The mud hut

In 2017 I was running the foundation for Coca-Cola Consolidated, and I found myself sitting in a mud hut in a refugee camp in northern Uganda.

The camp held South Sudanese refugees. It lived on rice trucks, three a week. In that hut with me sat someone from UNICEF, someone from a world hunger organization, and the Bishop of East Africa. Three institutions that almost never sit in the same room, let alone the same hut, and the question on the table was simple to say and hard to answer: what would move this place generationally, not just until the next truck?

We did not leave with a program. We left with a person.

The person of peace

The model we built was organized around what we called a person of peace, a local man or woman the camp already trusted. Around that person we put microfinance, so families had something to build with. A school, so the children had somewhere to go. And a church, so the whole thing had a center that would still be there when the trucks and the foreign staff were not.

It worked. It was scaled beyond that camp. I will not give you a number of camps or countries, because I have told this story enough times to know my count drifts, and I would rather be honest about that than impressive.

What I carried home was a question rather than a model. Could the for-profit, the nonprofit, and the local church collaborate to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges? The corporation had capital and operating discipline. The NGO had reach and expertise. The church had the person of peace, and it had permanence.

I did not have an answer. I had a conviction that the answer was yes, and no idea what my part in it was.

Four years later

It took four years for that to become a firm. In 2021 I left Community Bible Church and hung a single shingle: strategic consulting for churches, nonprofits, and faith-driven businesses. I was good at it. I would build a strong strategic plan, hand it to an operations leader still running yesterday’s playbook, and watch it die.

That was the price of being wrong about something. I had believed strategy was the scarce thing. I was wrong. Vision needs strategy, strategy needs a plan, and a plan needs capacity, meaning whether you can actually execute. Capacity is the gap churches and nonprofits can rarely afford to close, and for about eighteen months I watched the same collision repeat. A leader would tell me what they wanted. I would name what had to change. They would tell me they could not change it, which meant they could not have the outcome either.

So I ran an experiment. In the fall of 2023 I bought a small bookkeeping firm to test a theory: if we could touch both the dollars and the people inside an organization, would the strategy finally stick? By January 2024 we had our footing as a strategic management firm with finance and HR delivery behind it.

I should say plainly that this is what Novum sells. The mud hut is the reason the firm exists, not a marketing story I found later, and it is also, yes, the reason I would like you to call us. Both of those are true at once.

What I am actually doing

When people ask what I do, I say I architect moonshots for high-capacity missional leaders. That is the NASA line. What it means in practice is less glamorous: taking a leader’s God-sized vision and building the organization underneath it that can carry the weight. Across sectors the pain points are always the same. The corporation, the nonprofit, and the church call them by different names, and part of the work is translating between them.

The question from the hut is still open. I do not think one firm answers it. But I think about the person of peace often, the one the camp already trusted, and I think the leaders reading this are that person for their own communities.

My job is to make sure that when the trucks stop coming, what you built is still standing.