Lost

Hi {{first_name|friend}}. Happy Sunday. Take a minute with this little poem:

Sometimes when we feel lost our instinct is to run around faster, trying to find something to latch onto.

But perhaps the moment is asking us: Stand still. Let the world find you.

In many moments these past few months I have felt a sense of deep confusion, of being totally unmoored and adrift.

The future seems wildly unknown - for all of us, but here I’m thinking specifically about my core business: Salesforce consulting for nonprofits. Every part of that sentence is changing now in big ways. Here’s a slide I shared with my team at our retreat:

Making that slide, I thought of my favorite scene from the brilliant movie Margin Call. Here’s the clip - specifically from 4:00-6:00 but I’m including the full scene because I just love it. Jeremy Irons as the CEO of a bank (clearly Lehman Brothers) has called for a 3 AM emergency meeting as the team has realized collapse is imminent:

“I’m here for one reason, and one reason alone. I’m here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I’m afraid I don’t…hear…a…thing. Just…silence.”

At the risk of being too dramatic, I’ve felt that way at many points this year. Staring out my metaphorical skyscraper window in the middle of the night, feeling the responsibility of 19 salaries + health insurance premiums on my shoulders, I try to listen for the music and I don’t…hear…a…thing. Just…silence. It feels like the music has stopped for Salesforce consulting in a way I’ve never experienced before.

It’s not quite the whole bank crashing, but it’s plenty scary. And as the person whose job it is to steward our company vision and keep us resilient, I felt in those moments like maybe I was just not good at my job. Maybe I got lucky for a few years surfing a wave that anyone could have caught. Maybe now the wave is over and we’re all just out to sea.

For someone who prides himself on memorizing the map, being lost is deeply unnerving.

And then last week I had a dream.

I was in a grassy field with one of my very first clients. I had worked with them in 2015-2016, back in those wild scrappy early days when I didn’t know a damn thing but told people I would figure it out and they believed me.

I was standing with our point person, Adina. The rest of her team was coming down a hill toward us one by one since were were all going to get lunch together. As we waited for the group we started reflecting on the past few years, our in person work sessions we had together. I said something about how they have always been great and she said “Yes except for Tennessee” which I understood alluded to a (fictional) time we sent a junior inexperienced consultant to work with her in person there and it did not go well. In my head that symbolized a chapter in OpenTent history where we weren’t as effective in achieving client results as we were hoping to be.

But now in the dream it felt like the reason we were gathering with Adina and her team was because we were launching a new chapter. We had figured out how to use new technology to return to our company roots, and we had renewed confidence that we could make meaningful improvements in how our clients did their work every day. We were launching this new service and in doing so, we were going back to all our early clients to get their feedback and see if this would be useful to them.

It was tremendously exciting. The energy felt like the early days of building OpenTent: a confident curiosity, a freshness in the air, a direct connection with clients, a quickness in trying new things, a glimmering potential of “this might just change everything.”

I woke up with a smile.

Perhaps the tech changes that seem to threaten our business could actually help us fulfill our potential as a company.

Perhaps we could build even stronger relationships with our customers - all of them.

Perhaps the startup energy I yearned for was still there, ready to go when the right idea emerged.

The forest had found me.

And so: this week we’re launching OpenTent Studio.

The idea didn’t come from the dream, but the dream gave me the confidence I needed to really go for it.

We’re going to use AI coding tools to start making custom software for clients. For all of OpenTent’s life up until about 4-5 months ago, making custom software instead of using an enterprise platform like Salesforce would have been a dumb idea. Too expensive, takes too long, too hard to maintain over time, etc.

But now, AI tools like Replit (which we used to make Welcome Back) open up huge new opportunities to build custom software quickly and cheaply. There are so many organizations who need software less expensive than Salesforce but more sophisticated than out-of-the-box CRMs. Now, for the first time ever, the idea of each organization having their own software made just for them is not actually unreasonable.

I’m giddy about it!! I think it’s going to be a blast to work on.

But beyond the idea of it, I’m just awed at nature’s way of guiding us to the right next step.

The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.

Wherever you are is called Here.

Have a beautiful week ❤