So what does fragile look like in real life inside a small nonprofit for what you're

talking about? I'm glad you asked because this has really been where my research has been for the last 15 years.

And so I worked in the nonprofit space for 15 years and then went back to school and got my MBA at Duke and really knew that this was something I wanted to do.

But one of the things that struck me in that moment was that there were so many business practices that we should apply to the nonprofit space.

But at that time, we were transplanting them into the nonprofit space as if they could use them identically as the retail industry or healthcare.

But nonprofits are very different in the way that we operate.

We're our own industry.

I'd love to see you at the table.

So what does that look like in practice?

You know, it's interesting.

We, um, like to talk about some of the bigger issues that I think that plague organizations, and these are organizations across the board.

If you were to talk to any Fortune 500 company, they would say these are the things they're worried about too.

Um, but these are things specific to nonprofits, and so we've got burnout, which we've been talking about.

There's also the burden, the secondary trauma, as well as the busyness, what I talked about earlier, the kind of the busyness competitions.

And so part of the struggle we have is a little bit with ourselves.

What prompted you to write it?

So what's the difference between getting bigger and actually getting

stronger? Yeah.

I love this question.

And I just want to echo, I mean, you and I travel the country and we go to a lot of keynotes and conferences.

I mean, this is real.

It's palpable.

And I think that we saw it post-COVID and it made sense then.

And I want you to, you know, walk us through the flywheel idea and really what gap does this fill in the sector? Like why this book and who should be reading it?

And essentially we have six

different elements.

And so if you, if you could imagine the first is impact, because at the end of the day, impact is our bottom line.

We exist to create impact in the community, but just creating it alone doesn't actually get it out to people.

And it doesn't allow people who are donors to come to the mission and contribute to it.

So impact is the starting point.

And I oftentimes say that, I know you love Texans because you like bringing them up, bringing us on your podcast.

Same kind of thing here, right?

How do you distinguish and why is it important?

Yeah.

So first of all, I will say we were part of a really interesting time.

So it wasn't just Cincinnati that got started.

There was also all these other kind of what I call ecosystem builders that were getting started in Rhode Island.

So I had a counterpart there.

There were some in Canada.

Tell us about all that.

[laughs]

"I wanna do something else now." And I didn't really know what that was, and I'd always been thinking about studying French properly, and that's when I left.

And so I decided 18 months later, I left to do a French degree at King's College London full-time.

I was the only old person there with lots of 18-year-olds.

And, uh, so when I did that, I was able to cash in my share options 'cause I was a good leaver.

I retired.

And so I started buying properties to let out and became a landlord without really thinking too much about it, and I used letting agents.

So give us your thoughts on using AI as a sort of sidekick in your author business, and also for wider life.

Qualitative, yep.

And, and yeah, so those kind of things are really important.

Um, and no matter what, impact has to be that bottom line.

We have to be measuring the things that really matter.

And so I see too many people who are like, "I wanna take this thing to scale," and they've never really, um, decided or distilled down, what is the thing that you're doing that is significantly different than everybody else? Whether it's an after-school program or a two-gen program or an arts group, what are you doing that's unique and different? Um, and so sometimes scale will stretch organizations beyond their ability, and when you get stretched, you find your weak points really quickly.

Um, and so that's...

So sometimes I think, um, we don't spend enough time talking to people about Reinforcing the work that they're doing at an impactful level, and then, um, scaling by design.

[laughs]

Could you, Suzanne?

Yeah, a record year this year, as we'd said.

As you said, revenue up 17%, so growing £40 million a year on year.

That revenue split is roughly two-thirds coming from businesses we acquired this year and the full year impact of the businesses we bought the year before, and a third of the growth coming from our core business, so organic growth.

The standout performance in that organic sector is almost certainly vaping, as Sandy said.

We've had 20 million pounds of growth in our vaping category.

And that's against the backdrop of a huge year of transition, not forgetting that at the start of that financial year, disposable vapes were banned and we were tasked with transitioning all of our retailers and their consumers onto a rechargeable alternative.

I don't suppose you could just walk us through the outlook for the business, what investors should expect?