Summary

The purpose of this post is to summarize the achievements and learnings at Impact Ops in its first two years.

Impact Ops provides consultancy and hands-on support to help high-impact organizations upgrade their operations. We’ve grown from three co-founders to a team of 11 specialists and supported 50+ high-impact organizations since our founding in April 2023.

We deliver specialist operations services in areas where we have deep experience, including finance, recruitment, and entity setup. We have 50+ active clients who we’ve helped tackle various operational challenges. Besides our client work, we’re pleased to have contributed to the broader nonprofit ecosystem in several ways, including via free resources.

We’re also proud to have built a sustainable business model that doesn’t rely on continuous fundraising. We’ll share details about our services, projects, and business model in what follows, including our key takeaways and what’s next for Impact Ops!

What is Impact Ops?

Impact Ops is an operations support agency that delivers services to nonprofit organizations. 

Our mission is to empower high-impact projects to scale and flourish. We execute our mission by delivering specialist operations services in areas where we have deep experience, including finance, recruitment, and entity setup.

Our team has extensive experience within nonprofit operations. Collectively, we have:

• 50+ years’ experience working at nonprofits (incl. Effective Ventures, CEA, Panorama Global, Anti Entropy, Code For Africa, Epistea, and the Marine Megafauna Foundation)
• 50+ further years’ experience working in related roles outside the nonprofit community, including COO, recruitment, and accounting positions.

These figures underrepresent our collective relevant experience, as they exclude time spent supporting nonprofit organizations via Impact Ops (10 years collectively) and working for other consultancies (incl. PwC, EY, BDO, and Accenture). If it sounds like we're proud of our team, that's because we are!

What does Impact Ops do, concretely?

We provide consultancy and hands-on support to help our clients upgrade their operations.

We’ve identified six areas where nonprofits tend to lack operational capacity or specialisms — and this is how we’ve structured our services:

• Finance: Ongoing support from budgets to bookkeeping.
• Recruitment: Sourcing and hiring world-class candidates. 
• Entity setup: Entity registration and compliant infrastructure.
• Due diligence: Assessing risks from donors, grantees, or other collaborators.
• Ops audit: Reports identifying efficiency gains.
• Systems: Implementing systems to improve efficiency.

We also provide ad hoc operations consultancy to organizations looking for advice or capacity that doesn’t strictly fall within our six service lines.

Who are Impact Ops’s clients?

Impact Ops now has 50+ active clients. You can see a selection of our clients on our website.

We’re cause-neutral with respect to the clients we support. There’s no need for a client to be a registered charity or US 501(c)(3); we’re interested in the potential for significant positive impact. We’re especially excited about supporting projects with a strong founding team, funding, and a theory of change for impact – whether tackling global health and development, reducing animal suffering, protecting our climate, or safeguarding the long-term future.

That said, there are some commonalities between our clients. Many of our clients are in their first few years of operating (~50% have been operational for up to three years). But we work with clients of all ages; our youngest client, Food Policy Pathways, is 6 months old; our oldest, Foresight Institute, is 38 years old!

Many, but not most, of our clients work on mitigating global catastrophic risks (GCRs) — either as a broad category or within specific sub-fields (e.g. AI risk, biosecurity risk). Many of our clients promote effective giving, try to improve rationality and epistemics more broadly, or work on issues in global health and development.

Our clients typically have:

• Annual budgets of ~$1M (range: $300,000–$5M)
• Team headcounts of ~10 (range: 1–64)
• Funding from a major donor, like Open Philanthropy, Survival and Flourishing Fund, or Schmidt Futures.

What has Impact Ops achieved for its clients?

We’ve achieved a great deal for our clients over the last two years — more than we could do justice covering in a post of this length. Here’s an overview of some examples across our six service lines:

Key lessons from the last two years

Strategic foundation

• Planning and scenario development: Implementing the "5 Ps" principle (Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance) proved essential. We planned out three scenarios within our first month: the expected outcome, the worst-case scenario, and the aspirational outcome. Pre-defining “if-then” decision trees and establishing review points—including our 24-month sustainability deadline—enabled rapid, informed responses to changing conditions.
• Decision-making framework: We used the British military's 7-question strategic approach at the outset, which provided valuable structure for early entrepreneurial decisions, ensuring thorough analysis while maintaining operational speed.   

