In 2016, I was the Vice Chair of The Circus Project board, a startup nonprofit circus school at a grow-or-die moment. We had just taken a risky bet and signed a lease on our first facility. I shifted from board member to fulltime staff Managing Director to quickly scale up our tiny customer base and drive earned income.

Within three years, I led a 7-person management team to triple tuition sales revenue to the point where we were maxing out our physical capacity. We literally could not take on any more customers.

A circus facility needs high ceilings and open spaces, and can’t move in to any old building. After a year of groundwork meeting with architects, developers, a major funders, in 2019 I negotiated a deal with a children's theater to partner on a new youth arts complex. There would be theater space with rigging! Room for a huge trampoline! Big windows and natural light! It would be the only purpose-built circus facility on the West Coast.

We signed a contract with a capital campaign consultant and were poised to go all in on this major expansion. Four days later we entered pandemic lockdown mode and the deal collapsed.

While our competitors went dark, we maintained our customer base by moving to digital service delivery. I then led the team to go zero to 60 to build, fund, program, and launch a brand new outdoor performance venue in just under 6 months. I designed our roadmap based on incremental experiments so that we could move fast, build alignment and minimize risk.

We pulled this off by gaining a deep understanding of the competitive landscape and the factors driving customer loyalty, carefully positioning ourselves with our words and online content, and shifting our team culture to be retention and iteration obsessed. We designed the end-to-end customer experience to lead to retention, and invested in digital marketing through email and social media campaigns, SEO optimization, and implemented A/B testing to maximize results.

I also burned out. I gave the board 9 months’ notice and then left nonprofit to go back to school and level up my leadership skills with an MBA in Design Strategy. To prepare for this transition, I clearly documented the potential futures for the org, the tradeoffs, and the tough choices the board would need to make. I saw exciting paths forward but recognized I was out of gas. Four months after I left, The Circus Project was acquired by another organization, which absorbed our facility and many of the staff, keeping the mission alive while consolidating community resources.