For most of us nonprofit consultants, managing back-office work is a major pain.
We’d rather be out there landing new clients or finishing current client deliverables. But instead, we’re filing invoices, scheduling meetings, or even troubleshooting computer meltdowns.
If you’re not prepared, back-office operations can easily suck up an entire day!
Here at Funding for Good, we are always looking for ways to simplify the business of running a business. So today, we’re going to dig into our top tips and best practices.
What’s Included in Back Office Operations?
Depending on who you ask, back-office operations can include a pretty wide variety of different functions. To us, it means the full scope of tasks and activities required for running a business, which is distinct from your work as a consultant.
You’re likely already familiar with some of the standard administrative must-haves for nonprofit consulting, such as:
- Legal compliance – Your business needs to be set up and registered properly (think disregarded LLC vs C-Corp) and you need to comply with all applicable federal, state and local requirements.
- Tax planning and compliance – To avoid painful surprises come tax time, you need set aside the appropriate amount of your income to cover taxes. You also need a way to track deductible expenses, which will reduce your tax burden.
- Cash flow planning and management – Cash flow can be a huge issue for consultants, especially when getting started. Do you have enough income in the bank to pay yourself and cover outgoing expenses? What happens if a client is late in making a payment (hint, this is where you need to be thinking ahead to your contracts)?
- Contracts – Every time you start work with a new client or initiate a new scope with an existing client, you need to prepare a contract. Ideally, you want to be using your own contract template, so you can include things like payment terms and penalties for late payments (to avoid those cash flow crunches).
- Invoicing – In most cases, in order to get paid, you must submit an invoice. Depending on how many clients you have and how your services are structured (think project payments vs monthly retainers), creating invoices manually one at a time can take hours every month!
Even if you have these basics covered, there are still other areas of back-office work to think about and plan for:
- Scopes of work – Scopes of work are both client-facing and back-office operations. They are a key step in bringing on a client and setting shared expectations. But unless you streamline the process, preparing scopes of work take up a significant amount of time (that you are not getting paid for). Many newer consultants start out by creating each scope of work from scratch. (Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way.)
- IT and all things tech-related – Whether you think of yourself as techie or not, as a nonprofit consultant you deal with a lot of software and equipment. Even things as basic as setting up branded email accounts, recording a virtual training, organizing a webinar, or creating a simple website require multiple hardware and software tools.
- Payments to vendors – As a business owner, managing every single detail yourself is often NOT the best use of your precious time, resources, and energy. That’s why consultants often hire consultants! Think virtual assistants, web designers, copywriters, and more.
- Client experience management – This is one of the most overlooked aspects of back office operations. Once you have a core set of services you’re offering, you want to be sure that clients have the kind of consistent and positive experience that makes them want to keep working with you and refer other colleagues to you. The client experience goes beyond the quality of your work as a consultant though. Clients want to feel like they are in professional and competent hands—which includes everything from your intake process to your communications to your follow up.
- Customer service – You might not think of yourself as providing customer service, but that’s exactly what you’re doing when a client or prospect emails because they can’t download a document or log into a webinar or play a video you shared.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with this list, you are not alone!
Most of us become nonprofit consultants to make a difference and make a living. We don’t get into consulting in order to worry about invoicing, business registrations, and vendor payments! That’s where streamlining back office operations comes in.
Can All This Back Office Work Really Be Streamlined?
Yes, all of these areas of back-office work can either be streamlined or affordably outsourced!
Here are three examples of how we’ve streamlined back-office operations here at Funding for Good:
1) Simplifying invoicing and removing the stress of late payments
We’ve come a long way in our invoicing practices. The majority of our contracts now require full or partial payment up front. This trims down the number of invoices needed and eliminates the stress of late payments. If we’re working with a client long-term, such as on a retainer, we’ll create a full year’s worth of invoices up front and send them to the client at the start of the contract—with the explicit expectation that payment needs to be received on time for services to continue. If you work primarily on a retainer model, there are also free or low-cost tools you can use to set up invoices that are automatically sent each month.
2) Streamlining core service communications
We have several core services, like strategic planning, where we’ve refined every step in the process of our work with clients. For the parts that involve a lot of communication, preparation and meeting coordination via email, we’ve created email templates and automations that we can use to kick off this work—saving countless hours while still providing the same high-quality service.
3) Creating high-touch client experiences
Every client wants to feel confident, clear and enthusiastic about the service they are receiving. That’s why we are always looking for ways to improve our clients’ experiences throughout their work with us. This includes things like refining service intake forms to more quickly get to the heart of client needs or creating explainer videos and guides to share with clients so they can feel prepared for our work together. We also provide info sessions, set up intro planning calls, and have templates and tools that we share with clients—and that they can continue using after our work together.
Get Started Simplifying YOUR Back Office Operations
Even though we’ve come a long way in streamlining our operations and services at Funding for Good, there is always more work to be done. If you’re interested in getting support for setting up or simplifying your back office operations, we’d love to find a way to help! You can check out our full-service business coaching program for nonprofit consultants, which one recent participant called “business coaching on steroids.” If you’re looking for less of a commitment, you can also grab a one-hour consultation on-demand, where we’ll help you troubleshoot or strategize around the topic or topics of your choice!
