. And then we also put in some controls for that. That if, hey, there's a bunch of charges for $49,999. It triggered something in our system. Not that I ever would have, but good to have. But also, I think a big thing about this internal controls is it's not just a finance issue. Working with IT, facilities, payroll, other departments, making sure everybody's on the same page of what happens if somebody leaves, especially IT. When do we shut things down? How do we restrict access? Like I said, it's not always for bad reasons, but even if somebody leaves on the best of terms, they gave 7 months notice for retirement. The day they leave, their access needs to be cut off because it's just if the person no longer works there, they're not under things. So, I think thinking about how to bring other people into this is key. So what is the result? A, you have an updated policies and procedures manual. And I think this to me, the first time you do this is the worst. It's just the worst. There is no way to do policies and procedures and make it fun. There are and I see, Gia in the in the chat. There are some AI assistants that can help you with that that can kinda transcribe if you just wanna talk it out. But that first time you do policies and procedures, it's the worst. No way. But once you have it, what what I did when I was at nonprofit, it was a word document once it got approved by the board. And when we change the process or even monthly, I would just go back into it, track changes, and just edit it throughout the year. That way, come December when my finance committee wanted the updated version, it was done. I just had to do a quick read through. What else is the result? You mitigate business disruption. Hey. I know that Yale is in charge of my credit card system. She leaves. We know we have to change the administrator so that we can keep adding people to our credit cards, paying the bills, things like that. Avoiding those business disruptions and not spending 3 hours on the phone with Amex, I think, is key. You leverage your risk. And I know I see in the chat the amount of people who are ruining their lives are is low. But as an organization, you know what? We have to figure out where we're comfortable with risk. There's always gonna be risks, especially in a finance department. But where where can we put in controls, and what is our risk tolerance? Any auditor will talk about risk tolerance. You have materiality. Where are we okay? You know what? Andrew sitting in accounting who handles my lockbox with our petty cash. He could technically walk away with $5. But is it worth me creating a control to protect that $5? Figuring out where you can take those risks and being comfortable in documenting those, I think is key. And once you have those in place, you're gonna reduce the risk of theft and loss, and it just makes the organization run better. Alright. So we talked about how it's gonna affect the rest of the organization. We talked about how it's gonna affect the organization as a whole when it comes to fraud, data. I think a big concern is always money walking out the door. That brings us to our 3rd topic, which is really how do I retain people? How do I attract people? And how do I just make sure that I have that stable workforce going back to that kind of pathway to continuity? So what's the challenge? And we we talked about it in the beginning. I think the demand for talent is at an all time high. I think especially when it comes to the organizations on here, whether you're using Financial Edge, Raiser's Edge, some of the other, third party tools. There are specific things that I know some organizations look for that you don't necessarily wanna train somebody, but you will. That creates a a talent demand, and people are always looking for jobs. I'm not looking for a job, but I always see on LinkedIn all these alerts for all these jobs, and it's just there's so much out there. And I think what happens is you have you have that demand for this all time high, and then you have people who are just burned out from that job creep and blurring of responsibilities, especially coming out of and I hate mentioning it because it's so it seems like it's so far in the past, but it's only 4 years ago. Coming from COVID and just people's job responsibilities changed at a moment's notice, and my guess is a lot of your organizations have not redone their job duties, have not sat down and looked what what do people do on a day to day basis? What should they be doing? And how do we mold that job description to fit? Being able to react to staff social and emotional wellness. I think this is I I started in public accounting where, I was, for lack of a better term, a letter or a number. We were I was at a small firm. We were kinda grinded through. I think the the universe has changed. If your staff are being burned out, give them avenues to either step away and recharge or be able to kind of work through that so that their only option isn't just to quit. That's part of retaining staff is to be able to work through when people need help, whether it's something in their personal life or their burnout, being able to work with them and move forward. And a lot of us are in either a virtual or a hybrid environment. How do we work together? And making sure people have the tools and the the right ideas to kind of work together, in that virtual environment, I think, is key because I think I prefer and maybe it's because I'm older and I hate saying that at my this point in my life. I'm sure some people are mad that I'm calling myself older in the chat. But I do prefer a hybrid environment, but I have a fully virtual staff. And thinking about how to integrate her into the team, how to make sure she's fully trained and has work to do and feels like it's part of the team, that's part of my job. And it's it's not something I take lightly, but knowing how in a virtual environment to bring people aboard and have those