As the year winds down and we get ready to celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa, I wanted to take a moment to stop and thank the people who we've been fortunate to work with over the past year. The work that our clients do on a daily basis is both incredible and inspirational, and we're incredibly fortunate to play a small role in helping them advance their mission.

When we founded Ascendant in 2008, we had the vision of helping mission-driven organizations implement their strategies. We had a lot of experience helping global corporations do this, and saw an opportunity to bring these concepts to an under-served market. But along the way, we've learned a lot about how the social and public sector differ from the private sector, and how business and management concepts cannot be simply "ported over" to nonprofits without understanding the unique challenges and opportunities that nonprofits face.

Our early clients -- like Catholic Charities Archdiocese of Boston -- helped us learn what worked and what didn't. Clients like Rare Conservation taught us about global responsibility and how performance management must be tweaked to work in different parts of the world. And clients like the US Army showed us the importance of performance management in the world's largest organization.

To these clients, and others, thank you for your trust, patience, and support. Thanks to you, we've been able to grow Ascendant beyond our expectations and imagination, and have been able to help organizations as diverse as the World Bank and the Southern Alabama Workforce Development Council. It's been a great ride, and we're just getting started!

Happy Holidays from everyone at Ascendant.