How AI and ERP are Changing the Game for Community Based Nonprofits

[00:00:00] Shawn Rubbin: Too many things were disconnected. All the systems were disconnected. There were too many manual handoffs. It became more than inconvenient, it really became a financial risk.

[00:00:08] Will Stratton: The only way nonprofits are able to survive is by being that level of efficient, and if you don't have proper reporting, you can't make that case.

People aren't going to understand what you're doing

[00:00:28] Lauren O'Hara: Welcome to the Acumatica ERP podcast, where we explore practical innovation for growing businesses. I am Lauren O'Hara, and I am a product marketing manager at Acumatica. This season, we are digging into how AI and modern ERP capabilities are reshaping the day-to-day of growing organizations. So each episode, we will talk to people who are building and using this technology, and that means that you get the real wins and the real challenges in what's coming next.

For mission-driven organizations, operational efficiency and healthy margins really matter, of course, but success is also measured by how many families get served, how many homes get built, and how effectively resources reach the community. So today, we're asking a simple question: What becomes possible when fast-growing, mission-driven organizations have access to the same modern systems and AI capabilities that power businesses today?

So to explore that, we're joined by two leaders from different corners of the nonprofit world. Will Stratton is the chief financial officer at Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver, and Shawn Rubbin is the chief advancement officer at PSI Family Services. Will, Shawn, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

[00:01:43] Will Stratton: Thank you

[00:01:44] Shawn Rubbin: Great to be here.

[00:01:45] Lauren O'Hara: All right. So let's start with some little bit more introduction from both of you. So Will, could you tell us a little bit about your business and what your role entails day to day?

[00:01:55] Will Stratton: Sure. As you said, I'm Will Stratton, chief financial officer here at Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver.

Habitat for Humanity, pretty well-known brand internationally. Those of us in Denver, we're the fourth or third largest affiliate in the nation, depending on how you look at it. And so, you know, my focus is that traditional Habitat model of building homes and involving the community and supplying, you know, inventory in a way that...

or for people that does not normally get served. The thing that makes it really interesting is just our broadened scope. We also have several retail locations. We have mortgage origination. We have other pieces. And so any given day has a new challenge, new thing that we have to figure out. And so that's when technology really becomes a key part of our operation.

[00:02:42] Lauren O'Hara: Awesome. I love the, you know, the new challenges is always a key, right? It always makes, makes things interesting. Shawn, same question to you. Could you also let us know what your organization does and then what your role entails from day to day?

[00:02:57] Shawn Rubbin: Absolutely. We're a health and human services organization.

We serve families and individuals in the, uh, Washington, D.C. and Maryland areas. Have been serving since 1979, primarily through, almost exclusively through government-funded behavioral health agencies. We serve individuals that need behavioral health therapies, developmental disabilities, persons with developmental disabilities, and we are a provider of foster care services.

We, too, are mission-driven, and my work crosses through operations, finance, technology, and strategy. And I spend a lot of time connecting the areas that the organization often puts into separate boxes because there's a-- We're, we're, we're in the people business. Like Will, this is the people business. This is about shoring up people and, and their needs and, and also our employees.

They're a big part of what makes it all work.

[00:03:48] Lauren O'Hara: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, and, and, and I like the idea of, you know, taking some different components that might traditionally be separate and, you know, trying to connect them all, right? It's a great point. Okay. So for the businesses we usually cover on this show, efficiency shows up as a margin, right?

And, and, uh, obviously, margins are still important to both of you, but it's gonna also show up if-- that efficiency is also gonna show up for more families served and, um, individuals served and homes built. So how much of that is driven by what's happening in your back office? And then Shawn, I'll start with you first.

But, you know, how much of that Really drives, is driven by the back office

[00:04:24] Shawn Rubbin: Well, it's dr- it's driven a great deal, uh, by the back office because margins really do matter to, to nonprofits, and it helps us and enables us to not only expand and sustain our mission and serving more people, but the quality of the service, because we are a fee-for-service.

So if the quality of the service isn't excellent, doesn't meet certain standards, we're not going to, we're not going to necessarily get paid for that service. We're not gonna get reimbursed. So we have to pay diligent, diligent attention to what's going on and make sure, you know, that the back office is running smoothly and there's less friction between the organa- organization's day-to-day work and that it's, you know, meeting its mission.

And service delivery just can't live in separate worlds, so we have to pay strict attention to the things are moving efficiently.

[00:05:15] Lauren O'Hara: Yeah, I mean, just like you said, I mean, the margin and the, all those things still matter to you, and that's, that's a, that's an excellent example of that. So Will, same question.

