Most people treat operations like a back-office problem. Kerstin Lynam learned the opposite the hard way: thirty-plus years running medical research nonprofits, including a run as CEO of the Lundquist Institute, where the gap between a working ops layer and a broken one decided whether the mission happened at all.

She joins Katie and Maria for a conversation startup founders will recognize immediately, even though the setting is nonprofit. We get into why most charts of accounts are over-engineered, how to design budget reports that finance and program teams can actually read together, what an excellent board does that a passable board never will, and when the right call is to shut a program down (and why most leaders flinch). Kerstin also walks through the line she lives by: if you do not have trust, you have nothing.

Plus the published research she ran to measure something everyone told her could not be measured: the emotional impact of a pediatric cancer photography class.

If you are scaling a company, this is the shortcut to lessons earned over decades.

Key topics: nonprofit operations, chart of accounts, finance and operations alignment, board management, lean huddles, breaking down silos, measuring qualitative impact, startup operations, COO playbook

Hosts: Katie Whitcraft and Maria Pienaar
Guest: Kerstin Lynam
Want smarter ops? Visit scalespark.ai