Helping small teams carry big missions.

The name

A portage is the stretch where you pick up the canoe and carry it overland to the next water. It's unglamorous, it's heavy, and nobody puts it on the brochure. It's also the part that decides whether the trip happens.

Most small organizations are stuck on a portage: the spreadsheet nobody trusts, the grant report built from scratch every quarter, the handoff that lives in one person's head. That's the work I do.

Is this you?

• You run a small nonprofit, or you just inherited one, along with whatever mess came with the keys.
• You lead programs and spend more time wrangling tools than serving people.
• You've been told you need a strategy, when what you need is to see what's actually going on.
• You want something built that your team can own, not a consultant you have to keep feeding.

How it works

Visibility beats strategy.

You can't fix what you can't see, and most plans fail on the first unlabeled spreadsheet.

1. Surface it.
   Find out what's really happening: where work lives, who does it, where it leaks.
2. Simplify it.
   Cut what doesn't earn its keep. Most of the fix is subtraction.
3. Systemize it.
   Build the lightweight systems, usually on tools you already have, and train your people to run them.

After that you can fly solo, or keep me around on a limited basis if something needs tending. Your call.

Who's behind it

I'm Dan. I've spent my career bringing order to organizations that were, charitably, in motion: humanitarian logistics, hiring, teaching, and a fair number of rooms where the real process was whatever one person remembered. Portage Haus is where I put that to use for small teams doing work that matters.

I'm a little irreverent about operations and entirely serious about the mission. If that sounds like your kind of person to work with, we'll probably get along.