Meet Allison Fuller

We recently connected with Allison Fuller and have shared our conversation below.

Allison, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

I grew up in a household where nothing is more valued than hard work, and nothing worse than being called lazy. I am a third generation American and a third generation entrepreneur. Growing up, work was something that kept my dad away from 3am until 9pm, and in turn, his business that he owned along with my grandfather and uncle, was the vehicle that propelled our family from little resources into one of homeowners and business owners. My Dad was hard on us about work, but my mom is even more intense about it, Even though when I was young my parents had limited resources, my mom worked hard to create a home for us that, looking back on it, required an absolutely huge amount of effort considering my dad was almost always working.. Everything homemade, everything beautifully executed. My mom is a generation in between Donna Reed and Pinterest, but to this day she can’t even sit still long enough to watch a movie. I love my work, so that definitely makes it easier, but I really am driven to execute well. Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am lucky. I need to start with that. Profoundly privileged. Whatever you want to call it. First, I have parents that supported and believed in me. I have a husband that is brilliant and supportive. And I landed in Los Angeles, which, aside from maybe New York, is one of the few places in the world where you really can try anything.

Charity work has been a passion of mine since 9th grade, when my high school key club was looking for volunteers to work with developmentally disabled adults to teach them how to swim. At the time, I am not sure what I was thinking except maybe that I was a reasonably strong swimmer and needed some college service hours. But once I got into the pool and worked with Sandra, a woman impacted with Down Syndrome who was terrified of the water, and Charlie, who had autism, and needed someone to teach him some stroke technique, I was hooked. I worked with these same 2 individuals, and many more, every single Tuesday throughout my 4 years in high school and throughout much of college. This continued after college in a different way, and I joined local community service groups to continue volunteering in nonprofits despite working in a different sector. By 2007, I found a group of women and we co-founded our own nonprofit which threw local events for nonprofits, and raised its own money to become one of the first group donors at Kiva and Grameen Foundation.

As an escrow officer in the the real estate sector, by 2007, the writing was on the wall that things were going downhill. I worked hard, but there was a lot less satisfaction to the work as real estate offices closed and things rapidly contracted. Feeling disillusioned, I made a conscious decision to work in the sector that brought me the most internal peace and transitioned to working in the nonprofit sector. My first job in nonprofit was at Autism Speaks in Los Angeles, and then to The Children’s Nature Institute, where my next piece of luck hit, and I met Matt Kamin, who is my business partner and the co-founder at Envision Consulting. There is a whole middle story here about our stints at Children’s Nature Institute and a few other nonprofit organizations, but the end result was that after a few years, Matt and I decided to work as consultants doing primarily interim CEO work. Our first assignment was a 2 year turnaround that culminated in a merger. It was a rough introduction to contracts, compliance, and change management, but I’m supremely proud of the work we did. It quickly led to other interim assignments, and within a few years, we had too many interim opportunities for the two of us to do at any sort of scale.

When you’re doing turnaround work, it requires a huge amount of trust between you and the Boards that hire you. You’re both in a rough place. A Board is usually finding out a whole bunch of bad things at once, and you’re simultaneously making recommendations and implementing them. There isn’t a lot of room for long debate, only action. To be fair, not all of the interim roles we did were crisis roles, but a few definitely were. We ended up only having to close down one organization in that time, but the others, as we closed our engagements, would ask Matt and I to replace ourselves. To recruit, screen and present candidates. To provide recommendations on ongoing operations. To help organizations think strategically. And so, Envision Consulting turned from the two of us doing interim work to full-time consulting. Today we have 15 team members in three states and have the immense privilege of working with over 100 nonprofit organizations a year. We recently opened an office in Lexington, Kentucky with Amy Brin, who I cannot say enough good things about, and it feels like Envision is really poised for more intentional growth.

