How We Do It
In order to provide high-quality management consulting services to our ministry clients, Cornerstone cannot hire inexperienced or junior-level consultants. We have built a structure that will be very professional and effective in helping our clients. To do that we hire only seasoned consultants that have the ability to work within the highest levels of Christian ministries - at the board and executive level. Most of our consultants are and need to have a great deal of experience that is normally only found in professionals with 20+ years of experience – those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Because of the level of income needed to hire seasoned management consultants, building out a consulting firm where everyone who works with the clients is a full-time, experienced, consultant is at best very difficult, if not impossible when money needs to be raised through donations to reduce the cost to clients.
Given that, Cornerstone still plans to build a core group of full-time employees/consultants that will grow over time as funding and number of clients and projects grows. However, the growth of that core group should not grow linearly with the number of clients and projects. It should grow more slowly, otherwise funding will more than likely not keep up. Therefore to enable continued client growth with slow core growth, the core team is augmented by others – contractors and volunteers.
Diagram of the CGMC Structure
Contractors will charge CGMC a reduced rate for their services and will mainly be used to fill in skill gaps that inevitably will always exist when a relatively small group of people is trying to assist with a large variety of projects. CGMC full-time consultants won’t be able to be experts in all things whatsoever. In fact, we don’t even want to be experts in everything even with the addition of contractors and volunteers. We will talk more about that below when we talk about the ecosystem of our “business partners”. Another reason for utilizing contractors is to ensure that the peaks and valleys of consulting needs is smoothed out by bringing in contractors to help with the peaks, but not continuing to have to pay them when project demand is lower.
The key role of volunteers will be to keep the need for funding to as low a level as possible. Cornerstone has already and will continue to build out a network of professional volunteers. These are professionals that are willing to give their time to help organizations through Cornerstone for free. They may be willing and able to give 4 hours a week, a day a month, a week of vacation time a year, 10% of full-time status, 25%, 75%, or even 100%. They may be in the middle of their professional career, near the end, semi or even fully retired. There are a lot of professionals & executives that are in their late 50s or 60s, semi-retired or fully-retired that want to “give back”. They are often now being called “Finishers”. Most of the time when they think of “giving back”, they are most often, for example, led to think of going to a village in Africa to help build schools or housing for people. However, most professionals have not done this type of work during their careers and their professional skills are much better suited & valuable for working with CGMC’s clients to help them figure a way to better organize teams which then go and do things such as building schools in Africa.
Our plan is to use technology and “partners” to build out our volunteer network. We plan on working with partner organizations, such as the Finishers Project (www.Finishers.org), while at the same time building out our own website and database that allows professional Christians to sign up with Cornerstone to help organizations. Technology will be an important part of the volunteer process as otherwise that process would have the potential to take up a lot of full-time CGMC employees’ time.
Finally, as we said above, we cannot and do not plan on being “all things to all people”. There are things that we do not plan on helping organizations with. For example, we do not plan on helping organizations with fundraising. There are a number of firms that do a great job of helping Christian organizations with this. Our plan is to build an ecosystem of business partners. These will be organizations that we partner with to provide a full-range of services to our clients. As much as makes sense for our clients, we will seek relationships that are mutually beneficial in which we bring them business and therefore revenue, while our business partners help Cornerstone continue to provide management consulting services for as low of a cost as possible through their paid sponsorship of Cornerstone.