How Margin & Mission Ignition Helped the Humane Society of Manatee County Grow With Purpose

In this episode of the Nonprofit Thrivability Series of Beyond The Blog, a Podcast by The Patterson Foundation, host Read Corley talks with Rick Yocum, executive director of the Humane Society of Manatee County, about his experience going through Margin & Mission Ignition not once, but twice.

The conversation is about what happens when a nonprofit leader sees a need in the community and uses a clear process to figure out whether the idea can work.

Rick’s first Margin & Mission Ignition venture focused on the organization’s veterinary clinic. The clinic already existed, but it was not reaching the number of clients it needed to serve the community well or help support the shelter. By participating in Margin & Mission Ignition, Rick and his team worked through the planning, conversations, and decisions needed to strengthen the clinic.

Rick makes clear that MMI did not come in and write the plan for them. It gave them homework. It gave them guardrails.

• It helped them ask better questions.
• Was this idea tied to the mission?
• Was it meeting a real community need?
• Did the board understand the plan?
• Were staff part of the process?
• Were they tracking services and people helped, not just dollars?

For the Humane Society, the clinic’s growth was connected to a larger purpose: helping more people access low to moderate-cost veterinary care and keeping more pets with the families who love them.

The work also changed how the organization thought about expenses. Rick said that to grow revenue, they had to invest first. That meant adding contract veterinarians, building out medical support staff, buying equipment, and paying people competitively enough to keep good talent. Margin & Mission Ignition helped them look at those decisions as part of growth, not just as costs to avoid.

Rick’s second venture came from listening. Staff and the public were seeing a need for affordable dermatology care for animals. Skin, ear, and allergy issues can become long-term problems, and many families struggle to afford the care they need. The organization used the Margin & Mission Ignition process again to build a service that matched the mission and responded to what people were asking for.

Rick describes the effects of the work less like ripples and more like waves:

• Stronger credibility and trust among funders and donors, leading to increased support and larger gifts
• Expanded collaboration across nonprofit organizations, creating shared solutions for overlapping community needs
• Stronger internal alignment across staff and board, with shared ownership of strategy and clearer decision-making
• Increased ability to attract and retain high-quality talent through more competitive compensation and stability
• Shift from reactive operations to proactive growth, investing in capacity ahead of demand rather than managing constraints
• More disciplined, mission-aligned decision making, reducing time and resources spent on ideas that do not directly support impact

Watch the full episode to hear how Margin & Mission Ignition helped Rick and his team build a stronger plan, bring stakeholders along, and use social enterprise to support the work they were already doing.