Risk management and resilience

• Proactive risk assessment: Given startup failure rates, we prioritized building resilience from inception. A comprehensive risk assessment and “murphy-jitsu” exercise was completed in the first year, with corresponding mitigation strategies. This proved invaluable for pre-empting challenges and helped us navigate the risky startup phase.
• Thinking to the finish: Thinking through plans all the way to a clearly defined set of end objectives creates clarity and alignment. Planning is much easier when you have a clear idea of what end state you are working towards. We broke our start up phase down into 3 phases each with a clearly defined set of objectives, which helped keep the organisation on track in the early stages.  

Organizational development

• Health before growth: Prioritizing organizational health early established strong foundations. Patrick Lencioni's principles from "The Advantage" provided particularly relevant guidance for our co-founders and helped ensure the team has remained aligned.
• Culture first, scale second: Establishing clear cultural norms before expansion attracted aligned talent and maintained team cohesion during growth phases.
• Adaptive governance: We avoided early bureaucracy while systematically reviewing and improving governance structures as we scaled, maintaining efficiency without sacrificing control.

Operational excellence

• Sustainable operations: Establishing clear communication early on about work-life balance expectations and what burnout prevention measures we would implement from the outset protected founder wellbeing—a critical startup risk factor.
• Customer-centric development: Quarterly user feedback collection and responsive service adaptation during the early stages allowed us to adapt our services to our customers needs. Our Recruitment and Due diligence services expanded significantly based on client demand and feedback.
• Communication standards: Implementing "ABC" communication norms (Accuracy, Brevity, Clarity) and favouring quick huddles over lengthy digital exchanges improved team efficiency and reduced misunderstandings.

Brand and purpose

• Beyond visual identity: Brand purpose transcends logos and style guides. Investing time in defining how you want the world to perceive your offering creates strategic clarity and market positioning advantages.

What has Impact Ops done for the broader nonprofit community?

Besides our (paid) client work, we’re proud to have contributed to the broader nonprofit ecosystem in several ways. For example, we’ve:

• Written and shared a number of free resources on particular operational challenges.
• Created a Nonprofit Operations Playbook, funded by Astera Institute, to help founders launch high-impact nonprofits in the US.
• Shared our expertise pro bono with a number of potential clients.
• Supported Anti Entropy with the development of its nonprofit accelerator, SparkWell. SparkWell is designed to help high-impact nonprofit projects test ideas, develop operational capabilities, and launch as independent entities.

How is Impact Ops funded?

Impact Ops is funded by fees from our clients. We were keen to build a sustainable business model that doesn’t rely on fundraising (besides an initial startup loan to build infrastructure).

In our first two years we generated over $1M in income, and we’re working towards paying back our startup capital later this year. 

What’s next for Impact Ops?

We’re continuing to grow our team and refine our services. 

A major strategic focus is exploring and experimenting with AI tools to improve the efficiency of operations in the nonprofit sector. We’ve had notable success with this on the accountancy side through tools like Briefcase; and we believe we’ll also see the benefits on the recruitment side soon.

Another significant project we’re contributing to is the SparkWell nonprofit accelerator. SparkWell temporarily houses nonprofit projects while they receive mentorship and ops support in order to launch independent entities of their own, and currently sponsors six high-impact projects. 

We’re keen to remain employee-owned. Our co-founders have taken the Founders Pledge, and we plan on taking the GWWC Company Pledge once we’re liability-free. We may pursue further accreditation (e.g. B Corp status, 1% For the Planet) to ensure we remain accountable and aligned with our mission to empower high-impact projects to scale and flourish. We’re seeking experienced advisors to provide input into our developing strategy so do reach out if you’re interested.

As always, you can follow us on LinkedIn and/or sign up to the Impact Ops Newsletter to learn of new developments and opportunities.