Strategy and
sustainability, built
together.
We help mission-driven organizations set clear strategy and design the financial model to fund it. Built with your team, so it gets implemented, not shelved.
How we help.
Partners typically engage us in one of two ways. Most come to us for a comprehensive strategic plan, anchored in a sustainable financial model. Some come specifically to strengthen their revenue model and build a path to financial sustainability. Either can be paired with added capacity as the work demands.
Strategic Planning
Our most comprehensive engagement, typically 6–9 months. We help you make clear, future-ready choices about who you are and where you’ll focus, co-constructed with your team. Financial sustainability is worked through the whole process, not added at the end, so you leave with a plan you can fund and act on, not one that sits on a shelf.
What you leave with:
- A clear-eyed read of your external landscape
- A sharpened organizational identity, role, and 3-year vision for success
- Big bets and leaps for how the organization should evolve
- Goals and an implementation roadmap
- A resilient, right-fit financial model
- Staff, board, and funder buy-in
Financial Sustainability Planning
For organizations whose most pressing need is a sustainable financial model itself. We build a financial sustainability strategy across philanthropic, earned, and public revenue, aligned to your context, stage, and mix of services, and grounded in a clear read of your costs, unit economics, and financial health. Available on its own, or as part of a strategic plan.
What you leave with:
- A full financial health diagnostic
- A flexible, multi-year financial model
- A revenue strategy across philanthropy, earned, and public funding
- Cost structure and unit economics analysis
- Earned-revenue strategy, pricing, and feasibility
Talent & Org Design
Capabilities analysis, staffing and org redesign, decision rights, and talent systems, from hiring through retention.
Implementation Support
3–6 months of follow-on capacity to launch the plan: project management, ED/team coaching, and funder-facing materials.
Webinars & Cohort Facilitation
We design and lead workshop and cohort series on strategy, earned revenue, pricing, and go-to-market, à la New Profit.
Figures reflect NorthStar engagement records and our 2025–26 end-of-year client feedback survey.
Sharper strategy.Resilient financial model.Built together.
Too often, strategy gets made by a small group on a timeline that never lets the organization weigh in, and the financial model is an afterthought. We do it differently.
The usual way
The NorthStar way
Financial model treated as an afterthought, figured out at the end.
Financial sustainability strategy centered, and attended to throughout the process.
Built by a small, senior team behind closed doors.
Built with your senior team, staff, communities served, partners, and board together.
Little regular stakeholder input along the way.
Regular stakeholder input to drive buy-in, check blind spots, and validate the plan before it goes live.
A polished plan that avoids the hard choices.
A plan that forces the hard choices and arrives with the buy-in to implement it.
We co-construct the plan through hands-on design sprints, so the people who carry out the strategy help shape it. The result forces smart choices, earns genuine buy-in, and is built to last.
The work is getting harder.
Getting strategy right matters
more than ever.
The work is getting harder, not easier.
Volatile funding, shifting policy and funder priorities, the rapid rise of AI, and rising community needs, often without added resources, create real friction for the teams advancing the work.
Time and capacity are stretched thin.
Leaders and teams are carrying more than ever, with less room to step back and make deliberate choices about where to focus.
The right strategic choices accelerate. The wrong ones distract.
The right choices move the mission forward. The wrong ones pull you off course.
The first job of strategy isn’t a longer to-do list. It’s deciding, clearly and together, where you’ll focus to create the greatest impact.
The NorthStar Strategy Cascade
Our work follows a connected set of choices, starting from the external context your organization is navigating, then cascading from your North Star all the way down to the culture and systems that carry the strategy out. The financial model isn’t a separate conversation. It’s a tier in the cascade.
Grounded in external context
We partner with organizations of every scale, from $500K to $100M+ budgets.
Practical tools you can put to work.
A few of the frameworks and tools we use with clients. Enter your email to download, and we’ll add you to our occasional insights list.
The Earned Revenue Toolkit
A practical set of modeling, pricing, and earned-revenue tactics for building mission-aligned income that lasts.
Strategic Levers
An actionable set of strategic levers leaders are using to drive impact and unlock financial stability in challenging times.
Sales System Builder
Turn scattered interest into a steady pipeline of signed partnerships, one owned system so qualified leads keep moving.
Get clarity in a moment of
high ambiguity.
Tell us where your organization is feeling stretched, and we’ll help you find the best next step.