The Accidental Nonprofiteer

I started as an intern in 2010 because I needed college credit. Six years later I was the chief operating officer of a national organization, and most of what I knew I had learned by getting it wrong first.

This book is the record of that. Volunteer programs, email operations, event production, ecommerce, the infrastructure a small organization runs on when there is no budget for infrastructure. What held up, what did not, and why the difference is usually structural rather than personal.

The argument, to the extent there is one, is that a mission is not a system. Good intentions do not survive turnover. Processes, documentation, and infrastructure sometimes do, and building those is most of the job.

Small organizations usually run on what two or three people happen to know. That works, and it is fragile. This book is for the people holding that knowledge, and for anyone trying to move it somewhere safer.

Each of my books describes the same failure from a different angle: an organization builds real capability, and that capability turns out to live inside one or two people rather than inside the organization. This is the first one, and the broadest.

In August 2026 I began doctoral study at Texas State University's McCoy College of Business. My research interests are in organizational durability and executive dependency: why execution capacity concentrates in individuals, and what documentation, process design, and technology actually transfer when those individuals leave. These books are the practitioner record that came first.