Financial Strategy

Optimise your investments and your impact

You’ve an inspiring mission, ambitious goals, and limited funds. It’s a dilemma facing most for-purpose organisations. So, you need sound advice and creative thinking to help you wring impact from every cent.

We can guide your financial strategy in two ways.

Identify options to optimise your return on investment and your social impact. We take a big picture look at how you can use your capital to achieve your goals.
Test a hypothesis and confirm your financial strategy. If you’ve an innovative idea to unlock impact, we’ll do the research and crunch the numbers to see if it’ll fly.

From creative financial problem solving to investigating alternative funding sources, our team understand for-purpose organisations and the commercial realities you operate in.

Financial strategy services

Financial strategy

Balance creativity with wise investments to deliver lasting impact even when capital is in short supply.

Research

Validate a hypothesis, investigate new investments, or explore alternative funding sources that fit your values.

Gemelli are very good at understanding problems, unearthing relevant background, and prioritising needs. That gives us a sense of how to pilot a new idea safely because we haven't money to burn building houses only to find our plan hasn't worked. Gemelli give us the data to focus our future strategy.”

Dominic Foote, CEO, New Zealand Housing Foundation

Inspiring goals but limited funds

Sweat your capital harder

Your impact goals are bigger than your capital resource. How do you make your money work harder to get you where you want to go?

Test new ideas safely

You’ve an exciting idea but you can’t afford to throw money away. Test your hypothesis with research, international best practice, and financial modelling.

Wring impact from every cent

Confirm there’s a need

You’ve identified a new group needing support, but how many people are you talking? How did they get into this situation? Who’s already supporting their needs?

Research solutions

There’s a problem, but you don’t know how to help. We research options, and test them against your goals, values, and resources to make recommendations for your board.

Investigate best practice

Understand international innovation and learn from what others are doing in your field. We’re up to date on creative financial approaches in the for-purpose world.

Explore creative funding

Leverage your assets in new ways. Phase your development. Bring on an equity partner. Investigate new funding sources. Creative funding is our core expertise. .

"When Gemelli are working on a project for us, they check in regularly. They’re knowledgeable, experienced researchers who communicate without losing people in statistical jargon, strong communicators, and strong collaborators as well.”

Dominic Foote, CEO, New Zealand Housing Foundation

The financial strategy process

Financial strategies move through a four-step process to give you a better understanding of financial options for your organisation.

1. Discovery

We start with your end goal, asking what outcomes and impact you want, what success looks like, and what resources you have at your command.

2. Proposal

Your proposal includes a reverse brief, your context and desired outcomes, our scope of work, approach, timeframes, cost, and project team. This proposal clarifies exactly what you’ve asked us to do, outlines what we’re all doing, and confirms expectations before we get started.

3. Kick off workshop

Bring all key decision makers to this workshop so everyone’s on the same page. We’ll work through your proposal to make sure nothing's changed. Then we review your appetite for risk, so our recommendations are tailored to your needs. Next, we explore ideas for revenue streams to understand what's important to you. We love opening your eyes to new possibilities, but we don’t want you paralysed by too much choice, so we’ll guide you to options that match your goals.

4. Develop and present your strategy report

We present your report and discuss our findings, to help your board focus their energy and decide which direction to take. Reports typically cover:

Your context, purpose, and definition of success
The problem you’re trying to solve / the hypothesis you want to test
Summary of what you’ve tried, your successes and failures
Summary of our approach
Summary of research and recommendations. Is your hypothesis correct?
High-level financial modelling to test viability of your options
Investigate funding sources and revenue opportunities
Review how each option delivers on your objectives
Recommendations and next steps.

Some strategies are a two-part project where we first confirm if there’s a need to be met, then research financially viable solutions to this need.

We work collaboratively, so whether we’re testing your hypothesis, or developing a strategy you can expect regular updates to keep you in the loop.

BOOK YOUR DISCOVERY CALL

Financial Strategy FAQs

1We’ve a limited budget. Can we afford a financial strategy?

A financial strategy is going to help you make wiser financial decisions, so it will both save you money and make you money in the long term. But we know that answer doesn’t solve the budget issues you have today. We get the world of for-purpose organisations because we’re a for-purpose organisation ourselves. We understand being driven by a meaningful mission, but we also get the commercial realities you operate in. When we set up shop, we saw for-purpose organisations were poorly served for affordable financial and commercial advice. Without this advice, many transformative projects were failing unnecessarily, some not even seeing the light of day. Our affordable advisory services help you figure out if your project is viable. Talk to us about your goals and your budget. If we set firm boundaries for the scope we cover in your strategy we can keep your costs tight. We don’t want to head off down a rabbit hole and spend a truckload of time and money, any more than you do.

2We’ve commissioned strategies in the past and they didn’t deliver, so we’re a bit scared to commit in case this disappoints again.

We get it. We've worked with hundreds of for-purpose organisations, from faith-based charities to social enterprises and many of them have told us the same story. First up, we run a really robust discovery process, and we confirm our scope of work in detail, so there’s no room for confusion on what your end report will cover. But also, we work very collaboratively. We’re not going to disappear for six weeks and spit a report out at the end. We keep you in the loop every step of the way, report on our findings as we go, and explore what they mean. If something comes out of left field, we let you know and explore next steps. Because if we're testing a hypothesis and it doesn't come out the way you’re expecting, we don’t want that to be a nasty surprise.

If we haven’t answered your question about financial strategy, email us.

Test your ideas and proceed with a sound financial plan

When you’ve ambitious ideas but limited funds, you need a sound plan to deliver your dreams. A financial strategy gives you confidence to proceed