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What you’ll get from this post: A working playbook for scaling a nonprofit, drawn from how Missy Heilman grew BIO Girls from a handful of girls at one Fargo church into 120 program locations across five states. Strategic planning that survives contact with a real week, a test for killing programs that drift from your mission, and a way to treat failure that your team will actually believe.

The dream someone else had for her first

In 2013, Missy Heilman wanted to make a difference in the lives of a couple of girls. That was the whole plan.

She started BIO Girls at Olivet Lutheran Church in Fargo because she needed an organization to back the idea. She recruited friends, friends of friends, and a few people she flat-out voluntold into helping. From week to week, the team made it up as they went. “Well, what are we gonna teach the girls next week? What should we focus on? What could the lesson be?” No curriculum. No expectations on the kids. Show up, be your best self, run a 5K at the end, see what happens.

Here’s the part most founders will recognize. Missy could not see what she had built.

Her coworkers could. They told her this could be national, that she could reach thousands. She was pregnant with her third kid and working full time as a VP of marketing. Her response: “I don’t have time for that.”

“My friends and coworkers, they dreamed big for me before I was willing to.”

If you lead something you started, sit with that line for a second. The people around you often see the ceiling before you do. Not because you lack vision, but because you are buried in the to-do list, in the thick of it, doing the work. The clarity belongs to the people with distance.

So the first lesson of scaling is a posture, not a tactic. Believe the people who dream bigger for you than you’re ready to dream for yourself, and start writing things down before you feel ready.

Why she said yes before she was ready

A woman named Jill Nelson reached out from Fergus Falls. We need this here, she said.

Missy had no capacity. None. But she understood something about opportunity windows: if she said no, that no might be permanent. So she said yes. And the yes forced the work she had been avoiding. Process. Documentation. What this thing would actually look like if someone else had to run it.

For the first two years, BIO Girls wasn’t even a nonprofit. By year three they had three communities, fiscal sponsors like the YMCA in Fergus Falls, and a founder finally asking the right question. “Okay, we need to figure out what this is.”

Growth didn’t come from a master plan. It came from saying yes to one stretch she wasn’t ready for, then building the systems the stretch demanded. That order matters. Most people want the systems first, then the growth. Missy did it backward, and backward worked.

Mission first, said out loud, every time

Every nonprofit says it’s mission-driven. Far fewer can tell you the last good idea they turned down.

At BIO Girls, the filter is plain. Does this help us further our mission? Missy runs every decision through it, and she’s honest that the filter only works if you’re willing to fail it sometimes. They have chased shiny objects. She’ll tell you so.

The clearest example is the teen program.

BIO Girls works with second through sixth graders, and works with them well. The teen program felt mission-aligned. Adolescent girls, mental health, the same heartbeat as everything else they do. They believed in it. They piloted it.

It failed. They no longer offer it.

Watch how she says that, because the language is the whole point. “It failed. We no longer offer a teen program.” No spin. No “we learned so much and pivoted to deeper impact.” A pilot that didn’t work, named as a pilot that didn’t work, shut down so the focus could go back to the second through sixth graders they haven’t fully reached yet.

That’s the discipline. Mission drift rarely shows up as a bad idea. It shows up as a good idea that belongs to someone else’s mission.

The compliment that’s actually a trap

If you run a nonprofit, you know this moment. Someone says, “You should also do X.” For BIO Girls, X is almost always a boys program.

Missy’s take is generous and clear-eyed at the same time. The ask is a compliment. It means you’re doing something well enough that people trust you to do more. “I also say if I had $5 for every time someone said, when are you gonna start a boys program, I would never have to fundraise again.”

The compliment is real. The trap is also real. Both things are true, and the strategic plan is what lets her hold them at once. She can receive the praise without letting it set the agenda, because the agenda is already written down and reviewed every quarter.

Take the compliment. Keep the focus. The plan is what makes that possible.

A strategic plan that doesn’t die on a shelf

Say “strategic plan” to most nonprofit leaders and watch them flinch. They picture the process. A consultant, a few offsites, a 70-slide deck that lands on a shelf and stays there until the next plan replaces it.

Missy builds them differently, and the difference is the whole value.

“You don’t end with a binder that’s so thick you could do campfires all summer with it.”

Here’s the structure that actually works at BIO Girls:

• A three-year goal. Not five, not ten. Three. Too much changes past three years to plan in detail.
• An annual plan that moves you toward the three-year goal.
• Quarterly rocks that roll up to the annual plan.
• A weekly look at progress as a leadership team.

The plan is a cadence. The goal sits three years out, and every week the leadership team checks whether this week moved them closer. That’s the part people skip, and skipping it is why their plans gather dust.

Compare the two versions of strategic planning:

• The version that fails: Hire a consultant every three to five years. Produce a thick deck. Reference it at the annual board meeting. Wonder why nothing changed.
• The version that works: Set a three-year goal. Break it into annual and quarterly chunks. Review weekly. Adjust as the world changes, because over three years it will.