What's happening in your back office? How does that... How much of the efficiency is driven by what's happening in your back office then?

[00:05:29] Will Stratton: Of course. You know, it's always funny for us to use the word margin, because I think people think, you know, in a traditional construction company, your house costs, we'll say Denver, $400,000, and we're gonna sell it for 500, and there's your margin.

I always joke with everyone that our number looks the other direction. We build something for $400,000, then we sell it for $200,000 Well, that obviously doesn't work super well, um, when you're trying to grow and really sustain a business. So what do you do? So you try to find alternative methods to fill that other two hundred thousand dollars so that we can keep serving the community.

I think the thing that makes it so interesting then is that that comes from everyone. There is no one understood constant bucket. There is obviously things like grants and fundraising and other revenue streams, our retail, things like that, but you're still going to operate at a loss. So it takes everyone thinking really, I think, innovatively around their positions and around what they do to help make that gap kind of close.

I'll give you an example. We have a facilities team and a IT team, and when we s- talk about budget, it's not only about spend, but it's about earning potential even for them. So, you know, can you do shared service with another nonprofit? Can we lease out, you know, property that we own to other nonprofits?

We wanna help the community, but we have to constantly strive to help make up that margin because, like I said, every for-profit company in the world is able to roll out and go, "Well, you know, five hundred thousand for four hundred thousand dollar cost, we can do that all day." For us, it's a completely different form of algebra that we have to commit, and so it means that everyone is constantly pushed to be more efficient, to be more effective, and to think about things a little differently in their own departments.

[00:07:19] Lauren O'Hara: That's awesome. And, and I love the idea that, you know, you obviously have the back office and, but that innovation is not just innovation with, you know, your technology, but it's also the way you're thinking, right? Yeah. That's awesome. Love it. Okay. So I'm gonna hop back over to Shawn. So PSI, and this is, these are things that you've already mentioned.

PSI has been serving families and individuals since 1979, and, you know, your funding model shifted from volume-based to fee-driven reimbursement. So what did that shift expose about the systems that you were running on and, and improvements you might need to make?

[00:07:51] Shawn Rubbin: Well, again, like I had previously said, when it was volume based, that was, that was very different because it was the number of participants that were showing up, that were coming to our day treatment programs every day.

When it switched to fee for service, even within one program, let's say the services to the developmentally disabled, some of that is job placement. Uh, they-- it's a supported employment program. So that bills out at a different rate because that individual may need a, uh, a job coach to help them through their day on the job.

That's gonna be a different rate than someone who's receiving pre-employment training. They're basically staying working on their skills within one space, you know, with a simulated office or whatever it might be. The reimbursement rates are gonna be different, and we had to integrate so many of our systems together.

Too many things were disconnected. All the systems were disconnected. There were too many manual handoffs It became more than inconvenient and became, it really became a financial risk. We basically needed to look more at the, that things were properly documented because they were so closely tied. The clinical documentation ended up driving the billables instead of just numbers of people showing up to the program.

That's what made things feel so different.

[00:09:05] Lauren O'Hara: Mm-hmm. And I bet, I bet that that could cause some risk too, right? Like, that helps you, you know, and, and those issues can, can be risky, right?

[00:09:14] Shawn Rubbin: Oh, absolutely, because it's for different individuals, that could be the quality of the service could affect so many other parts of their lives.

And then for us as an organization, the risks inherent in what we do can affect th- th- uh, things like our insurance rates, our, our, you know, just the business of doing business.

[00:09:31] Lauren O'Hara: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I love it. Yeah, that's a really good point. So Will, I'm gonna hop back over to you. Habitat Denver spans home building, home preservation, the accessory dwelling unit, so ADU program, mortgage organization, and a chain of ReStores, which you mentioned a lot of this in your, uh, intro.

So pretty different operations under one roof. So where does that complexity show up in the numbers, and what does it demand of your system?

[00:09:54] Will Stratton: When I started here, someone made a joke to me that most nonprofits have one or two lines of business, and we have eight. And it really feels like that whenever you deal with anything from our operations, even things like a financial, maybe you do understand the, you know, the very boring world of construction accounting, but how does that integrate with the point-of-sale software from retail operations?

Mm-hmm. How can that be rectified or reconciled with, you know, grant timing? We have all of these things. We have work that we do that's traditional construction. We have fee-for-service work, just like Shawn and their shop does. And so there's different pieces, and so a system that's underlying this, that's serving as a backbone, similar to Shawn's comment, you can have a separate system for every line, and what you're gonna end up with is vastly confusing different pieces of information.

