Lauren – I’m a skeptic too…and then I got my full report of 34 and the top five and bottom five seem so spot-on that I sort of assume the rest line up too. I’m finding it really fun to play along; to assume my top five are correct, should be integral to how I run the business, and to think about what that actually looks like.

Thanks for sharing this Molly. I love this perspective and the idea of growing into an accomplice for good.

Congrats, Denali, and thanks for starting this thread. I love the idea of celebrating our small successes along the way.

Hello Grizzly Denali and Ama. I’d love to know more about what you all have done to try to identify the “right” clients. I have an interview protocol that we started using a couple of years ago with potential clients to suss out whether they really are ready to work with local communities in a meaningful way, or whether they just know how to use the right language to get a grant, but aren’t really prepared to do the work beyond that. Ama – it looks like something that might be a next step beyond your Client Intake form (which I really like!). I’ve only had a few chances to use it so far, and I rarely use the whole thing, but maybe it’s working so far…How do you two narrow in?

Greetings, fellow empire builders! I’m Karen Peterman and I’ve owned a small evaluation and research firm since 2010 called Karen Peterman Consulting, Co. (original, I know…more on the name below). I like to say that I started the company on accident. In 2007ish was approached by a client about picking up work “on the side” instead of going through the evaluation firm I was working for at the time. I got permission from my boss to slowly transition out of her company, and within a couple of years I had a full portfolio of my own.

I had no ambitions of owning my own company, and so I have sort of Forrest Gumped my way forward for the past decade. I have spent most of the past 12 years trying not to drown in work. It took me a long time to figure out the kind of colleagues I needed to hire. Once I figured that out, I could finally start to find rare moments to look up and think, “Hey, maybe I should have a plan.” And that’s why I’m here – I am excited about what might happen with the company, and what my team might be able to do together, if I start trying to run the business on purpose and with goals beyond simply trying to meet client deadlines.

There are a couple other things that matter to my story, as I’m thinking about it. First, I have a former boss who I hated and who hated me right back. I spent a lot of my early days trying to make sure that I didn’t wake up one morning to realize I had turned in to “that person.” That’s part of why the company is my name – you hire me, you get me…for better or for worse.

Second, I ran the company for a long time with what I believed to be a strong work ethic and quality work, but without any values beyond that. In 2020 I realized that our work was often complicit in perpetuating the inequities that our clients’ programs were supposed to be combatting (we specialize in evaluating and studying STEM education programs). We were following their lead and their values, and that sometimes meant that we didn’t ask the questions we should have. The thing about realizing you are complicit in something is this – you can only claim to be complicit for a short while, and if you don’t change anything about what you are doing, then you are an accomplice, at best. I didn’t want to be an accomplice. So, we made lots of values-based changes. As the result, I have a better sense of who I am and who the company is, and now I just need to figure out where I want us to go, and how to make the intentional choices to get there. Enter Evergreen Empire and Boost and Bloom – let’s do this!