In 2021, BIO Girls brought in an outside consultant to set their first three-year plan and to facilitate that first round of quarterly rocks. After year one, the leadership team could run the cadence themselves. The consultant taught the rhythm. The team kept it.

The stretch goal they missed on purpose

This is the section to read twice.

BIO Girls set a goal to reach one in six North Dakota girls annually by the end of 2025. When they set it, they were reaching about one in 25.

They’re going to miss it. They’ll land around one in eight to one in nine.

Now listen to how Missy frames a missed goal. “We’re actually going to fail to meet our goal of one in six, but it’s not a failure.” Going from one in 25 to one in nine in three years is enormous. The stretch goal did its job. It pulled the organization further than a safe goal ever would have.

When Max first heard “we set this goal and we failed,” his instinct was to back the train up. That’s the outsider’s job, holding up the mirror. And the mirror showed something worth naming: a missed stretch goal measures how far the stretch took you.

If your goals are all achievable, they’re too small. Set the number that scares you a little, then judge the result by the distance traveled, not the line you drew before you knew what was possible.

EOS in a nonprofit, which almost nobody does

Here’s a detail that surprised even Max. BIO Girls runs on EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System made famous in the book Traction.

You almost never hear of a nonprofit using it. Missy didn’t go looking for it either. A supporter asked if she used EOS, she had no idea what it was, so she and her COO Laura read the book together. Their reaction: “Yes, we get it.” They were already doing many of the same things. EOS just formalized them and gave them shared language.

That last part is the quiet superpower. Common language. When a team can say “we use an operating system, we knock out our rocks every quarter,” it changes how they see themselves. They’re not a cute nonprofit hoping for the best. They’re an organization with real goals and a real system for hitting them. The mission is the heart. The operating system is the spine. You need both to stand up straight.

Why the CEO still shows up as a site director

Missy could delegate the ground-level work. She has thousands of volunteers. By every org-chart logic, the CEO does not need to be running a 12-week program at a single church.

She runs one anyway. Every year. BIO Girls requires every employee to volunteer at a program at some point, and Missy holds herself to the same rule.

The reason is practical, not sentimental. The 12 weeks she spends co-leading at Olivet with her partner Betsy are what keep her connected to the why. Hearing the girls’ successes. Being the shoulder when one of them cries. Being the person who says their name when they walk in, which for a lot of these girls is the thing they show up for.

The proof is in the retention. Last year, 25 of the 40 girls at Olivet were repeat participants. A sixth grader stopped Missy at church to ask when BIO Girls starts again. That’s not a program kids get signed up for. It’s a place they choose.

If you’ve scaled yourself out of contact with the people you serve, you’ve scaled out the thing that told you the work mattered in the first place. Find the version of “site director” that keeps you in the room.

Failure is a point in time

BIO Girls teaches the girls one idea above most others, and the leadership team runs the organization on the same idea.

“Failure is a point in time. It doesn’t define who you are, and the best thing you can do is remember the lesson, forget the mistake.”

That line works as an operating principle, and you can see it in how the team behaves. In monthly meetings, everyone shares a failure and a success. Out loud. At Tellwell we call those wins and learns, and the practice does the same thing in both organizations: it makes failure safe to name, which makes it safe to take the risks worth taking.

For the girls, every week is a rep. Running, an art project, a yoga flow. The activity is just the vehicle. “Who doesn’t F up a yoga flow? Come on.” The point is to go outside the comfort zone, learn that some days are better than others, and discover that a flub is something you grow from and move past.

Missy is blunt about why this matters more for girls. They give up the things they love at higher rates than boys, paralyzed by perfection, terrified of disappointing someone if they aren’t the best. BIO Girls is trying to change that narrative one raised hand at a time. Her own sixth grader told her she’s the only person in math class who raises her hand to answer questions. Missy’s response was a strategist’s response: how do we keep that the case?

What you can actually do this week

Reading about BIO Girls won’t scale your organization. Doing a few of these things might.

1. This week, 30 minutes: Write down the last three good ideas you said no to. If you can’t name any, you have a mission drift problem hiding in plain sight.
2. This week, 1 hour: Draft a single three-year goal. One sentence, one number, scary enough that you’re not sure you’ll hit it.
3. This month, half a day: Break that three-year goal into four quarterly rocks for the next year. Put a recurring 30-minute weekly check on the leadership calendar to review them.
4. This month, ongoing: Add “a failure and a success” to your next team meeting. You go first. Name a real one.
5. This quarter, one program: Get the CEO back on the ground for one full cycle of your core program. Not a photo op. The actual work.

Resource Hub

• BIO Girls. Learn about the program and support the work: biogirls.org
• EOS / Traction by Gino Wickman. The operating system BIO Girls runs on
• North Dakota Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The data behind why this work matters for girls
• Start with Story. Max’s newsletter on human-first storytelling for mission-driven organizations: wetellwell.com
• WellTold. Tellwell’s conference and community for storytellers and nonprofit leaders