You're gonna open up this system, and it's going to say 10, and you're gonna open up a different system, and it's going to say eight, and no one's going to know what the truth is. And so, you know, when it comes to an ERP especially, people talk about, well, there's these, you know, certain ones that you go for, and it's, it's such a different equation for us because if it was just home building, then people say, "Well, you do take one of these."

And if it's just retail, "Then you take one of these." And if it's just mortgages, "You take one of these." And you have to stop and go, well, what if it's all of them? Mm-hmm. What if it's all of those at the same time? And you're a nonprofit, so you can't just go out and have someone build you one that you need.

You have to find something that works, and that's really where we've landed, you know, obviously with Acumatica. But with all of our systems has to be something that is... You know, we can't have something tailor-made for us, but it needs to speak every language. This stuff has to be able to... As I said earlier, our margin is dictated by the success of every program.

Mm-hmm. And so everything that is not measured is going to be allowed to lag behind, and then it's not contributing, and everything has to contribute. The only way nonprofits are able to survive is by being that level of efficient and lean around contribution, and everything has to feed the program. And if you don't have proper reporting and don't have proper- You know, the numbers coming out, you can put in all you want, but it's not going to help you any.

You can't s- make that case. People aren't going to understand what you're doing. And so it's a constant battle with, you know, really all new technology. It might work for this small piece, it might work for this one department, but can it speak to the entire mission, to the entire affiliate? Because that's really what we need from it.

We need it to be able to hold all of that together and somehow make sense of it all in one language so that an outside person can read it and go, "Oh, I understand what's happening," and not just go, "Well, okay, I got this," but not the rest of it.

[00:12:29] Lauren O'Hara: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I mean, the, y- your point about just connecting all those different systems, right, into one and, like, having a construction company that also does retail, that's, you know...

And, and those are those, those things that you hear even from a big construction co- corporation, you know, they may, they may need that. So that's really interesting that, yeah, that's, that, that's your need as well.

[00:12:52] Will Stratton: Well, I think it's the thing that's, it gets missed so often, and I've worked at a larger construction company, publicly traded, in the past.

You have someone in-house who can build it for you. You can say that, "Well, I need this to be exactly this all the time, and this always to look like this," and you can have someone go and do that. Obviously, even at our scale at Habitat, we're still a nonprofit. As I said earlier, every dollar has to be accounted for to be able to make up for that margin gap And so we can't have someone here who's building us custom software.

We're not-- Our mission is not making the best home building custom software available. That's not what we're here for. And so everything needs to funnel that direction and everything needs to serve it. And that's really where, like I said, a lot of those conversations end up, a lot of the questions end up getting raised, and why we're always looking for new and different answers because the systems and the mission just require it.

We're doing new and innovative things every time, every day, and we need the system to keep up with us and catch up so that we can keep going forward.

[00:13:51] Lauren O'Hara: Very nicely put. I love it. Yeah. That's great.

[00:13:53] Shawn Rubbin: And I, I find, you know, with that, Will, also, and you were, you were-- this is where you were going with it, too, the flexibility in the systems that you're using- Right

is so important. And that's what I found was especially appealing with Acumatica as one big system, the flexibility and people understanding our, our, our business. We're serving many, many masters here. So.

[00:14:14] Will Stratton: I think the-- that-- So Shawn, I mean, the flexibility is the right word. That's 100% true. Yes. Because we're driven by...

I mean, everybody's driven by a market condition, but we're driven by, you know, so many different markets, and we have to have the ability to respond. So, you know, as I'm just using ourselves as an example, the 10-year Treasury rate moves, which impacts what we're able to lend at for our mortgages, at the same time that lumber changes, which changes how much we're able to build the house for.

And all of those things in different markets and different reporting mechanisms have to be able to flow down into one single spreadsheet or one single financial that someone can read and try to make sense of, and then be able to act on. And I think that's the flexibility piece, because we have to be so much more nimble and so much quicker than some of our other peers because, you know, we don't have reserves.

We're spending money on program, and we don't have the ability to kind of just wait something out. Those are people not being served that we need to serve. We need someone who can change with us. If we look at the market today and go, "You know what? Federal grants aren't going to work anymore. We need to do something else," then the system needs to move with us.

We don't have time to go through a year-long implementation because then we're late again.

[00:15:27] Lauren O'Hara: Yeah. Right. And so, so you're both agreeing that flexibility is a, a huge advantage for your organization, right?

