Nova Counseling Services is a state-licensed, 50-bed residential and 90-day halfway house provider in Northeast Wisconsin. Post-pandemic demand for addiction treatment is higher than ever. Wait lists are growing. Counselors are burning out. Expenses are rising faster than revenue. Without a stronger talent pipeline and more reliable funding, Nova risked turning away people who needed help most.
Hickory Grove partnered with Nova through a six-month field consulting engagement to answer one hard question:
How can Nova grow treatment capacity while staying true to its mission of delivering the highest quality care at the lowest possible cost?
The answer was not a quick marketing campaign or a one-time fundraiser. It was a capacity flywheel that connects talent, culture, community, and dollars, supported by strategic facilitation, digital strategy, and data-smart operations.
Engagement At A Glance
Organization: Nova Counseling Services, a nonprofit addiction recovery provider
Scope: Six-month strategy and operations engagement, implemented from 2024 to 2025.
Focus: Talent and culture, workload and burnout, compensation, donor marketing, financial and operational tuning
The Capacity Flywheel
Nova did not just need more beds. They needed a system where each improvement fed the next.
We framed this as a capacity flywheel with three intertwined elements: talent, culture, and community dollars. When each gear turns, more people get access to treatment.
Counselors power culture
Culture attracts funding and community support
Dollars add beds, reduce burnout, and improve quality
Turn the flywheel and you save more lives. Let one part slip and the whole system strains.
This framing became the backbone of our Strategy Consulting work and gave the board, leadership team, and staff a shared way to talk about trade offs.
Core Challenge
Nova faced a clear but complex challenge:
Demand for treatment had eclipsed existing capacity
Turnover among licensed addiction counselors hovered near 10 percent
Operating expenses were outpacing revenue
The board wanted to expand access and add capacity. The leadership team knew that without a resilient talent pipeline and more diversified funding, growth would simply increase burnout and risk.
The strategic question we posed was:
How do we fix staffing and culture in a way that also unlocks more sustainable funding, backed by data smart operations and clear KPIs?
Approach And Methodology
Hickory Grove treated Nova as a full system problem, not just an HR or fundraising challenge. The work combined Strategic Consulting, Web and Digital, and Marketing Operations.
Key steps included:
Stakeholder interviews with each leadership role and a random sample of counselors to understand cultural realities, burnout, and perceived blockers
Root cause analysis of turnover, cross-referenced with Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data to separate compensation issues from workload and support issues
Process mapping to identify administrative tasks consuming licensed clinician time and where an admin pool or better tooling could help
Donor persona research and a competitive scan across 12 regional nonprofits to understand how recovery work was being messaged and funded in the region
Financial modeling of cost per bed and multiple expansion scenarios, presented at a board retreat using a simple, data-driven story instead of a thick deck
This mix of qualitative and quantitative work is typical of Hickory Grove: we start with interviews and process walks, then layer on analytics, benchmarks, and scenario modeling before designing recommendations.
Pillars And 12 Month Outcomes
We organized the work into five pillars. Each pillar connected directly to one or more of your service lines and had clear moves and measurable outcomes within the first year.
Pillar 1: Recruit And Retain Counselors
Nova could not increase capacity without stabilizing the counselor base. Together we:
Rewrote job descriptions to be outcome-based, with explicit salary bands and realistic expectations
Introduced a referral bonus program that paid at offer acceptance and again at six months
Built a simple mentorship and growth hub using tools Nova already had, such as Slack, plus quarterly retreats focused on connection and professional development
Early outcomes:
Time to hire dropped from 86 days to 56 days
First-year retention improved from 74 percent to 88 percent, a 14-point increase
The takeaway was clear: when people know what they are signing up for, feel supported, and see a growth path, they stay.
Pillar 2: Rebalance Workloads
Licensed counselors were spending too much time on paperwork and admin tasks that did not require their credentials. We:
Built a small admin pool dedicated to insurance paperwork and intake forms
Clarified a target caseload cap of fewer than eight clients per counselor so the load felt sustainable
Embedded realistic job previews into the hiring funnel so no one came in surprised by the work
Early outcomes:
Burnout self-report scores dropped by 22 percent
Counselors gained six additional clinical hours per week per FTE, directly increasing treatment capacity without new hires
This is classic marketing operations thinking applied to a clinical setting: get the right work on the right desk, and document the process so it is sustainable.