cross training so that, hey, we're able to do that transition. That brings us to our 3rd polling question. What is the biggest challenge your nonprofit faces in attracting and retaining top talent? I'm gonna take a little sip of water while you guys answer that polling question. So just thinking about it, like, what is the challenge and what are what are you hearing when you're interviewing or people are leaving? I think a big thing is making sure you do do that exit interviews, and hopefully people are being honest about why they're leaving. Sometimes you can't prevent it, but it's really thinking about how to move forward and how to make your your organization better, I think, is key. So let me just scroll down. So thinking about and I see all of you in the chat have all your reasons for, problems, and I think they're all valid. And thinking about how to counteract that, what can we offer? I think a big thing is, okay, you have the people you want to stay. I have listen. I worked at a nonprofit. I had our finance team was about 8 people. I had 2 FTEs. I had the people that, you know what, if push came to shove, these are the ones I wanna stay. Talk to them about what they want. What's gonna make them stay? And you know what? Sometimes it's just money. And that it's clear as day that people want more money. And I think the thing, it's hard in a nonprofit. Almost all of you have shoestring budgets. And you are operating to that net zero bottom line, maybe in event of a deficit, hoping some donor comes in and fills that deficit. And you might not even some people, they're gonna ask for more money and you might balk, but the thing to remember, and it's very hard, and I I've been on the other side. I've been in that situation is a small raise for somebody, it's gonna cost so much more to replace them. In just searching for somebody, backfilling, training, that sometimes it's it's harder to do that. Do it and sometimes it's just, let's do a market study. I know Fort Worth and Bazaars offers market studies. Let's make sure you know what? We are in a small market. We are in a mountain town. But let's make sure, at least based off what's out there and our and where we are, that we are paying market rate. And you know what? Market rate for a remote employee somewhere else in the country, they might not wanna stay here, but where we are based and the challenges we have, that's that's where we are. I think making sure that everybody feels like they have a pathway. And I think a lot of nonprofits, avoiding that heir apparent. I think there's always one person that always has that pathway. They're the future CFO. And I think that does demoralize the rest of the team. So trying to avoid that. And increase learning and development, upskilling. And I think that's where cross training, it's a backdoor to learning and development. Because most of the times when you cross train, you're gonna have somebody who wants to learn more and know more, and that's the way you you can give them duties that would be at that next level. The cross training, it's usually always a step up. And I think, knowing that. I do see a question in the chat. Where's the best way to find the market rate? A, if you're using a payroll provider, they might actually have it for your industry, for your revenue size, for your ZIP code. If not, there are third parties like Fort Worth Biz Arts. It is not an expensive project, and we have nonprofits all the time that just want to know what's going on. And you can look at it. But I would check with your payroll provider first. Some of them do offer it as part of the package you've already had. I would just like to mention that because I didn't know that exists until one of them told me it did. So I would check there first. So what does that mean for the result? You're gonna keep the people you wanna chain you wanna keep. You're gonna grow your top performers into people that can become part of management, can become part of your executive leadership team. You're gonna offer competitive compensation, and competitive is a relative term. Competitive for you, for where you are, for what you do, for what your margins are, I think is key. You're gonna enable your staff to have healthy workloads and to not be burnout. You're gonna give them the chance to have a work life balance. Like I said, people don't work at nonprofit for the salary. Like, I keep saying, I wish they did, but they don't. They work there for the mission, and I think a big thing is to make sure that you're not overloading them and making sure that they have a healthy workload in order to move forward. And I think healthy is a relative term. I think the certain finance departments, it's never gonna be a 40 hour job when you get to a certain level. But being able to maintain that, being able to take vacation, being able to recharge, being able to fully disconnect. I will never forget the time I realized that, you know what, I need to switch jobs. I was on a train in Norway through the mountains hoping that my Wi Fi connected long enough that I could submit payroll. It was at that point I realized I did not have a healthy work life balance and work to change it. But being able to recognize that your people need breaks, everybody needs to recharge. We can't burn the candle at both ends, I think, is key. And at the end of the day, it will create organization wide satisfaction and growth. It'll build that collaboration, and people will wanna help. It makes that cross training easier. So I think when we think about what is smart succession planning, it really comes down to be proactive, not reactive. So what does that mean? Establishing procedures for job rotations. Let's say you're a bigger organization and you have 3 or 4 staff staff accountants. Rotate what they're doing. Like, don't get siloed in that one person's been doing the same thing for 20 years if you have the benefit of being able to do that. Because I think when you