[00:15:36] Shawn Rubbin: Absolutely.

[00:15:37] Lauren O'Hara: Awesome. Love it. Shawn, you said at Acumatica Summit on the big stage, and you did an awesome job, by the way.

I was really- Thank you ... impressed, um, that technology should never overshadow mission, it should strengthen it, which is a lovely statement. So what does that look like in practice when you're, you know, evaluator rolling out something new?

[00:15:57] Shawn Rubbin: The biggest thing is to start with the problem, not the product.

What is the problem I'm trying to solve here? What are we trying to solve? What are we trying to solve within our office, and what are we trying to solve in the, in the community? The technology itself is not the strategy. What needs to improve for the person doing the work or the person receiving the service?

Some of most friction with technology is how rapidly it changes and how getting buy-in to use it. I mean, a good example though is, uh, during the pandemic, we had to quickly shift into doing telehealth services, which typically, I mean, you had to go through all kinds of hoops to make that happen. The technology was there, but the adoption by the people that we serve, some of our staff.

So we had to do these quick, quick, you know, on the spot trainings and get people to understand if we don't do this, we're not gonna... You know, four weeks in our business of people not being able to show up in person- Mm-hmm ... is gonna cause a real problem. Or even with the social distancing, it's still the, the, the numbers aren't gonna be there.

We are mandated to give these services. So that was, you know, an interesting time, but it did make us innovate and innovate quickly and use what we had and quickly develop best practices on the way to use it.

[00:17:15] Lauren O'Hara: So, I mean, I think it's really interesting that so far we've both talked about, you know, the being, you know, how important it's to be nimble, how important it's to be able to be flexible, right?

And that allows you probably to, to be innovative to some extent, right? And that allows you to, um, hopefully leverage the technology to, you know, to the best advantage, right?

[00:17:37] Shawn Rubbin: Well, what's that old adage? Um, necessity is the mother of invention. The mother and the father Of invention. So yeah, and flexibility has to be there so you can innovate

[00:17:49] Lauren O'Hara: Yeah, yeah.

So now I've got a question for both of you. I'm gonna ask Shawn to go first. So nonprofits carry a reporting burden. Most businesses don't. So you have, uh, you know, as you've both mentioned, and, and Will, especially granters, government contracts, compliance, donors, all want a different cut of the same data.

How much of your team's time goes to that? And where has technology genuinely moved the needle for you with all of those different people that-- different organizations you have to report to?

[00:18:19] Shawn Rubbin: Yeah, there are so many audiences that need different views of the picture, of, yeah, not just the financial picture, but the picture, and the underlying info has to remain reliable and consistent.

Government agencies, regulators, funders, auditors, the board, internal management, all asking different questions and in different formats for different reporting periods. What we really needed was, again, back to what we were saying at the beginning, can't have all these different systems producing the different reports, and if they're not talking to each other and talking effectively, what's gonna happen?

So you can't keep manipulating the same spreadsheets that come out of different systems. So that integration is also really important, so you have one source of truth. We don't have to keep rebuilding the truth, you know, for all these different audiences.

[00:19:08] Lauren O'Hara: Cool. So you have trust, you have trust in the data that you're getting, right?

[00:19:11] Shawn Rubbin: Absolutely. Yes.

[00:19:12] Lauren O'Hara: That's awesome. Okay. All right. Will, I would ask you the same thing. So how has your team's time shifted to where, you know, s- with the technology that you have in place now, how has that changed over time?

[00:19:26] Will Stratton: We have a borderline full compliance team because of all the different stakeholders that ultimately are involved in putting together our capital stack.

And that team has really leaned in heavily to the technology piece because ultimately, as Shawn said, these things lived in different silos for a long time, and it was hard, and I think this is the important piece that Shawn hinted at. There are numbers on a page, but there was no qualitative story behind it.

The story is what was getting-- was causing the problems, is that if you just report, you know, compliance, hey, this was X number of revenue, Y number of expense, it doesn't tell a story. It doesn't tell them whether we're being successful or not, especially in the lens of a nonprofit. I mean We shouldn't strive to have no profit, but to be honest, there are years that we don't because of just cycles of construction, especially for us.

The cycles of the market, there are years where we contract and grow and contract and grow. And because that money is ultimately not going into the pocket of, you know, an owner or something like that, we're also incentivized to spend as much of our net income as possible because it's all programmic.

