I missed it when it happened. Somewhere in the last couple of weeks, I passed fifty-two posts, one a week. I have now been blogging and posting to LinkedIn for more than a year. It started as a course for people looking for their next nonprofit executive job. It turned into something about non-profit management on-boarding. Then it turned into a record of my own first ninety days, written while I was inside them.

More than a year of posts is long enough to ask what the thing has actually become.

When I started with sharing best practices, I had read about in books. Watkins on the first ninety days. Bradt and his coauthors on the hundred-day plan. Wiggins on the new chief executive. Wolfred and Adams on nonprofit transitions. But these summary posts were not what grabbed my readers’ attention.

The most-read thing I have written is the one where I published my real job-search numbers. The applications, the interviews, the rejections, all of it. People wrote to tell me how much they appreciated that I shared the challenges as well as the accomplishments. The next most-read is a post about learning to prioritize, the second-best piece of advice I ever got. Neither of those is a translation of anyone’s framework. They are accounts written by someone who has lived and experienced rather than studied it.

That is why I think that there is a gap in the business literature. The existing books for CEOs speak to the for-profit leader. The books written about my sector are written to the board and the search committee, not to me. The reader sitting where I sit, in a nonprofit, in the first person, under real constraints, was not being written to.

That reader is who I have been writing to. The blog helped me find the gap.

So thank you for reading these. The comments I get, online and in person, are usually from people in the same kind of seat, and they are the reason this has stayed worth doing. More than a year in, I have found my groove. The first ninety days were only the start. The rest of the first year is still ahead. I hope that you will join me.