Half of every dollar from book sales and community subscriptions at Nellson Associates goes into a scholarship fund. People keep asking me why. Here's the real answer.

The simple version is that I want this practice to be moral before it's capitalistic. If you stop reading here, you've got the headline.

The longer version is more interesting, and it starts with my father.

## What my father optimized for

Robert Nellson founded Nellson Associates in 1997. He'd come out of Booz Allen and Fleet Financial — places where the rules of consulting were defined by quarterly utilization rates and partnership economics — and he started his independent practice with a different question in mind.

He wasn't optimizing for total revenue. He was optimizing for the kind of person he wanted to be while doing the work.

That sounds like a platitude until you watch what it actually means in practice. It means turning down a client because the engagement would compromise something you can't articulate but you can feel. It means doing additional work past the scope when the additional work is what the client actually needs, not what they asked for. It means charging less than you could for someone who has less than you do. It means structuring your year so you have time to write the book you've been meaning to write, instead of cramming one more billable engagement into Q4.

I watched my father do all of that for thirty years. He wasn't pious about it. He didn't write Medium posts about ethical consulting. He just did the work and trusted that the work would compound, and it did.

## Why I'm restructuring instead of just being virtuous

When I started Nellson Associates I wanted to inherit my father's operating philosophy, but I knew I wasn't going to inherit it by accident. The default mode of any independent practice is profit-maximizing. The systems push you toward more billable hours, higher rates, fewer scholarships. If you want to operate differently, you have to build the differently into the platform from day one.

So I did. The Scholarship Fund isn't a thing I do when I have spare time. It's a structural feature of every transaction. Half of every book sale and half of every community subscription payment automatically writes a contribution row to the scholarship fund. The contributions are aggregated on a public dashboard. Donors can pull annual receipts from their account dashboard. The whole thing is enforced by code, not by my willingness to remember.

This is the most important architectural decision I made when building NAWeb. Not the database choice, not the hosting model, not the auth flow. The decision to make the moral commitment a structural property of the platform.

## The mechanic

50% of book and community sales flow to the fund. Tracked on a public dashboard at /scholarship-fund/. Tax receipts available to donors.

The 50% number is high. High enough that some people who've looked at the math have told me it's economically irresponsible — that I'm leaving money on the table that could be reinvested in the practice or saved against lean quarters or spent on a marketing budget that would grow the practice faster.

They're right that 50% is aggressive. They're wrong that it's irresponsible. Here's the trade-off I've made: I would rather run a smaller practice with a larger fund than a larger practice with no fund at all. The size of the practice is bounded by what I can do well personally. The size of the fund is bounded only by how much I'm willing to give. Between those two constraints, I'd rather optimize for the second.

## Who the scholarships are for

This is the part I'm still working out, and I'm going to be honest about that rather than pretend I have it solved.

The clearest use case: clients who need consulting work but cannot afford the rate I need to charge to keep the practice sustainable. Small school districts, nonprofits, community organizations, healthcare providers in underserved areas. The kinds of clients I'd want to take on regardless of the economics, except the economics make it impossible at scale.

The scholarship fund lets me say yes to those clients. It pays the gap between what they can afford and what the engagement actually costs. It means the practice can serve people my father would have wanted us to serve, without me having to subsidize it out of household income.

The longer-term version: I want the fund to also pay for educational scholarships. Tuition assistance for students entering fields like healthcare data, educational technology, or independent consulting itself — the work my father did and the work I'm doing now. I'd want to award those publicly, with named scholarships and a clear application process.

I'm not there yet. Phase one is the consulting subsidy. Phase two is the educational scholarships. Phase three is whatever the fund wants to be when it's grown enough to have its own opinion.

## Why public instead of quiet

I could do all of this privately. Most consultants who do pro bono work don't advertise it. There's a virtue tradition that says quiet generosity is more authentic than public generosity, and I have a lot of sympathy for that view.

I'm doing it publicly anyway. Two reasons.

The first reason is structural pressure. Public commitment creates accountability that private commitment doesn't. When the dashboard is right there on the website, when every blog post has a footer reminding readers that half of their subscription went to the fund, when clients can ask me at intake how much I've raised — that pressure makes it impossible to quietly let the commitment slide when revenue gets tight. The public accountability is the load-bearing structure that keeps me honest.

The second reason is permission-giving. Other consultants have asked me how I structured the fund and whether they could do something similar. The answer is yes, obviously, and I want them to. Making it visible is the way I make it copyable. If even one other consulting firm reads this and says "we should do this too," the fund has done more than the disbursements it makes.

## The thing I'm not doing

I'm not asking anyone else to do this. I'm not turning the scholarship fund into a movement or a methodology or a framework or a Substack series.

I'm doing it because it's the version of the practice I can defend on a long enough timeline. If I look back on twenty years of Nellson Associates and see that I built something my father would have recognized — a practice that was moral before it was capitalistic, that did the work and trusted the work would compound — then I'll have done what I came here to do.

The math has to work. The math is not the only thing that has to work.

If you want to see the dashboard, it's right here: [Scholarship Fund](/scholarship-fund/). If you want to be part of it, the easiest way is to subscribe to the community or buy the book. Either one routes half of what you pay to the fund automatically.

That's the real answer.