How the Wichita Foundation Found Its Right-Sized Role

She was right. But her leaving revealed just how much she'd been doing behind the scenes: snacks for the board meeting, office coverage, or a broken copier nobody knew who to call for service. And all of the scheduling. Shelly and her team have a lot of meetings, and suddenly the churn of coordinating them landed on the person whose time the organization could least afford to spend that way.

Shelly was juggling four or five meetings at once, holding open windows on her calendar, and by the time someone wrote back to confirm, she'd already filled the timeslot with another appointment. "I was doing my job and then trying to manage that administrative stuff that's not a strength of mine anyway," she told me. "I wasn't effective at it. So I knew we needed to bring someone in."

I want to highlight something else Shelly said, because I hear it from nearly every nonprofit leader we talk to. For a long time, having an executive assistant felt to her like something that was frowned upon in the nonprofit world. It took a friend telling her, plainly, that she needed to lead like the CEO she is. Her board hired her to be the most effective leader she can be, and if the right support makes that possible, it isn't an indulgence. It's smart leadership.

Nicole came on as the Foundation's dedicated fractional EA in October 2024.

This wasn't the model the team was used to, and Shelly is refreshingly honest about the adjustment. Nicole wasn't down the hall quietly taking care of things as she noticed them, so the team had to learn to be deliberate and specific about what they needed. Shelly calls it one of the most valuable exercises they've done together, and I agree with her. Naming your needs out loud is clarifying work, and most teams never have a reason to do it.

Shelly learned to tell Nicole the details and context that she’d previously kept in her head. Things like which donor always meets at the same restaurant on the west side or if a relationship needs extra warmth layered onto a perfectly professional reply or which meetings should be forty-five minutes at the office, and which teammates can't do evening events because they have little kids at home. Shelly drew the map, then Nicole ran the routes.

And Nicole did what our EAs do best, which is get ahead of the need. Last board meeting I put this together. Do we need it again for this one? Those proactive questions started quickly. The team also planned ahead to use Nicole’s on-site time as effectively as possible, so the morning she came in to make board-meeting copies, she also did the mailing that needed stuffing. Board meeting prep simply happened because Nicole owned it. The room was set, the copies were made, the minutes were drafted and ready for Shelly's final pass, and every meeting on Shelly’s calendar was verified the day before so she never went to a meeting where the person was a no-show.

What Shelly says she felt underneath it all was reliability. A steady undercurrent she didn't have to think about. A qualified professional, in her words, who's intelligent, knows the language, and is reliable. That's exactly the feeling we're committed to delivering to all of our clients. I helped with onboarding and sat in on a board meeting myself, so if Nicole was sick or had an unplanned emergency, I could provide the support the Foundation needed.

The time added up to roughly ten hours a week saved across the team. Two to three of those hours were Shelly's personally, just in scheduling back-and-forth. Around every board cycle, about four more hours of staff copying and prep work. For a team that prides itself on running lean, ten hours a week is not a small number. It's more than a full working day, every week, returned to the mission.

And then, a year in, came the ending I opened with. Working with Nicole showed the Foundation exactly what their permanent role should look like: part-time and in-office, with light accounting folded in to satisfy the auditors and scholarship-season phone coverage that genuinely needs a person in the building. They hired that person. In Shelly's words, Nicole helped train them to see what they needed, and to move from the traditional full-time EA structure to a modern role that fits the organization and isn't wasteful.

Some clients stay with us for years, and the fractional model is their long-term solution. For the Wichita Foundation, we were the bridge that helped them define the role clearly enough to fill it for good. I consider both outcomes a success, because the relationship was never about keeping a contract. It was about the Foundation getting exactly the support it needs.

In her own words:

"Nicole helped us know how to work more efficiently and trust that the administrative work would be done. We pride ourselves on the leanness of our team, but it can reach a point where you lose organizational flow and can't act on your mission.

She literally helped us get to mission fulfillment, because she was reliable and we didn't have to think about those other things."

Here's what working with Shelly clarified for me.

She gave me an image I haven't stopped using. The work an EA does is easy to wave off as small, but Shelly calls it the connective tendons — the tissue that makes everything else move. Without it, everything gets sore. A missed donor lunch is never just a lunch. It's trust. If the CEO is sitting in a board meeting worrying about whether someone remembered to buy the snacks and bottled water, something unimportant in the grand scheme of things has claimed attention the mission needed.

She also named the trap that lean nonprofit teams fall into, and she named it with so much grace. Leanness is a point of pride, and it should be, right up until it costs you your organizational flow. The non-profit leaders we support work twice as hard with half the money and staff of their for-profit peers. Shelly says that often, and she's right. Which is exactly why their time deserves guarding, not less support but more of the right kind.

And her words to other leaders is the one I'd put on a billboard. 

It doesn't matter whether you lead a small nonprofit or a giant aerospace company — you're expected to show up and be prepared. The support underneath you is a lot of how that happens.

If your week looks like Shelly's used to, with too many meetings you're coordinating yourself and the small things slipping since the person who used to catch them moved on, this is what we do. Whether you need a partner for the long haul or a bridge to clarity about what your team really needs, I'd be honored to talk.