We place CEO’s and other C-Suite leadership, but we always lead with strategy. Envision Consulting is a consulting firm doing nonprofit strategy and executive search services. Matt and I have taken our fair share of criticism for not labeling ourselves as a search firm first, even though it comprises about 60-75% of our work on a given year. But anyone who works in talent development will tell you that good hires can’t fix poor strategy. We strongly believe it takes both: The right people and the right strategy to make great impact. So in addition to executive search, we take on strategic leadership engagements as well. This sometimes looks like strategic or succession planning, but more and more, it takes the form of nonprofit merger and acquisition exploration and implementation work. Over the last 10 years, we have built ourselves into one of the most experienced nonprofit merger firms in Los Angeles, and Nationally. It’s an interesting blend of corporate strategy, contract negotiations and change management. And it feels full circle and incredibly gratifying that we get to help nonprofit organizations really scale their impact for the community.

The second thing you’re going to hear from us that you would think would not be controversial, but it is, is that nonprofit is a team sport. Your CEO can be your team captain or even your head coach, but without a strong management and cohesive team, it’s not enough. So in the last year as we have really solidified our search and strategy lines, we realized there was a deep deficit of hands-on resources for Board recruiting, development, and coaching. So, we worked for the last year to develop a dedicated service line to doing just that: BoardBuilders (BoardBuilders.Net). It’s a subscription service where we leverage our deep expertise in recruiting to find great board members, have built an online repository of Board webinars and templates, and leveraged an incredible resource: retired nonprofit CEO’s, to coach nonprofit organizations to recruiting and building their best Board ever. We are incredibly enthusiastic about it, because it not only fills an evergreen need in the community, we can do it at a price point that makes it much more accessible for smaller organizations that have not always had the budget for consulting. We’ve even had community donors come to us to sponsor local organizations. It’s a win win.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Three things that I think are impactful on my journey are resourcefulness, curiosity and fearlessness. Resourcefulness means that there are very few things that I am unwilling to try or to learn. I have the “I can fix it” gene from my parents, and with today’s absolute explosion in information available there is very very little you cannot learn for yourself. The next part is being curious: one of the worst traits I see in leadership is leaders who are not curious about different opinions or processes, I think it takes my clients and my team a little off-guard when I ask “why do you do things that way,’ but I mean it truly. I want to know what makes people make the decisions they make so I can re-evaluate my position or approach. Hearing how people process information makes you better at communication and relating to others. The third piece I’m not always as good at as I used to be, is fearlessness. Leaving a career, a sector, a job – thats all really really hard. Many people and organizations stay rooted in place because of fear. Some of that fear is 100% founded and valid, again there is a huge element of luxury, stability and confidence in some areas that you need to have in order to be able to take risks in others, but sometimes you need to have just enough fearlessness to move forward and trust in the unknown.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

Twelve months ago I was starting to feel like my business was running us, and not that we were running our business. Matt and I had really started with intention on focusing only on really impactful or interesting projects, and we were able to throw ourselves into them. But that doesn’t really scale well, and when you have payroll, and project deadlines, and a million other compliance things that come along with running a business, I needed to run projects with my alotted amount of time and budget. It was great for the business, but I started doing “budget work” during business hours and sneaking in passion projects after hours. Rationing my time on top of managing employees…. it started to feel, well, like a job. In my personal life, I have a family with young children. My husband has a really demanding job too. I want and need to spend more time with my family. But more and more I felt like Envision was leading me, not that I was leading it. Matt was feeling similarly, and we weren’t sure if we were burned out, or if it was just a blip, or if we had to re-evaluate what we were doing.

Starting in January of this year, Matt and I really invested in our partnership and put it back front and center. We brought in someone to help us work through many of the frustrations we had let fall by the wayside in the last few years, and I finally feel, 11 months later, like we are back on the right path. Part of this was my letting go and trusting my team more, and part of this was finally being intentional about the work we are doing. Lately I have drawn stronger boundaries around my personal life. I took vacations. I have really gotten a lot out of my Disneyland magic key, and I have a stronger bond with my family. On the professional side, I’ve also been more willing to draw boundaries, to be intentional about the kinds of clients and projects we take on. This has been hard, since I’ve spent a long time in a scarcity mindset, but for the most part, we have earned better, more loyal clients as a result and I’ve been happy to let clients walk away if those decisions didn’t fit their needs.

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