Strategy
Our Ambitions
Looking Back
Our priorities a year ago revolved around profitability, building out more impact measurement infrastructure, and growing our team while maintaining our culture.
12 months later, we’ve got a lot to be proud of.
Turning the Corner on Profitability
November 2024 was our first profitable month. While there’s plenty of room to grow, that’s an important proof point about the long-term viability of our model.
Hardening our Impact Measurement Infrastructure
In 2024, we deployed a sweeping overhaul of our Walden Impact Assessment tool, improving its adaptability, the quality of its content, and its efficiency. We also refined the criteria we use to evaluate loans, loan purchases, and investments to ensure that every deposit dollar we deploy aligns with the spirit of our mission.
Ongoing Hiring & Culture
2024 brought new faces and much progress on our culture-related goals. We continue to evolve our ways of working to embrace flexibility, ensuring that members of our team can contribute and feel a sense of belonging wherever they’re working from. Once a quarter, our entire team convenes in Concord, NH for two days in-person – and once a month, our executive team spends a day together in-person collaborating. Both practices have been useful complements to our time apart working remotely. Our performance and development infrastructure has also matured, having added 360-degree reviews, self-evaluations, quarterly performance goals and associated financial incentives, performance ratings, and a series of new cultural norms (like “mirroring & testing”, same day email replies, and “complete asks”).
Looking Ahead
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Over the course of the rest of this calendar year, here are a few things we’re focused on.
Galvanizing our Impact Strategy
We’re ramping up our commercial growth engine in 2025, increasing our focus on deploying our deposit dollars as capital to mission-aligned organizations. With relatively fewer deals as we found our early footing, most borrowers felt squarely aligned with our mission. As we scale, there are more potential loans that fall in the grey. We’ve begun to map how we’ll approach those decisions – when loans fall outside of our region, for example, or in industries that are adjacent to our local food ecosystem – but those frameworks will be tested in 2025 in ways our business has not required before. We’ll use this report to explain some of those frameworks in more detail, so you can help keep us accountable to our commitments.
From a Profitable Month to a Profitable Year
We’re ramping up our commercial growth engine in 2025, increasing our focus on deploying our deposit dollars as capital to mission-aligned organizations. With relatively fewer deals as we found our early footing, most borrowers felt squarely aligned with our mission. As we scale, there are more potential loans that fall in the grey. We’ve begun to map how we’ll approach those decisions – when loans fall outside of our region, for example, or in industries that are adjacent to our local food ecosystem – but those frameworks will be tested in 2025 in ways our business has not required before. We’ll use this report to explain some of those frameworks in more detail, so you can help keep us accountable to our commitments.
Ongoing Hiring & Culture
We have ambitious hiring plans in 2025, with particular concentration on our lending team – ensuring we have the right representatives out in the world, such that any mission-aligned organization in our region or beyond that’s looking for financing understands our unique value. To that same end, we’re also re-organizing several of our departments into a centralized “partner” group that we hope further accentuates our differentiation. We’ll continue iterating on our remote work model, optimizing for productivity and a sense of belonging.