Case Studies
Selected Engagements
Selected engagements that show how Mark works across sectors, scales, and stakes. Each case describes the situation, the work, and what changed.
A note on outcomes: strategy work creates conditions for success that play out over years and through many other inputs. The cases below describe what changed in each organization's capacity to think, decide, and operate. Where direct financial outcomes are visible, they are named. Where they are not, the case describes the institutional change.
Volunteers of America Chesapeake
Regional human services nonprofit. $30M revenue, 600+ employees. Serves Maryland, Virginia, DC, and the Carolinas with affordable housing, behavioral health, veteran support, homeless services, and community re-entry programs.
The new CEO inherited a money-losing organization with deficits in service performance, compensation, management staffing, and process efficiency.
- Built a new strategy with the leadership team
- Aligned the management culture to support execution
- Advised the CEO on filling key management positions and cross-training staff
- Revised 20 core process flows across finance, performance management, and operations
- Implemented a document management system that reduced costs and gave management real-time visibility into operations
Over the engagement, the organization moved from $22M and money-losing to $30M and profitable. Service performance, management depth, and operational discipline all strengthened. The leadership team gained the financial stability to invest in growth and the operational visibility to steer it.
Office of Naval Research
ONR funds the Navy's science and technology priorities (about $280M a year) through grants and contracts to scientists and engineers.
ONR builds its Global Science and Technology R&D Roadmap by pulling together input from a wide, scattered group: Navy fleet and force personnel and technology academics from around the world. Their needs and capabilities vary a lot. The environment shifts fast. Getting all those perspectives into one coherent roadmap, in a short window, is hard.
- Reviewed the current Global S&T R&D Roadmap and how it gets built
- Facilitated a global group of academics, research technologists, and fleet and force innovators as they revised the S&T R&D plan
- Recommended better approaches to portfolio management, staff support, and networking, plus stronger processes for putting the roadmap into practice
- Recommended better participant preparation and communication ahead of the annual roadmap exercise
ONR adopted a redesigned roadmap session: better structure, clearer process, and a real follow-up cadence. The new design for participant preparation and communication was documented, approved, and in place for the next cycle.
Children's Home Society of Florida
Statewide nonprofit. 1,700+ employees, $120M+ revenue. Largest provider of services to abused, neglected, and at-risk children in Florida. 110+ years old.
A 110-year-old organization facing rising demand and constrained resources. Services across education, health, and juvenile justice operated in parallel rather than as an integrated whole. Sixteen service regions ran 16 different operating approaches.
- Conducted leadership and strategy diagnostics across the executive team and regional directors
- Designed a unified strategy that integrated education, health, and juvenile justice services
- Built a business model that aligned the 16 regions to a common operational framework
- Implemented a shared performance management system used across all regions
Vision and values now serve as a shared reference across the organization, replacing 16 different regional interpretations. The integrated strategy aligned services that had operated in parallel for decades. All 16 regions now operate from the same business performance planning and tracking system, allowing leadership to compare regional performance, identify what works, and replicate it. For the first time, CHSF leadership has cross-network visibility into how the organization is functioning as a whole.
NatureServe
Scientific nonprofit. $10M revenue. Authoritative source on North American biodiversity data, supporting conservation planning through a network of 60+ natural heritage programs across the continent..
Scientific staff were working too hard on projects that weren't economically viable. The organization had no strategy to direct effort toward the work with the greatest mission impact.
- Realigned vision and mission to the organization's actual capabilities and reach
- Identified the customer segments where the organization could have the most mission impact
- Built a new business model with the leadership team that aligned services to mission impact
- Trained scientific staff to apply business discipline to project selection and execution.
The organization now operated from a clear business model that focused effort on the customer segments where its scientific work would have the most impact. Project selection became more disciplined. Staff time aligned with revenue and mission, rather than fragmenting across both. The leadership team gained a shared logic for saying yes and saying no.