It's the ability to serve more homes and deliver more families into homeownership, and so we want to do that. So if I go... You know, we have bankers also, so we have everything from a government agency to a for-profit bank all looking at the same financials. And maybe a government, you know, they want something really around our, a project that they funded.

They want that so, so secular and by itself, and whether it's successful. And without the underlying qualitative piece, as I said earlier, these things run at deficits. So if you look at it and go, "Well, how do you, how are you sustainable?" And so having all this stuff into one system allows you to pull that back up immediately and go, "This is the actual narrative.

This is what makes it to where we're able to do this year over year," and means that, you know, you don't have to worry about us making our debt obligations. It looks weird that we maybe have this net loss, but that's just a timing thing, and these... Showing them things like awards and commitments and timing of receivables, it just helps paint that full picture that otherwise you just lose.

And that's where having one system, one true system really helps carry you through that because it's all in one place. You can pull it together versus, "Well, no, hold on. Let me go pull this here, pull this there, and that will explain all this." That, that's not going to get a lot of confidence, and that's what you really need when you're selling this.

[00:21:51] Lauren O'Hara: Very nice. I like the fact that you mentioned that, you know, you make a profit, and then you're o-you're going to take that profit and reinvest it into your work, right? You're going to... And so I think that's a really interesting differentiator for your organizations, right? Is that you... Yes, obviously, like we mentioned at the very beginning, right?

Margins are very important, but it's not about paying your CEO. It's about paying back to the community, right?

[00:22:18] Will Stratton: Right. Yeah, we, we don't have owners. There's no distribution, there's no dividend. There's no one sitting there sending me, you know, asking me for stakeholder or shareholder statements and saying, "When do I get my payout?

When do I get my return?" The return is, and I, I'm able to lean into this, the return is the families. It's the families served. It's the fact that right before this call, we had a closing today in our building, and I could hear them cheering as that family closed. That is the return. That is what comes out of this.

Yeah. There's no, you know, no one's pulling up in their new Mercedes every day because we hit a big sale. What a big sale does for us, what a big fundraising capital campaign does for us, is it means that next year there's 100 families that we can serve versus 80, or what have you. It means that we can expand our programs.

It means that we can put more into resource so that people can access those goods more easily. It's that sort of stuff. Mm-hmm. And so that's where I think the having that really tight messaging that's beyond just that quantitative, it is that qualitative piece as well, that's what gets that going, and that's what really starts feeding it and starts snowballing because that stuff all does become self-investment

[00:23:23] Lauren O'Hara: Very nice.

Love it. Okay, so I'm gonna shift a little bit to AI. So a recent survey found ninety-two percent of nonprofits are using AI in some form, but only seven percent say it's made a major difference. So where has AI been most impactful in your work today, and are there any areas that you're concerned about with AI?

[00:23:43] Will Stratton: Sean made the comment that we need to identify the problem, and I think that that was where AI started, where everybody sat down and said, "Well, there's this AI thing. We should use it." AI is a tool in a tool belt like anything else. And so what are we doing with it? And I think especially for us, we wanted to be very cautious because we are collecting information from people.

We have not only personal identifying information, socials and things like that, but we have income verification, credit scores, things like that when it comes to doing our mortgage origination side that, you know, I would feel very uncomfortable if I just messaged a copilot right now and said, "Hey, can I pull up this information?"

Even if it is a closed system, that would just make me feel bad. And so we stepped back as a group and said, "Okay, we're gonna be very diligent about this, and we're going to use it to solve problems, not just something that becomes pervasive." We had had that moment where we had a meeting at one point, and I joked that, "Is this everybody's chat agent talking to everybody's chat agent?"

'Cause it was feeling like that for a moment, where someone gave a great comment from theirs, and everybody typed it into theirs, and then we're just reading it back. And that's-

[00:24:48] Lauren O'Hara: Right.

[00:24:48] Will Stratton: That's not, you know... That can feel innovative in the moment that you're watching that happen, but it's definitely not innovative for the program.

It's not innovative for what we're trying to do. And so instead, we've been very diligent. We've put money into investment with our basically expanding the scope of our, what we refer to as business solutions, but it oversees IT, and these are problems. Is this a tool AI that can be used to solve said problem?

Is there, you know, a way here? Is it another good tool in the tool belt? And so you think about something like understanding our financials with these different programs, that is something we can lean into AI, and it's going to get very boring for certain people to just sit there and stare at income statements and try to understand how eight different departments pull together.

But can you help me put this in a way that people would understand, help reinforce the narrative, put it more pretty pictures, which people seem to love, but I'm an accountant, so I always try to avoid, and things like that, versus really using it to get the full everywhere kind of piece that it was headed.