Pillar 3: Data-Driven Compensation
Compensation discussions at nonprofits are often emotional and anecdotal. We reframed them with data.
We introduced:
Annual wage benchmarking using Bureau of Labor Statistics data and tools like Glassdoor
A performance pool tied to net margin targets, so financial performance and staff recognition moved together
Tuition reimbursement for continuing education credits up to a clear annual limit
Outcomes:
Salaries were brought within roughly 5 percent of the state median for comparable roles
Staff rated their understanding of merit pay clarity at 4.3 out of 5 in a survey, a notable improvement
This combination of financial modeling and transparent communication is a direct example of the overlap between Hickory Grove’s Strategy Consulting and Marketing Operations.
Pillar 4: Donor First Marketing
Nova needed more consistent community dollars, but the story they were telling did not fully capture the impact of their work.
We helped them design a donor first marketing approach that included:
A story driven video series featuring client and staff testimonials, focused on recovery journeys and the realities of the work
A tiered corporate sponsorship model with clear Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels that made it easier for local businesses to say yes
A mix of Facebook look-alike ads and local radio public service announcements to reach both digital and offline audiences
Early outcomes:
Nova secured its first 25 thousand dollar matching gift
The email opt in list grew by 31 percent year over year, expanding the base for future campaigns
This is Web And Digital work with a Strategy Consulting backbone. We did not chase impressions. We built a donor journey and messaging strategy tied to the capacity flywheel.
Pillar 5: Financial And Operations Tune Up
(Service lines: Marketing Operations, Strategic Consulting)
Finally, we connected the dots between capacity, cost, and expansion choices.
Key moves:
Built a cost per bed dashboard in Google Data Studio so leadership and the board could see the financial impact of operational decisions in one view
Modeled profit and loss for five different expansion options, translating abstract ideas into numbers that could be compared side by side
Facilitated a lean Kaizen-style event to streamline kitchen procurement and other support processes
Outcomes:
Identified roughly 120 thousand dollars in annual savings from food contracts and utilities
Provided enough confidence and clarity for the board to green-light a study of expanding the Terra Program, Nova’s core treatment offering
This is where the Strategy Consulting and Marketing Operations lines fully intersect: board-level decisions grounded in simple, accurate data.
Key Insights For Mission Driven Organizations
The Nova engagement produced insights that apply well beyond addiction recovery.
Mission attracts, but culture keeps. Professionals will take on hard work when they see leadership investing in their growth and mental health, not just asking for more output.
Stigma is a storytelling gap. Honest recovery stories move donor empathy and support faster than polished brochures. People give to missions they can feel, not just understand intellectually.
Small data can have big leverage. Transparent wage benchmarks and simple dashboards can shift board sentiment and unlock funding in a single meeting when everyone is looking at the same picture.
For Hickory Grove, these insights reinforce our core belief that Strategy Consulting, Web And Digital, and Marketing Operations are most powerful when they are designed together, not in silos.
How Hickory Grove Can Help Your Organization
If Nova sounds even a little like your world, this is the kind of work Hickory Grove does best. We step in as a fractional CMO and strategic facilitation partner, then bring in web and digital strategy plus marketing operations so your plans, systems, and people are all working toward the same goals.
With Hickory Grove, you can expect:
Strategic consulting and facilitation
We help boards and leadership teams get on the same page about capacity, revenue, and risk. That means structured interviews, working sessions, and clear frameworks that turn competing opinions into a shared plan your team can actually follow.Web and digital experience
We translate your mission into donor and community journeys that make sense online. That includes tightening your website, email, and content around the stories and actions that move funding and participation, not just pageviews.Marketing operations
We build the dashboards, benchmarks, and workflows that tie everything together. You get simple, repeatable ways to see what is working, reduce busywork for frontline staff, and make better decisions at the board table.
Every organization will have its own version of the capacity flywheel, but the pattern is the same. When you center your people, fix the systems around them, and back decisions with clear data, you can expand impact without burning out the team that makes it all possible. Hickory Grove is here to guide that work with you.
