When I tell people that RVG works with both for-profit businesses and nonprofits the reaction is usually some version of the same question.
How do those two things go together?
It is a fair question. On the surface a $15M distribution company and a $4M regional nonprofit seem to have almost nothing in common. Different goals. Different pressures. Different vocabularies. Different definitions of success.
But spend enough time inside both kinds of organizations and a different picture emerges. One that took me longer than I expected to see clearly.
The operational problems are nearly identical. The language is completely different.
The Commercial Side First
My background before RVG was built around revenue operations. CRM implementation. Sales process design. The unglamorous work of getting organizations to capture what they know, systematize how they sell, and build something that survives when key people leave.
The clients were mostly founder-led businesses between $2M and $30M. Smart operators who had figured out how to grow through instinct, relationships, and sheer personal force of will. The growth was real. The infrastructure behind it usually was not.
The pattern repeated itself so consistently that I started to wonder if it was universal.
Founder knows how to grow the business. Business grows. Business gets complex enough that the founder cannot be everywhere at once. Growth stalls or gets chaotic. Someone suggests a CRM. CRM gets implemented. Nobody really uses it. Problem persists.
The issue was never the tool. It was that nobody had translated how the business actually worked into something the tool could reflect. And nobody had built the process that the tool was supposed to support.
Then the Nonprofit Work Started
The first time I sat down with a nonprofit executive director to talk about operations I expected the conversation to be fundamentally different from what I was used to.
It was not.
Different words. Same problems.
The executive director who could not take a vacation without things falling apart was the founder who could not take a vacation without things falling apart. The program data scattered across personal spreadsheets was the sales data scattered across personal spreadsheets. The staff departure that broke institutional knowledge for six months was the star salesperson departure that broke the pipeline for six months.
The constituent management system that nobody trusted was the CRM that nobody trusted.
I remember sitting in a conference room with the leadership team of a mid-sized nonprofit — good people, important mission, genuinely excellent programs — listening to them describe their operational challenges. And thinking: I have had this exact conversation. Just with different nouns.
What the Difference Actually Is
The difference between working in commercial and nonprofit environments is not the operational problems. It is the context those problems live in.
In a for-profit business the urgency is usually revenue. When the pipeline is broken you feel it in the numbers. When the CRM is unreliable the forecast is unreliable. The connection between operational dysfunction and business outcome is direct and relatively fast.
In a nonprofit the urgency is mission. When operations are broken you feel it in program delivery. In staff burnout. In the gap between what you set out to do and what you are actually able to deliver consistently. The connection is just as real but it often takes longer to show up clearly and it is harder to quantify.
This changes how you have the conversation. Not what you fix — but how you talk about why fixing it matters.
With a business owner I talk about pipeline visibility and revenue predictability. With an executive director I talk about program capacity and mission delivery. The underlying work is remarkably similar. The framing has to be completely different.
What This Taught Me About Growth
Working across both worlds clarified something I had only partially understood before.
Growth — whether you are measuring it in revenue or in program reach or in community impact — is ultimately a systems problem. The organizations that grow sustainably are not necessarily the ones with the best products or the most compelling missions. They are the ones that figured out how to make their growth repeatable.
How to capture what they know. How to deliver consistently. How to bring new people up to speed without rebuilding everything from scratch every time. How to see what is actually happening in the organization without relying on one person’s memory or one meeting’s update.
That problem does not care whether your goal is profit or purpose. It shows up the same way in both environments. And it responds to the same kind of work.
Why RVG Works the Way It Does
RVG was built to serve both worlds intentionally — not because it made the business model more interesting but because the problem we solve does not respect the distinction between commercial and mission-driven.
The founders and executive directors I work with are not that different from each other. They are smart people who built something real and are now trying to figure out how to grow it without it depending entirely on them. They are trying to make their instincts and their institutional knowledge transferable. They are trying to build something that outlasts any one person.
That is the same problem in every organization I have ever worked inside. The language changes. The work does not.