We don't want it to be that. We don't wanna lose that personal piece, especially, you know, Habitat, people are coming for the people. They're not coming because our AI chatbot's really good. And so we wanna make sure that it is, it's serving the needs of the affiliate and not just filling up silos.

[00:26:02] Lauren O'Hara: Mm-hmm.

I like the idea of the tool belt, AI being the tool. Okay. So Shawn, same question to you. How is PSI using AI, if at all? And, you know, do you have any concerns similar to Will about, you know, just some of those security issues or other?

[00:26:17] Shawn Rubbin: Well, like Will and the concerns that he has, we are, again, dealing with people and some very private and sensitive information.

And in this case, something that we've been highly aware of, you know, since the beginning of time, is we're handling people's private health information. We have to guard, you know, every fiber of our being. Where we really are looking into it, but very carefully, is again, in the clinical documentation. And in behavioral health, you know, first of all, you have to get, you have to get consent.

Now, we are not using system yet because we, we still want to review and make sure. But what's gonna be important about when we do use that, of course, is the training of the staff in how to use it, because it can be taken advantage of. And if you're not really tight on the controls with it, you can get, you know, duplication of notes.

But the insights that can be gained for individual therapeutic interventions that might be necessary that a clinician might miss, that's gonna be invaluable. But even the bigger necessity is that the documentation is where the revenue cycle begins. The widgets that we move around day in and day out are claims submission, because we're doing thousands and thousands and thousands of claims per week, per month.

And if there are errors in any of the documentation, some of the, some of the stuff that, that clinician will do, you know, 25 times a day just in, in basic information, any of, any mistakes, the transposing of numbers, any of those kinds of things, a claim is gonna be rejected. And that, you know, if it happens once, it can happen 50, you know, 50 times, uh, you know, in a day.

So that's where our selection of the, of the clinical documentation AI that we could be using, that's what's gonna really make the difference for us.

[00:28:02] Lauren O'Hara: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That sounds like a big time savings too, and reducing risk if, when you do get to that point, right?

[00:28:09] Shawn Rubbin: Yes, absolutely

[00:28:11] Lauren O'Hara: Awesome. I mean, I, you know, I can certainly appreciate both of your positions on, uh, needing to look at your clients most fir- first and foremost, right?

And keeping their safe, their information safe. So that's, that's a really good, good perspective. So what would you tell another nonprofit leader who knows their systems are holding them back and, um, but they don't know where to start?

[00:28:33] Shawn Rubbin: Yeah, I, I, and I have been thinking about this a lot lately as, as things in the, in the bigger world, you know, do change, and we have, we have to pivot and make changes in how we deliver services and as funding dollars are being cut and chopped, you know, all over the place in the healthcare business.

I would tell others, start with the questions that you can't answer, not just shopping for technology, but identify the operational bottlenecks. Because what we have found is that there's usually some sort of mismatch between the people, the process that's trying to be accomplished and, and the tools that, that you're using.

We have spent time, you know, auditing whatever tech we're using and then, and documenting the workflows, seeing what workflows are gonna work best because there's a real hybrid bet- it's a real hybrid system between still using paper-based systems and digital. And there's, uh, you know, there's a lot that has to happen at, at, you know, filling the training gap, the culture, uh, um, and the training gap.

And usually a system fails, and this is what I would tell somebody, because You haven't trained your folks how to use it, so they haven't adopted it, and to them it's more burdensome than just writing their notes on a piece of paper instead. Mm-hmm. And we, you know, try to create the environment of there are no stupid questions and you're not gonna get penalized for not understanding fully how to use this.

That's what... You know, we're, we're all about, you know, helping people grow. So that's, that's, you know, the people we serve and the people that are serving.

[00:30:03] Lauren O'Hara: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:30:04] Shawn Rubbin: So-

[00:30:04] Lauren O'Hara: Yeah. No, it's a really good point ... that's what I would

[00:30:06] Shawn Rubbin: say.

[00:30:06] Lauren O'Hara: So adoption is, you know, something that, that people need to look at in addition to all the other points that you made.

That's, that's really... Okay, so Will, same to you. Um, what would you say to another nonprofit leader who's looking at possibly modernizing their systems or, or c- you know, condensing all of their multiple systems into one thing like Acumatica?

[00:30:29] Will Stratton: So obviously you start with that identifying your problem, just like the previous conversation, that's what we're going for.

