Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Skyler Badenoch’s three-factor framework for scaling the buildOn Nicaragua program as one of the clearest articulations of how nonprofit organizations grow — and why most attempts stall.
This episode is for CEOs leading mission-driven organizations who have moved past survival mode and are asking how to grow impact at scale without losing the culture, the team, or the mission that made the work worth doing.
Key Takeaways
- Scaling a nonprofit past 300% growth requires three simultaneous disciplines — right people, right partners, and secured funding — and failing any one of them stalls the other two.
- Compound incremental growth of 6–10% per year, sustained consistently, produces more durable scale than explosive growth that requires repeating the same heroic effort every cycle.
- Culture in a resource-constrained organization is not driven by salary alone. The three drivers that determine whether teams stay and perform are mission belief, collegial relationships, and above-fair compensation — in that order of leverage.
- Nonprofit CEOs who give high performers the space to grow without micromanaging them create the internal mobility that sustains the organization beyond the CEO’s tenure.
- AI gives nonprofits two legitimate tools right now: efficiency gains on data-heavy operational tasks and translation work, and analysis speed on operational logs that would otherwise take hours of manual review.
How Nonprofit CEOs Drive 300% Growth: Right People, Right Partners, Right Funding
Badenoch drove a 300% growth rate in the Nicaragua program at buildOn by keeping three disciplines in place simultaneously. Remove any one of them and the growth stops.
The first discipline is hiring for alignment before hiring for skill. “Anybody who thinks that they could do it alone is wrong,” Badenoch said. “You have to do it with the team. You have to have that feeling that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. And then you have to unlock people’s potential to do good work.” At buildOn Nicaragua, that meant finding people who didn’t just fill roles but understood what the growth was in service of.
The second discipline is securing institutional partners who add operational value, not just legitimacy. In Nicaragua, Badenoch’s team was struggling to identify where to build. Municipal governments — the mayor’s offices of rural municipalities — solved that problem. They provided lists of 10 to 30 communities over multi-year windows. That one partnership change converted buildOn from an organization doing the work alone into an organization with a multiplier. Growth became possible because the work was no longer solely theirs to carry.
The third discipline is funding — and Badenoch is direct that this is not a secondary concern. “You can’t scale really without the money in this work. The ability to scale is only as good as how much money you’re able to raise.” At buildOn, the CEO, COO, and development team held that responsibility. Without their fundraising, program growth was theoretical regardless of how well the field teams executed.
The Compounding Growth Model That Outlasts Any Single Leadership Cycle
The most durable scaling insight from Badenoch’s career is not the 300% sprint — it is what happened after he left.
The Haiti buildOn program Badenoch helped start in 2006 began with a budget for one school. Then two. Then four. Then eight. Then ten. By December of the year Badenoch spoke to Gow, buildOn had passed 200 schools in Haiti. Badenoch had been gone from the organization for ten years.
That outcome didn’t happen because someone swung for exponential growth. It happened because the organization compounded at a consistent rate.
“There’s a lot of different ways you could scale,” Badenoch said. “You could scale as fast as you possibly can, or you can scale six to eight percent a year, but compounding that — that’s when you really have the ability to scale and sustain growth.” His contrast is precise: zero to 100 in a year requires repeating that same extraordinary effort in year two, then year three. Consistent 6–10% annual growth, compounded, means that a decade later the organization is doing ten times what it used to do — without requiring heroic effort every cycle.
For CEOs who feel pressure to show dramatic year-over-year gains, Badenoch’s framework is a counterweight: the organizations that outlast their founders are almost always the ones that built the discipline of compounding, not the ones that got famous for a single growth year.
How Nonprofit CEOs Build Culture When Salary Isn’t the Lever
The instinct most CEOs reach for when retention becomes a problem is compensation. Badenoch’s experience running Hope for Haiti for nine years, across a sector where budgets are constrained by definition, surfaces a more precise model.
He names three culture drivers, and they are not equal in leverage:
What you’re doing. Mission belief is the primary driver. “If you’re into the mission, if you care about the work, if you believe in what we’re doing and the vision — that can be a huge driver for people.” For Badenoch, this is not abstract. A nearly $1 million grant announced to support 8,000 students and 4,000 teachers over two years isn’t just a funding win — it is fuel. It is the concrete proof that the work is real and the sacrifice is worth it.
