At Impact Ops, our mission is to enable high-impact projects to scale. We do this by solving critical operational bottlenecks, like finance, hiring, and infrastructure.
Our work is therefore often time-sensitive, confidential, and deeply integrated with a client’s business and internal systems. This means that a typical agency-client relationship isn’t suitable – instead, we prioritize speed, trust, and context-awareness.
What does this look like in practice?
Most of our 20+ clients heard about us through word-of-mouth – though we’re active on LinkedIn and the EA Ops Slack workspace, and we’ve made a few appearances at EA Global!
You can get in touch through our enquiry form or reach out directly via email. We arrange an introductory call to establish that we’re a good fit. This works both ways! You want to ensure that we can offer the services and support you’re looking for; and we want to meet the founding team, understand its plans for impact, and how it’s secured funding.
Our services
We offer specialist consultation, implementation, and ongoing support in the areas where we have deep experience.
This includes:
- Finance: We provide ongoing financial support to ensure you can manage your project’s finances in an efficient and effective way.
- Hiring: We manage hiring rounds for your project in order to free up your time, reduce bias in the process, keep candidates engaged and informed, and give candidates constructive feedback.
- Entity setup: Whether creating an entity from scratch, or “spinning out” of a fiscal sponsor, we help you set things up correctly from the start — including registration, governance, compliance, and infrastructure.
- Audit: Our operational audits identify efficiency gains and compliance improvements across key areas of your project, like governance, finance, systems, fundraising, and HR.
- Due diligence: We assess risks associated with individuals and organizations you intend to partner with, like donors or grantees.
- System implementation: We recommend and implement systems to free up your attention — like CRMs, HR, applicant tracking, expense management, and more.
Kick-off
Once we’ve discussed needs and expectations, we share a proposal outlining our proposed services, timeline, breakdown, team, fees, and next steps. Once a service level agreement is sent and signed, we’re ready to get stuck in. We organize a kick-off meeting to discuss priorities, and establish key points of contact.
We’re lucky to have six operations ninjas on our team:
- Joshua is a co-founder and CEO, and works from Devon, UK. Josh leads our entity setup service — he focuses on launching organizations with appropriate governance and infrastructure.
- Sara is a co-founder and works from Berlin, Germany. Sara leads our hiring service, and believes that hiring is the most important activity any organization conducts.
- Andrew is a co-founder and works from Johannesburg, South Africa. Andrew leads our audit and systems implementation services. He’s all about identifying inefficiencies and “bad habits” that may be holding back your project from reaching its full potential.
- Eric is our Finance Specialist, and works from Montreal, Canada. Eric leads our finance service, and wants you to raise your expectations when it comes to outsourcing finance support.
- Alex is our Operations Associate, and works from Cambridgeshire, UK. Alex leads our due diligence service, and believes that due diligence is an essential precursor to any sizeable transaction — particularly in the charity sector, where ethical expectations are high and any suggestion of poor governance can do significant damage to your reputation.
- Patrick is our Finance Associate, and works from Oxford, UK. Patrick supports Eric in delivering our finance service, and ensures that bookkeeping and payments are timely and accurate.
Communication
Information sharing
Once the kick-off meeting is complete, we invite you to a shared drive. This gives us a place to securely store files we’re collaborating on — for example, audits or due diligence reports. Shared drives have the following advantages:
- Files and folders persist after the creator account is removed.
- Access to files is easier to manager. Users can be added as “members” of a shared drive (giving them access to all files, rather than select files shared manually), and all members necessarily see the same content. You can also add a Google Group as a member, which automatically makes all members of the group members of the drive.
- External members (i.e. people outside the client domain) can be added to shared drive.
Besides the shared drive, we may need access to certain parts of your organization’s systems and infrastructure in order to provide our services efficiently. For example, access to your accounting system to manage bookkeeping; your mailbox to communicate with candidates for an open position; or your Airtable to build a grants management system.
While systems and files can be shared with Impact Ops accounts, you may prefer to create dedicated Impact Ops user profiles within your organization’s domain. This ensures that you retain access to sharing and security permissions, and limits the number of users with access to sensitive information.
Day-to-day
We pride ourselves on quick, helpful, and direct communication. In order to consistently achieve this across 20+ clients, we create a shared Slack channel, and schedule regular check-ins with you.
Typically, most day-to-day communication takes place over Slack. Our whole team is added, and the channel is actively monitored – meaning we can triage and respond to your requests as quickly as possible. We’re a remote team — with staff in the UK, Germany, and Canada — which means we’re likely able to field questions outside of your standard working hours.
Our regular check-ins, on the other hand, give us an opportunity to share and receive relevant updates, review work achieved over the last week, clarify next steps and resolve bottlenecks, and agree on tasks for the coming week.
Quarterly review & feedback
If we’re providing more than routine finance support, we’ll schedule a quarterly review. This gives us an opportunity to discuss what’s worked well, what could be improved, and strategic priorities for the coming quarter.
We’re always keen to get your feedback so we can improve our service, and we ask you to share feedback each quarter. At a minimum, this means telling us how satisfied you are overall with the support you received from Impact Ops, and if there’s something you’d like us to do differently.
We assign each organization that we work with a “Relationship manager”. Your relationship manager is your point of contact for sharing and receiving feedback, and escalating any critical bottlenecks that may arise in your operations.
Interested?
Our mission is to enable high-impact projects to scale by solving critical operational bottlenecks, like finance, hiring, and infrastructure. We’re trusted by 20+ organizations looking to have an outsized positive impact on the world. If you’d like support, and think we’d be a good fit, please get in touch at hello@impact-ops.org.