Make it, you know, make your list, understand where your gaps are, and then it's going to feel intimidating. There's going to be a moment where you look at that list and you go, "Oh, no." But it's the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step kind of thing- Mm-hmm ... where you, you take a moment and you go, "But this is the thing we can address right now."

And I think this is maybe the most important part when you actually talk about nonprofits, is understanding how you're going to, we'll use the word justify the cost. I think that it's so easy for nonprofits, especially, to decide that software upgrade. That comment earlier I made of, you know, "Well, do I wanna spend $20,000 on this new software suite when I could put $20,000 towards another home?"

That starts to get really tough. I think the piece that you have to be very conscious of, and I don't want people to sit there and stagnate, is that, well, what is the $20,000 investment able to do for you? And so what we've done here, this is something I ask of almost everything we do, and that's from new head count, new software, new systems, new anything, is give me a true cost benefit of this.

And it can be beyond the quantitative. There's going to be some revenue and expense impact. You know, something sys- Like, we just went through an upgrade on our Acumatica, and it allows us to remove another system. So that's something dollars easy one-to-one. But what's it doing for the time, for the mental health- I mean, mental health is something that matters to employees, and if we're trying to keep good morale, we think that there is cost savings around keeping people longer and having that established knowledge and not having to go hire people in current market and everything else, then does it make their life easier?

There's a dollar amount behind that, and maybe it's not the most fun to sit there and go, "Well, what is their mental health dollar cost?" But there's something that you can think through and then justify that cost. You know, the, that upgrade may be $20,000 sounds absolutely insane. You sometimes have to get out of your own way.

It becomes so easy to just say, "No new spending," or, "No new spending that's non-programming, that's not something into the home, that's not into the land, that's not into the people." Mm-hmm. You know, sometimes the back of house departments can get kind of left in the darkness, and I think that's really doing yourself a disservice because they can then lend their talents over if you're able to remove minutia, if you're able to remove repetitive tasks but not missed tasks, if you're able to streamline reporting, if you're able to, you know, clarify message.

Who knows what that means from a fundraising standpoint? And so you have these different departments now that collaborate and integrate in a way they didn't before around the use of technology, and I think that that's really important when you think about this holistically instead of just a line item or just an invoice.

[00:33:14] Lauren O'Hara: Yeah, I mean, I think another interesting thing that's come out of this conversation with you both is just that fact that, you know, investing in technology for a nonprofit looks very different because you have to-- Well, you obviously have a lot of stakeholders, different types of stakeholders, but you also have to, like you said, well, like, maybe it gets, uh, neglected, you know, the back up.

Some of that stuff might be neglected because it's not actually putting money into, you know, your actual service, the services that you're providing. But it, but it is in a way. It's just a different... It's-- That's really interesting.

[00:33:47] Will Stratton: Yeah. It's just a different math. Mm-hmm. And it's just, it takes training like anything else.

It's the expectation then for someone to really treat their department like a business that's serving a function for the program and saying, "This is the benefit I can bring, and I can do it via this system, and it'll allow me to increase value by this." And if you can start thinking that way, I think, you know, there's moments, especially in nonprofits, where that starts to feel very for-profit thinking.

And then people kind of start to push back a little bit, but then you say, "Well, yeah, why wouldn't I want more profit? That means more families. That means more homes." That doesn't mean that I get to pull in in my new Mercedes tomorrow, because ultimately I'm the CFO for a nonprofit, so it's not happening.

So that we can serve more, so that we can do more in the community, and so that's what you're infecting. That little bit of efficiency, this is when I really get super deep into it. Whenever I wanna guilt someone really bad, that 35 cents cup of coffee that you're making in our break room, that's 35 cents that could go to a home.

And so be diligent, you know, be thoughtful of it. Think through things like that, because that's really how our margins work, going back to margin. That is our margin, is everything has to lend itself to it, and investment can as well, just like investment in, you know, a fund that's turning 5%, investment in technology that's able to turn 5%.

I mean, we think we can do that all the time, so why wouldn't you do that investment?

[00:35:01] Lauren O'Hara: Yeah. Love it. Really well put. Okay, lightning round time. All right, you, you both ready? Yep. So Will, what's one tool or habit you rely on to keep your week from running you?

[00:35:13] Will Stratton: So I don't take anything. I get in the office by 7:00, and I refuse to speak to anyone pretty much before 9:00, and I do that for, you know, simple things, personal things like mindfulness, things like that.