The mechanism Badenoch uses to keep mission visible is low-tech and high-frequency. Hope for Haiti runs a WhatsApp thread where field colleagues send photos from their day. A nurse helping a patient on crutches through an infirmary. A child in a newly built school. Badenoch texts the thread: “This is everything. This is why we’re doing this work.” In an organization working across geographies, that thread is not a communications tool — it is a culture tool. It closes the distance between the headquarters work and the field impact in real time.
Who you’re doing it with. Badenoch is clear that this is the second lever — and it is not about mandating friendship. “When you have a relationship, when you can build relationships where there’s shared interest, where there’s shared success, where people legit like each other, that’s where magic happens.” He is equally clear about the inverse: when colleagues don’t like each other, it creates friction, disruption, and inefficiency. CEOs who dismiss team chemistry as soft management are misreading where performance problems originate.
Compensation. This is the third lever, not the first. Badenoch’s position is explicit: in the nonprofit sector, if the budget allows it, team members should be compensated above fair. Below-fair compensation eventually undercuts even strong mission belief and strong collegial relationships. But compensation alone, without the first two drivers at a high level, does not produce a culture that retains high performers through hard stretches.
The practical implication for scaling CEOs: before assuming a retention or performance problem is a pay problem, audit whether team members believe in the mission and whether the team actually functions as a team. In Badenoch’s model, those two variables have more leverage than salary — until the salary falls below fair.
Giving High Performers Space to Grow Is a Scaling Strategy
Badenoch names one thing as the source of his deepest professional fulfillment over nine years at Hope for Haiti: watching colleagues who started in entry-level positions reach the C-suite.
This is not incidental. It is a scaling decision.
“As you have those high-performing team members, you give them the space to grow, you give them the space to do good work, and they do good work.” His rule is specific: provide coaching, provide autonomous leadership, and then step back. CEOs who over-manage high performers force one of two outcomes — the performer leaves, or the performer stops performing at the level that made them valuable.
The organizations that scale sustainably develop leadership internally. Those that don’t find themselves repeatedly hiring externally into senior roles, restarting culture alignment from scratch with each new hire, and losing the institutional knowledge that compounds over time just as surely as the growth does.
How Nonprofit CEOs Can Use AI Without Losing the Human Connection
Badenoch’s framing of AI is more structured than most CEOs offer. He separates it into three legitimate uses — efficiency, creative thought partnership, and data analysis — and names one risk worth taking seriously.
AI as an Efficiency Tool: Translation and Operational Logistics
The clearest example from Hope for Haiti is translation. When a grant application required French-language resumes and Badenoch’s team didn’t have them, the answer used to be hours of work or a budget line for a translator. Now it’s a prompt. “We don’t have to ask that question anymore.” He applies the same logic to vehicle fleet analysis: 13 vehicles, each with a mileage and fuel log in a spreadsheet. Tasks that once took hours of manual review now produce decisions in minutes.
AI as a Thought Partner: Filling Expertise Gaps on Small Teams
“You can use AI as a thought partner and a creative spark, which I love,” Badenoch said. For organizations with small teams and limited access to specialized expertise, AI fills the gap between what the team knows and what a decision requires. This use is distinct from efficiency gains — it is about expanding the range of analysis a small team can do without adding headcount.
Where AI Creates Problems Rather Than Solving Them
Badenoch is specific about where AI creates problems rather than solving them. When both sides of an email exchange are using AI to draft and respond, something has broken down. “Y’all, let’s pick up the phone and have a normal human conversation about what we’re talking about.” His concern is not that AI is bad — it is that over-reliance on AI to generate communication replaces the human judgment and relationship-building that nonprofit work depends on.
One of Hope for Haiti’s college scholarship recipients in Haiti put the sharpest version of this on the table: “It atrophies your brain.” She still uses AI — but as an editing tool, not a replacement for thinking. Badenoch’s position lands in the same place: use AI where it replaces tedious manual work or accelerates analysis. Don’t use it where it replaces human judgment, human relationships, or human accountability.