have that siloed access and somebody goes to leave, that's where the oh crap moment goes. That's where it goes, oh, no. I need to figure this out. We have so many organizations that come to us. Hey. This person set up this system, set up the processes, and now they're retiring. So now we have to pay for this bizarre to come in and document everything because everything's been so siloed. I think and it it sounds very big brother, but if your employees work work remote, make sure they're working on a company computer. Make sure you have access to those files. Make sure you know that everybody's saving stuff on OneDrive. I work remote. I have my laptop with me. If I save something on my desktop, I'm sure my firm can go in and get it, but my team can't. That if I'm working on the presentation for our next Blackbaud webinar and I call up my my staff and go, hey. Can you edit this slide but it's saved on my desktop? Doesn't work. Make sure things are being saved in a place where it's accessible, even to IT. I think like, the last one. Engage at a firm to do a compensation study. If you've never done one before and you're seeing people leave because of compensation, get the market rate. And I think a big thing is when you're thinking about that market rate, also think about the benefits you're providing. I think sometimes you get lost in the salary, but, hey, I'm paying somebody $300 less every 2 weeks, but you know what? Our benefits are a 100% covered, so at the end of the day, their take home pay is more. I think it's a matter of making sure you're explaining everything they're being offered. I think sometimes some of us get lost in that gross salary number not thinking about what every everything comes. These are just some of the ways. I don't want to go into everything here because I know there are a lot of questions. And if you want if you want to learn more, I'm more than happy to talk. But there are also the slides are saved in the document section as Sarah noticed. So, those are there. So that kinda brings us to just some quick case studies. So 2 case studies I can talk about. One is it was a k through 12 private school. The CFO had always been a siloed one person department. Never really talked to anybody, never wanted anybody in their business. They did everything. So the organization decided, you know what? We're gonna bring we got brought in to kind of just document things. The the the board and the COO wanted to just make sure the organization was covered in case this person left. It wasn't it wasn't that they thought they were leaving. They're just like, hey. In case something happens, we need this covered, and make sure the organization keep rolling. As soon as we got brought in there, the CFO resigned immediately. They saw the writing on the wall. Even though there wasn't writing on the wall, it wasn't anything now as the board just like, we're not covered if you leave. And what I can say, it cost the organization a lot to bring us in to kind of document everything and backfill and figure out what their policies and procedures were. And it cost the organization a lot, but they they had been operating for 15 years with just one person that knew what was going on. The other one was a a technology company. New CFO, he was very much what I would call, and we've talked about it in the past webinars, a strategic CFO. He was not an accountant by trade. He was a finance guy, projections, grow the business. 2 thirds of his accounting staff quit, including his controller within months of year end. And this this poor CFO, I'll never forget him, was just left holding the bag. He knew accounting. He had no idea how to use his accounting system. He had no idea what his team was doing. He had been there about 3 months. He had just focused on projections, and it was just it was very hard. And it was a scramble because they had investors and had to get their financials done within, 2 months of year end. I've spent long nights putting those books together and figuring things out, for a very high cost, but they just the the CFO didn't plan for that. And just when they came in, they didn't think, hey. Let me figure out what's going on first. They were just so focused on the go forward. And it really luckily, the organization brought us in and everything was fine, but, like, they had to pay to backfill rather because they didn't take the time to understand what was going on. There are so many examples of this, because, unfortunately, I work in nonprofit consulting. No one calls me if everything's working. We get calls when things are on fire. So we see this all the time. And just taking some taking the time to figure it out, how do we cross train, what are people doing, I think, can really bring it about. And I know there's a ton of questions, but get to the last slide. And and thank you guys for kinda sticking around. I know Sarah's gonna wrap up, and then we'll get into questions. I will say there will be a polling question if you'd like to talk about anything here or anything regarding your finance department. I'm more than happy to help see how myself and 4 of us Mazars can help. But one thing I can offer to the you lovely people on this webinar, So I've been talking to the product team at Financial Edge. Great people. And when I've had conversations with a lot of you and thinking about the new year, a lot of you have problems. You either when you move to I'm gonna say it. I apologize for I think it's triggering. When you're moving to web view, a lot of you have these older databases that have a lot of data. You've been in it for 3, 30 20, 30 years. If you wanna contact me, I've worked with the product team. We might be able to offer you a database of refresh and create you kind of a data room of the past 25 years, maybe bring in 2 or 3 years, reset that chart of accounts, reset those programs, reset those funds. It's something I know Blackbaud is looking to offer in the future, but I've