But also, you know, get my schedule together, get my calendar together. I also, this is a leftover from when I was in public accounting, I track all of my time, so my calendar is a monster of the, what I worked on, and I do that so that I can figure out, I want to be as efficient as possible, and are there things that are pulling away from my day?

And I've kept that for a long time. I think the other thing is just having that moment to kind of center and help break... It's so easy, especially at our levels, to, for work and home to become very, just a continuous stream, and I like that time in the morning to kind of have a hard stop and hard start to where this is my work day now, and this is the end of my home.

[00:36:05] Lauren O'Hara: Okay. Shawn, after about 35 years at one organization, what still surprises you about your work?

[00:36:11] Shawn Rubbin: Resilience. The resilience of the people that we serve, because we try to buffer the changes that are happening out there, but we can still leak through, and we can come up with different ways to make them have less of an impact.

And with just, you know, brief, short explanations, the trust that's involved is what wins the day. Yeah, I would have to say the, yeah, the, the, the resilience, and not, and not only of the people that we serve, but the people on some staff. I'm continually surprised by the depth of what they actually do know, and I try to look at it that way.

Kind of like what, you know, Will said. You know, you just sort of flip it and look at, okay, what do you know? And instead of what you don't. It brings a smile to my face. Almost, almost, almost daily I'll see something, I'll experience something.

[00:36:57] Lauren O'Hara: I mean, resiliency is a wonderful thing to smile about in general, but I would say definitely for the people that you're serving, right, that your organization serves, like, that's huge.

And I'm sure that the people who work for PSI also have to exhibit, you know, that trust and that resiliency, so.

[00:37:14] Shawn Rubbin: Absolutely.

[00:37:15] Lauren O'Hara: Very cool. Okay. So both of you, the last lightning round question. I'm gonna start with Shawn since we were just on you. So what podcast or book or, or type of media has inspired you lately?

[00:37:27] Shawn Rubbin: I recently started one. This is, uh, I'm going to forget her name in the moment, but she is a rabbi at the Central Synagogue in New York City. Her story is she, her father is Jewish and her mother is Korean, so she grew up in Korea And has always became a rabbi and a cantor, and a very inspiring one. But for so long, she didn't feel like she belonged in any of those worlds, and each of those different worlds didn't accept her.

And I just-- That just really inspired me because that, that, that's a, a continuing theme, you know, of the human condition, is us wanting to belong. And it's like, uh, almost no matter what person you are, where you live, what you do for a living, we all wanna belong, and it's just interesting to hear from a, somebody completely different from me.

She just continued to stay on a path, but I do belong, and proving it to herself to then be able to build a community where she's respected and fully lived in that experience.

[00:38:26] Lauren O'Hara: That sounds incredible. I'll have to check that out. Thank you. All right. Will, same to you. What type of a book or podcast or, or, or, or anything that you consumed lately that has really inspired you?

[00:38:39] Will Stratton: Yeah. So I'm a-- I do a lot of reading, a lot of following of Stoicism, so you know- Yeah ... the teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. And so I have, uh, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius up on my bookcase right there. Um, the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, which normally has a daily lesson from one of those great teachers, along with some, we'll say some modernization and summary of what, you know, sometimes is, uh, two thousand years old and just, it keeps you centered, it keeps you, um, constantly understanding impact.

The other thing I think that's really, um, had a major impact is I have a book up here called The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope, and it's a- Nice ... uh, book about finding your purpose, finding your dharma. And so especially working at Habitat, it's just such a fulfilling mission that we feel and, you know, as someone who has a background in what I would consider more traditional finance accounting, to finally find a place where, you know, like I said, that money's not just going out, that money is coming into the community, it's further impacting, further having, you know, this positive influence on people's lives and making things better.

I think that a lot of my reading is around that, um, just that kind of fulfillment and finding comfort and, you know, what at times can be, you know, not always the most fun day-to-day task, but understanding that they do roll up to this greater purpose, this greater mission, and how I can fit into that, even bringing, you know, my kind of traditional accounting skills to it.

[00:40:00] Lauren O'Hara: Very cool. Yeah, I, I love Stoicism as well. Um, I think I have that, the second one that you mentioned upstairs on my bedside table, so... Well, uh, you both obviously, uh, enjoy feeling inspired with what you're, you know, reading and, and listening to, so that's pretty neat, too. I can, I can share that very much.

All right. That wraps it up. So Will and Shawn, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast and sharing how technology can really strengthen the work of your mission-driven organization. Thank you so much.

[00:40:31] Will Stratton: Thank you.

[00:40:32] Shawn Rubbin: Thank you. This was great.

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