Building the other half of impact
I help social impact founders stop firefighting and start growing their impact. Not by adding even more systems, but by fixing what's actually generating the fires.
"When I was in search of a Chief of Staff, I didn't know that I would be God-sent a person who will transform and re-align the whole texture of my organisation."
They are competent. They do their job.
But somehow you're still the one who gets called when something goes wrong.
Still signing off on things that shouldn't need your approval.
Still coming back from time away to find three things that quietly broke while you were gone.
You've tried to fix it. New tools. A restructure. Maybe someone came in, spent a few weeks with you, and left you a plan.
Six months later, the same things are breaking.
It's probably not even a systems problem.
The fixes weren't necessarily wrong. They just addressed what the dysfunction looks like rather than what's generating it. Which is why they reverted.
And while that cycle continues, every hour you spend in the weeds is an hour you're not doing the work you started all this for.
"Raghav has a rare ability to look at a chaotic system, identify the friction points, and build sustainable, scalable solutions that save everyone time."
When you fix the right thing, the change shows up faster than you'd expect.
Your team starts making calls you used to make.
Problems surface before they blow up.
You take a week away and come back to a team that handled things.
The fires that returned every quarter stop coming back.
And the time and headspace you get back goes to the work that actually moves the mission forward.
"He made a lasting impact on our growth. He brought structure to decision-making, empowered the team to take ownership, and created a culture of constructive feedback and improvement."
Three ways to work together. Start free, and go further only if it's a fit.
The Firefighting Diagnostic measures how reactively your organisation runs, which patterns keep the fires in place, and why past fixes haven't held. Then a Breakthrough Session: a 30-minute call on your results, ending with one clear next step in writing.
Take the diagnostic Already done it? Book your Breakthrough SessionYour read of what's causing the fires, set side by side with your team's, through anonymised interviews. You get a written report showing where the two match and where they diverge, plus a sequenced plan for what to fix first, second and third. I take three clients at a time.
See how the X-Ray worksI work inside your organisation part-time to put the fixes into practice, until they run without you or me holding them together. It starts with the Clarity X-Ray, or from its plan if you've already done one.
Right for you if you're willing to step out of some decisions yourself, and someone on your team can own the work once I leave.
How the partnership works
"He is thorough. And he is a master communicator, able to get to the heart of the problem and come up with a solution in a short amount of time."
Often the good work evaporates the moment the consultant leaves. These didn't, because in each case I was inside long enough to see whether the fix actually held, not just to propose one.
Nearly 7 years at one organisation. Nearly 4 at another. Nearly 3 at my bootstrapped business. Along with advising multiple leaders. So the results below weren't measured at the optimistic moment right after the intervention. They were measured after the system had been tested.
Community Empowerment Lab is a public health research organisation where I led multiple programmes over nearly 7 years. In 2016 I was brought in to replace the intervention study team lead on a 27,000-participant health trial, at a point when the intervention operations were struggling.
More than 100 team members were spread across 2,000 sq km, and leadership couldn't see what was happening on the ground. Problems surfaced as crises rather than signals.
As part of the turnaround, I led the build of the intervention war room: a central, data-driven monitoring centre connected directly to every team member in the field.
Between April and September 2016, the intervention team's performance nearly doubled. The war room became the bedrock of the field operations, which are still running 10 years later, long after I left.
A separate study at the same organisation had stalled for months. I was brought in specifically to fix it, with no authority over any of the people who actually mattered: government health workers, district officials, and a senior hospital doctor actively steering patients away.
I treated it as a behavioural problem, not a management one.
A public ranking system made health workers compete for training instead of avoiding it. I figured out what the antagonistic doctor actually wanted, recognition in front of international visitors, and made sure he got it.
Within seven months of my taking over as programme director, the study was back on track. The results it delivered helped secure $1M CAD in scale-up funding.
The founder's exact words when I joined were, "I have no idea what's happening in my business." It had been loss-making for a few years.
I cut the product line from 100+ SKUs to a dozen and rebuilt the operating system around automatic visibility rather than status meetings.
Cash-flow positive within five months, bringing in more than it spent after years of losses. 44% revenue growth. Around 60% less leadership time spent chasing updates.
A small, fully remote team doing a lot of work across funders, grantees and time zones. As that work grew, coordination had spread across four tools and a lot of know-how lived with individual people. Without a shared way of saying who owns which decision, many of them naturally flowed up to leadership.
Before proposing anything, I sat down with everyone on the team, one at a time. Without being prompted, every person named the same thing: how decisions got made.
I built a simple traffic-light framework. Green: the team decides. Yellow: the team decides and leadership is told, with two days to object. Red: the team recommends and leadership decides. Alongside it, I rolled out a single project management tool that gave the organisation real visibility into work that had previously run on memory, email and Slack threads.
By the time I left, the decision framework was still running without me, and another team lead had independently adopted their own version of it.
Not a turnaround. A specialty food business that brought produce grown by smallholder farmers in Meghalaya to customers across the rest of India.
With a team of three, I built it from the ground up: the logistics, supply chain, product design, financial systems and communications. Eventually it ran out of road, and the business didn't work out.
I know what it feels like to make decisions with your own money on the line, to watch something you built not work despite your best efforts, and to be the one who has to shut it down.
That's not a consulting experience, and it's why I understand what's actually at stake when you're the one in the room.
A dispatch every Monday on what's breaking in social impact organisations right now, why, and what actually fixes it.
Selected pieces on why the same fires keep coming back in social impact organisations, and what actually fixes them.
Custom-built AI coaches that act as your thought partner when you're stuck on a decision, a messy process or a fuzzy goal. Free, and they work in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI tools.
Five dispatches each from The Monday Manager archive, on the three reasons social impact organisations stay stuck. No email required.
Social impact founders put real rigour into finding the right problem to solve. That's half of impact. The other half is building an organisation that can actually solve it, and that half gets neglected. Your organisation's dysfunction isn't separate from your impact problem. It is your impact problem. That's the half I help founders build.
I've been the field operator, the P&L owner, the founder and the outside diagnostician. 14 years working inside health programmes, development nonprofits, wellness startups and my own company.
I've been the person who rescued failing global health trial operations. The one who cut a product line from 100 SKUs to a dozen and delivered a first profitable year in three. The one who told a founder that the way he was running things was the reason things weren't working. And the one who built a food business from a friend's request, then had to shut it down with my own money on the line.
That's not a typical consulting background. It means I know what it actually feels like to be inside rooms with real stakes, not just what it looks like from a post-mortem.
Along the way, I've published six papers in leading international peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
You've found the right problem. Now build the other half.