The Art of Self-Publishing: A CPA's Perspective

Your book focuses on how nonprofit organizations can achieve financial stability and health.

What motivated you to write a book on this topic?

The idea started when Gordon and I met at a CPA nonprofit conference in Vancouver in early 2020, just before COVID.

We were both on a panel and it began a long conversation and friendship.

I was fascinated by the five stages of financial wellness that Gordon was developing because it gave organizations a way to understand where they actually were and what they needed to build next.

My work focuses on the revenue side, what the mission truly costs, how you diversify funding, and how to build the relationships and the confidence to ask for what you need.

We realize that fundraising and finance are often treated as separate silos and separate functions, even though they're really two sides of the same coin.

And they're both required to build a sustainable strong organization that can deliver on the mission.

At some point, one of us said, we should write a book.

The deeper motivation was to put those two perspectives together in a form that nonprofit leaders would actually want to read and

that would be

useful for them.

And the subtitle of your book, A Nonprofit Leader's Journey from Financial Chaos to Clarity, what factors lead to a nonprofit organization finding itself in financial chaos?

Yeah, you know, people can often take that really personally.

But chaos is usually accumulated fragility, not one dramatic failure.

And financial chaos is rarely caused by one reckless decision or an incapable leader.

More often it develops when responsibility and demand grow faster than the systems that are built to support them.

A new executive director may inherit late or unreliable reports, a budget that looks balanced, but no cashflow forecast, restricted money that can't be used for payroll, or programs that have never been priced at full cost.

Often, Revenue is concentrated in grants which are increasingly unpredictable.

The finance process may live in one person's head and the board may receive numbers but not know the questions to ask.

Staff may be quietly subsidizing underfunding through overtime and burnout, and we wonder why everybody's leaving the organization.

Any one of those things can be managed, but when they accumulate, the leader feels as though every decision is being made in the dark.

One of the book's most important messages is that chaos is a condition, not a character flaw.

And once readers can see this and see it clearly in plain language, they can begin to build their way out.

I've been lucky to be a nonprofit for 13 years, so a few of your examples are sounding a little bit familiar.