Every hero needs a guide.
Your task is before you. Your goal is worthy: great good will come of your success. But challenges obstruct and uncertainty clouds your vision. Pitfalls and missteps threaten your progress. This is where you look around and ask, who can help me?
Organizations with standalone projects or key deliverables at hand don’t always have a permanent member of the team prepared to take on the task. Sometimes a board decides it’s time to look ahead to the future, and current staff are at capacity with present-oriented duties. When a nascent initiative looms, a short-term role may emerge for a specialized utility player.
This is where Poeta Consulting comes in.
With over fifteen years of experience in strategic planning, project management, and marketing and communications, Poeta Consulting guides individuals and organizations through whatever’s coming next. Poeta specializes in projects in the nonprofit and education sectors, drawing from deep knowledge in marketing, fundraising, operations, and finance. With particular knowledge in the classical education, primary, secondary, and higher education, and Christian nonprofit sub-sectors, Poeta is poised to bolster organizations as they provide value for their constituents and tell their story to supporters.
Io comincia: “Poeta che mi guidi,Guarda la mia virtu s'ell'e possente,prima ch'a l'alto passo tu mi fidi.”And I began: “Poet, who guidest me,
Regard my manhood, if it be sufficient.
Ere to the arduous pass thou dost confide me.
Inferno II.10-12Why Poeta?
Poeta is an honorific Dante uses for Virgil in the Divine Comedy. He addresses his guide as such scores of times as he asks questions and cries out for help.
Why is the best guide through the terrors of Hell and the pain of Purgatory a pagan shade from antiquity with a way with words? And what does a consulting firm have in common with Virgil, one of the undisputed greatest authors in the Western canon?
There is comfort waiting for us in speaking with those who have passed this way before. Dante sets out to write a mammoth poetic work describing one man’s struggle through obstacles and suffering to a brighter future, which is a path Virgil trod as the author of The Aeneid, the chronicle of Aeneas’ challenges and ultimate triumph as founder of Rome. Virgil, a fellow poet, is prepared to deal with Dante’s poetic instincts and especially his weaknesses as he makes his way through Inferno and into Purgatorio. And perhaps most importantly, a colleague who is passionate about depicting wisdom and right action makes the perfect mentor.
In most ways, Poeta Consulting is no Virgil. However, like Virgil, Poeta is not a permanent fixture in your story, but can provide value during a key season, illuminating a portion of your journey. Poeta is a new arrival to your institutional context, but can advise and guide because past experiences have prepared Poeta to be helpful. Poeta arrives armed with the knowledge that this season’s challenges and struggles are not proof that the idea was a bad one, but rather that difficulty is expected and hardship can be overcome as part of the bigger story. And Poeta can do it while focusing on virtuous conduct in business and a winning turn of phrase or two (but again, no Virgil).