Member milestone anniversary
Armstrong McGuire & Associates helping variety of nonprofit organizations achieve their goals for decades
By Jeff Wisser
“We make a living by what we get,” Winston Churchill once said. “We make a life by what we give.”
By that measure, Bert Armstrong has made quite a life.
As co-founder and principal of Armstrong McGuire & Associates, a consultancy serving nonprofits and philanthropic organizations across North Carolina and the Southeastern U.S., Armstrong and his team have spent the last 20 years advising nonprofit organizations through the company that bears his name.
But even before the debut of Armstrong McGuire in 2004, Armstrong had made a name – and a life – for himself working in the nonprofit sector.
“I graduated from Wake Forest University and quickly realized that corporate sales wasn’t the career I wanted. I stepped into a role with a small college where I fell in love with fundraising and came to understand the power of philanthropy in a community.” Armstrong explained. “I knew right away that this work is where I could apply my skills and my passion for service.”
A four-year stint doing development work with the North Carolina Museum of Art came next, followed by a long run with the Methodist Home for Children, based in Raleigh.
“I really found my stride in this sector during my time at the Methodist Home for Children,” Armstrong said. “It combined my vocation, my avocation, and my faith background in a way that just clicked, and it gave me a platform to impact important missional work, something every nonprofit fundraiser enjoys doing.”
During his eight years at Methodist Home for Children, Armstrong planned and executed a major capital campaign that oversubscribed its fundraising goals, helped plan and celebrate the organization’s centennial anniversary, and was involved as part of the senior leadership team in initiating new and expanded programs.
“I tell folks all the time that I’d probably still be right there, doing that work that I loved, except that I had this equally strong desire to create my own business.
That’s how Armstrong McGuire came to be when Bert accepted an offer from his friend and mentor, Tom McGuire to join him in launching the firm in January 2004. McGuire, a respected philanthropic foundation leader and veteran of his own nonprofit leadership as executive director of the North Carolina Symphony, retired from the firm in 2014. He died unexpectedly in 2018 while hiking the El Camino de Santiago trail in Spain.
“I was fortunate to have as a business partner and dear friend a gentleman who was also an icon of North Carolina’s nonprofits in the philanthropic space,” Armstrong said of the company’s co-founder. “We loved working on projects together and doing work that was making a difference in our community.”
Initially, the firm’s work focused on helping nonprofits plan for and execute annual resource development programs and capital campaigns. Twenty years later, Armstrong McGuire’s breadth of services includes counsel in every facet of nonprofit capacity building – leadership development, executive recruitment, organizational planning and fundraising counsel.
“We have grown into a full-service agency that serves all the different needs that nonprofits have related to sustainability and growth,” Armstrong said. “We meet our clients wherever they are in their organizational life cycle, sometimes during their most challenging seasons of change and transition. From there, we help them identify and prioritize the opportunities they have for greater impact. Our work always starts with discovering strengths, challenges, opportunities and a community’s understanding of their mission and value. From there, we work together to create a strategic path forward.”
Strategic planning, executive coaching , nonprofit board training are other areas where the firm excels. And the work, not surprisingly, is very satisfying for those who are doing it.
“That’s what we get excited about,” Armstrong said, “is helping organizations with great missions, like food banks, affordable housing programs, child and family services, youth development, arts and education. We work with large national and statewide organizations as well as start-ups and smaller, grassroot nonprofits who are often challenged in finding a sustainable revenue model. We work with the human and financial resources they have and design strategies that help make them more effective and more sustainable, because the community depends on them being able to do more of what they do best.”
And that, Armstrong stresses, would be impossible without the winning team working at Armstrong McGuire.
“We’ve got 16 senior advisors and staff who make up our core team. We love the work, and our folks bring decades of great experience serving as leaders themselves in the different roles that we engage with day to day. They also genuinely care about each other and about the success of every client. I’m really fortunate to be surrounded by people who are passionate about the work and find joy and satisfaction in the work, in even the most challenging projects. That’s how we’ve been successful and that’s how we’ve grown.”
In addition to its people, the firm’s success is the result of a steadfast commitment to a set of core values that have been in place at Armstrong McGuire since the beginning.
“From our early days, we have been guided by a set of core values that our team embraces in our personal and professional lives. They are integrity, experience, relationships and results. These are not just words posted on our website. They are values we put into practice in every interaction, with each other, with our clients and with our community.”
