Peter Lohmann says hire a consultant with deep experience across similar organizations and demand brutal honesty. Most consultants soften their criticism, so you have to explicitly ask for raw, unfiltered feedback. Hearing hard truths from an expert validates your problems and pushes you to fix them.
It is so important to have an outside set of eyes in any organization. Small business, nonprofit, doesn't matter. Get someone in there who's seen 100 of you. Yes. And get them to tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. Yeah. And my advice to anyone who hires a consultant like this is you need to tell them to be brutal. Because you pay them, they have this tendency to kind of be nice, but you're paying to hear what they have to say. So tell them, listen, you're not going to hurt my feelings. Give it to me raw. I want to know, you know, what are we doing well? What are we really doing wrong? Doing a horrible job at. And like, that's what, that's what you're paying for, right?
Right. And some of the things they told us, it's hard to hear. We knew it, but it was a different thing hearing it from an expert. And so we need to, we need to do better.
