Book One · Out now
So you want to start a nonprofit.
Nobody's going to teach you this part. Not the paperwork, not the board, not the money — and definitely not the question everyone skips, which is whether you should start one at all.
Passion Turned Profession · 15 chapters · 135 pages · $24.99
Book One
Most guides start at incorporation. This one starts a chapter earlier.
There are four honest ways to do what you're trying to do, and only one of them is a 501(c)(3). Some people read that chapter, realize their answer points somewhere simpler, and put the book down. That's the chapter working.
If the answer is yes, the rest is procedure. Incorporating. The exemption application, what it costs, and what actually holds it up. Building a founding board that isn't three friends nodding along. And the first ninety days, which is where most of the avoidable damage happens.
None of it's hard. It's just unwritten — and not knowing it is the only thing that ever made it look like a wall.
Every organization that stopped being useful had a reason at the time. The reason was almost always reasonable.
The set
Then there are four more.
Five books, and none of them repeat each other. Each one assumes the others exist and points to them by chapter instead of re-explaining. Book Two covers keeping a donor, so Book Four doesn't. Own the set and you should never read the same advice twice.
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Book One · Starting up
Passion Turned Profession
Everything nobody teaches you about starting a nonprofit
Whether to start one at all, then the paperwork, the founding board, and the first ninety days.
Available 15 chapters · 135 pages
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Book Two · Being known
Nobody Knows You Yet
How a young nonprofit builds an audience of supporters and volunteers
Nobody's heard of you, so you can't raise a budget or keep a volunteer. Posting more doesn't fix it. This does.
Available 25 chapters · 188 pages
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Book Three · Mission and program
Does It Actually Work?
Designing, running, and honestly measuring a nonprofit program
Attendance isn't a result. Neither is satisfaction. How to measure something real and say it out loud.
Available 25 chapters · 185 pages
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Book Four · Money in
Nobody Gives to Need
How a small nonprofit raises money without a development director
Need is everywhere and it doesn't move money. What actually does, and how to ask one person out loud.
Available 15 chapters · 97 pages
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Book Five · Money handled
Where Did It All Go?
Bookkeeping, cash, controls and reserves without a finance team
Raise it, then don't lose it. Cash flow is what actually closes organizations — not deficits, cash.
Available 14 chapters
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Books Six – Nine · Planned
The rest of the job
People and hiring · The board · Legal and compliance · Your own capacity
The half of the job that has nothing to do with your mission, and ends more founders than the mission ever does.
In development See the roadmap
Who this is for
People who didn't plan on this.
You know the work
You've known it a while — it's why you started. What you don't know is why your treasurer keeps asking about restricted funds, or whether your program actually does what you've been telling people it does. That's not a gap in you. Nobody teaches this.
One person, four jobs
If you've got a development director, a controller, and a lawyer on retainer, these will mostly tell you things you already know. Everything here is written for the organization where one person is doing all of it — which is most of them, and almost none of the books.
No cheerleading
Every chapter ends with a casebook: a real failure, anonymized, told as the reasonable decision it was at the time, with the cost nobody saw coming. I'll give you the structure. You know your organization, so you decide what it means there.
The Weekly Memo
One essay, most weeks.
How this sector really works — the incentives, the money, and the stuff everyone knows and nobody writes down.
Free. No welcome sequence, no webinar, no email telling you the cart closes Friday.