been kind of given the go ahead to kind of work with people that need this. So feel free to reach out and it's something we can talk about as the new year hits. If you just think, you know what, if I could just refresh my chart of accounts, get 25 years of data out of here because no one wants it, I'm your guy. So, Sarah, anything to wrap up there before I get to the questions? I'm gonna launch a survey, which may cover up your email address. So I've dropped that in the chat for folks, if you want to contact Andrew for that. And then, yeah, let's go ahead and do questions while I while I launch that. Alright. Let's see what we got here. So I guess the the first one I'll read, it's not really a succession issue, but what's a good marker that your finance department needs more staff? I think what I used to do was I would take, hey. Here's everything everybody's doing, and I would ask them, tell me how long it takes. Let's start there. Write all your responsibilities for the month, quarter, year, and let's give me an estimate of how long it takes. And then what I would do is my staff were hourly at the time. I would schedule them for 32 hours because I always assume, you know what, something's going to happen that's not planned. So if I think about think about what needs to be done. If I plan somebody for 40 hours, their job's not getting done. So we plan for 32, and that's when we take a look at it. You know what? We have 4 staff and everybody's at 40 hours. If we can afford to bring on another staff, that'll bring everybody down to 32. But you know what? 40 hours isn't bad. But if you do that exercise and you realize that your staff have 60 hours a week of work, that's when it might be a good work, good indicator. So sometimes just, like, taking a step back, let's throw everything we're doing. We used to do it on an Excel sheet. We did it, like, annually when we were doing our budget. Like because I'd always want more staff. I want people to have an easier life. So that that's how I did it when I was a nonprofit. That's how we do it for our clients. Alright. So another question I see here, I'm having challenge I'm having is the rest of my finance team is already overworked and others in the organization lack technical skills to be cross trained. How do we plan continuity when there's no one to catch the technical task? That's hard. And I think there is sometimes a resistance to learn those technical tasks, especially when you have long time employees. One of the things I'd say is sometimes even just making sure those technical tasks are documented, whether it's a video, whether it's a procedure's manual. Just making sure that, hey, I'm not here. Maybe there's not somebody I can cross train. But if I brought in Andrew and his nonprofit advisory team, there's a documentation that somebody with the technical skills can figure out what we're doing. And sometimes that can be enough to just kind of bridge that gap. Because you're not always gonna have a seamless transition, but having at least some form of documentation that somebody you know what? I don't have anybody else that knows Financial Edge. But if I document things properly and somebody knows Financial Edge, they should be able to step in and pick this up. I I wanna say seamlessly, maybe 70 to 80%, and then fill in the gaps. I think that's a good way to think about it if you just think you don't have anyone with those technical skills. Excuse me. See if there's anything else in the question as the timer keeps going off. The last one I'll answer is is there any onboarding software or onboarding strategies I work with with succession planning? I'd say the biggest one, not to tell anybody, but there I'm sure there are softwares that will document this from an HR standpoint. Having a checklist And just, okay, somebody leaves, what are the things we need to think about? I worked in microfinance, so we had 23 different banking partners. So we had to have a list of who had what access when they left in finance. So So even just having that checklist, you know what? Somebody's thinking of leaving. What do we need to think about? And sometimes having that list will spur, okay, here's what needs to be cross trained. Here's what needs to be done. Rather than buying another software, sometimes just coming up with that list. And sometimes it's like having staff do it themselves. Okay. You left tomorrow. What what needs to be covered? And maybe just starting there. And the way I kind of say that is it's not necessarily for succession planning. It's so you can take a vacation. Okay. You wanna take 2 weeks off to go to Italy and eat pasta and gelato. What needs to be covered? What does the organization need to do? And then it's not necessarily from a succession planning standpoint. It's, from a, hey. We wanna give you time off standpoint. So I think that that can be very, very, big when thinking about it. So and there's all types of training. I know we used to have our staff watch Excel videos. And if you're looking for financial edge, I see in the chat, Blackbaud University. That's where I started. When I started at Forbes and Miller, I did not know financial ed. That's where I started. And then I got the hands on training, and then I've seen it all. So there's always ways room to grow and learn, but I I think you all wanna do good. So making sure that your organizations can keep going, I think, is a big thing to kind of bring forward and think about as we go into the new year. But thank you everybody for your time. As you fill out the survey, as you think about it, like I said, if there's any topics you wanna see in the next year, I'm sitting down with Sarah and the team to think about what we're gonna do in the next year because I just think this leader thought leadership is so critical from everybody I've talked about that we wanna keep it going. But thank you everybody for your time today and happy holidays. Same. Thank you everybody. Goodbye.