The nonprofit sector has a structural advantage here that for-profit CEOs don’t always have: mission-driven organizations have a built-in reason to stay human-centered. AI that makes a healthcare worker more efficient is valuable. AI that replaces the healthcare worker’s relationship with a patient is not.
How Skyler Badenoch’s Scaling Principles Apply Across Nine Years at Hope for Haiti
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Right people before right plan | Alignment precedes execution — hire for mission belief and team fit before optimizing for skill | At buildOn Nicaragua, prioritizing mission-aligned hires before scaling execution contributed directly to the program’s 300% growth rate |
| Partners multiply what solo effort cannot | Institutional partners who add operational value — not just funding or visibility — are a force multiplier that unlocks growth the team alone cannot reach | Partnering with rural municipal governments gave buildOn Nicaragua access to 10–30 pre-identified building sites per year, producing the 300% program growth rate that solo field effort had not achieved |
| Compound consistency beats heroic sprints | 6–10% annual growth, compounded over a decade, produces 10x outcomes without requiring the same extraordinary effort every year | buildOn Haiti went from one school in 2006 to over 200 by the time Badenoch spoke to Gow — ten years after his departure — without a single transformational growth year driving the result |
| Mission visibility is a culture tool, not a PR function | CEOs who surface field impact in real time close the distance between headquarters work and mission outcome, sustaining motivation across geographies | Hope for Haiti’s WhatsApp thread, where field staff send daily photos, is Badenoch’s primary retention mechanism — keeping mission emotionally real for a team spread across multiple geographies |
| Give high performers space, then get out of the way | Coaching plus autonomous leadership produces internal mobility that scales the organization’s leadership bench without external hires | Multiple Hope for Haiti colleagues who started in entry-level roles have reached the C-suite under Badenoch’s nine-year tenure |
Quotes from This Episode
- “You can’t scale really without the money in this work. The ability to scale is only as good as how much money you’re able to raise.” — Skyler Badenoch, CEO, Hope for Haiti
- “If you’re into the mission, if you care about the work, if you believe in what we’re doing and the vision — that can be a huge driver for people.” — Skyler Badenoch, CEO, Hope for Haiti
- “When you have a relationship, when you can build relationships where there’s shared interest, where there’s shared success, where people legit like each other, that’s where magic happens.” — Skyler Badenoch, CEO, Hope for Haiti
- “It atrophies your brain.” — Hope for Haiti college scholarship recipient (on over-reliance on AI), quoted by Skyler Badenoch, CEO, Hope for Haiti
- “Y’all, let’s pick up the phone and have a normal human conversation about what we’re talking about.” — Skyler Badenoch, CEO, Hope for Haiti
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the three things a nonprofit CEO must have in place to scale a program?
Skyler Badenoch, CEO of Hope for Haiti, identifies three simultaneous requirements for scaling a nonprofit program: the right people aligned to the mission, the right institutional partners who add operational value rather than just legitimacy, and secured funding that makes growth financially possible. At buildOn Nicaragua, Badenoch drove a 300% growth rate by holding all three in place at once. When one is missing — even when the other two are strong — growth stalls or becomes unsustainable.
How should a CEO build culture in an organization where competitive salaries are hard to offer?
Badenoch’s three-driver model places mission belief first, colleague relationships second, and compensation third. His rule is that compensation must reach “above fair” in the nonprofit context if the budget allows it — but salary alone, without strong mission alignment and genuine team chemistry, does not retain high performers through difficult stretches. He uses a WhatsApp thread of field photos as a daily, low-cost mechanism to keep mission visible and emotionally real for the entire team.
When does AI help a nonprofit and when does it get in the way?
Badenoch’s rule is that AI creates value when it removes tedious manual work or accelerates analysis — translating grant documents, processing vehicle fleet logs, or acting as a thought partner when the team lacks specialized expertise. AI creates problems when it replaces the human relationships the work depends on. When both sides of an email exchange are generating AI responses, Badenoch’s answer is to pick up the phone. His operating principle: use AI where it eliminates friction; protect human judgment where relationships and accountability matter.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
