How to Scale Without Losing the Mission | Ryan Dewey Smith

Every CEO thinks they're "the one." Ryan Dewey Smith built a network of 40 nonprofit CEOs who agreed to become "one of," and it let them scale without losing their missions.

Ryan is the Founding Executive Chairman and CEO of Inperium, the nonprofit partnership network he started from a firehouse office in Reading, Pennsylvania. Today Inperium's partners employ about 8,000 people and touch 30,000 people a day across 20 states, many of them children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental health needs, or histories of homelessness. His new book, Sustaining the Mission, is out now from Forbes Books.

In this episode of Tim Stating the Obvious, we talk about:

• The hardest shift for any CEO: going from "the one" to one of 40

• Why a business without growth is "dying on the vine"

• The revenue range where shared services changes everything

• How a 55-year-old Philadelphia nonprofit went from almost missing payroll to opening a new homeless shelter

• How Inperium pays frontline caregivers more and gives them health insurance they can actually afford

• The first question Ryan asks every CEO who wants to join

• Why burnout comes from looking backward, and how to play offense instead

For nonprofit and healthcare CEOs: Ryan walks through the full Resources for Human Development turnaround. Back-office costs dropped from 25 percent to 9 percent, facility debt moved into 30-year tax-exempt bonds, and the organization returned to profitability within 18 months.