Who We Are
New Coyote Consulting is a people-first equity and communications consulting firm serving QTBIPOC professionals and their organizations as they come into their power. After beginning an equity journey, many organizations find that old ways of messaging and management don’t line up with their current vision. New Coyote starts and leads with equity. With services ranging from training to strategy to content creation, we help our clients craft and support a communications strategy that makes money while centering their principles and core values.
Check out our website at newcoyote.com to learn more about who we are and what we do.
New Coyote became a certified benefit company in January of 2021.
Our Mission
At the core of our work is the principle that capitalism and colonialism are both rooted in white supremacy, made to extract value from the working class in order to preserve and increase wealth for the ultra rich. Because this understanding permeates everything we do, this foundational issue and the liberation practice we cultivate to address it must be accounted for in all our actions, both as individuals and as organizations.
Liberation practice starts internally. We can’t tell clients they need to resist toxic colonizer mindsets if we ourselves aren’t doing the necessary work and having that practice show up for us in our day to day. At New Coyote, the preferred workday length is 6 hours or fewer, but never any more. If we need more hours, we bring on more people. We break for breakfast, lunch and dinner if those meals are lining up with our working hours. We pay everyone a minimum of market median plus 10%, and we focus on work that gets results rather than work that checks boxes. In the state of Oregon, it is considered fraud for a company our size to provide health insurance, so we offer a merit raise of $3/hr to help offset the cost of insurance for our employees.
We prioritize clients who are transgender or gender nonconforming people and Black, Indigenous or other people of color, especially where we can help people grow into and express their power.
2022 Summary and Key Metrics
As a Benefit Corporation for Good, we have a triple bottom line, meaning that we have an obligation to do right by people and the planet over and above profit.
People
- We offer full scholarships to all public trainings, no questions asked.
- Gave our employee a raise
- Funded the Willamette Valley Development Officers’ BIPOC Fundraisers Affinity Group budget at 100% for 2022 and recommitted for 2023
- Membership in Business for a Better Portland, a progressive chamber of commerce leveraging the power of business to do good in Portland and Oregon
- 100% of our staff and contractors identify as people from a marginalized group
- 15% of our annual net profits were donated to nonprofits in cash
- Special rate for justice-centered nonprofits
- More than $23,000 of in-kind donated to justice-centered nonprofit organizations
- Continue to pay a minimum of market median plus 10% for all staff and contractors
- Centering a liberation practice for staff and clients every day, growing and learning together, and sharing that learning in the form of a weekly video series as well as twice-monthly newsletters
- Free access to Masterclass for all employees
- Employees paid hourly rate to attend professional development classes
Planet
- Paperless office
- Fully remote office
- CEO’s office powered by 100% renewable power
- Stand opposed to cryptocurrency, and NFTs due to their high carbon cost
- 100% virtual speaking and training schedule in 2022, resulting in no travel
Profit
- Led more than 36 justice-based workshops and meet-ups centering marginalized people and their experiences
- CEO appeared on 2 podcasts
- Presented a workshop at the 2022 WVDO conference
- Presented a 60-minute workshop and 30-minute presentation and served on a coffee talk panel at the 2022 NTEN conference
- Tech Policies for Reducing Toxic Productivity, adapted from Confronting Toxic Productivity
- Self-Care During a Crisis, adapted from How To Maintain Empathy, Community Focus, and an Abundant Mindset During Crisis
- Served 10 total clients
- Reached 100% of our full client capacity by the end of the year
- Despite an abysmal Q1, and a rocky Q2 we did beat our total income goal by the end of the year
- In real time, we beat our income goals 6 months out of 12
- Our highest earning month was December, when we earned 161% of goal
- Our lowest earning month was March
- We closed the year at 103% of goal for income
Coming Year
In 2023 we will:
- Maintain the programs and policies we have while continuing to execute quality work
- Grow our team
- Manage our team’s internal capacity:
- evaluate the volume of work we take on
- Use tools to increase efficiency and speed
- cut extraneous work
- Try to decrease our daily work hours expectation to 4 per day
- Debut a certificate course with WVDO (now known as the People’s Non-Profit Accelerator)
- Give employee raises as well as annual employee raises
- Dedicate more hours to training and speaking
In Closing
2022 was one of the most turbulent years I’ve experienced in business. It’s the year we thought we were going to have to close, and I now find myself reflecting on how far we’ve come. Despite the fact that we hired our first employee in January 2022, and felt confident about our future, a couple months later—due to myriad influences, some of which were out of our control—we were planning and measuring week-to-week whether we could keep our doors open.
One of our major strengths as a business is that we’re extremely innovative and adaptable. In order to get out of the deep hole we were in, I did a lot of hard inner work, and slowly but surely built a ladder for our business. A big part of that involved prioritizing rest, both as individual workers and as a business. We said no to things that weren’t in alignment, because we knew that a short-term cash flow wouldn’t be worth the long-term setbacks in team morale. We evaluated and reevaluated our skills and looked to see where the intersection of money and values showed up for us in the market, then we seized the opportunities that were meant for us.
One of the things that saved New Coyote was that when money was lacking, we cut executive pay without ever making cuts to staff pay, so we didn’t lose the crucial support we needed to keep the business afloat. And after we’d done our absolute best, we didn’t grind our wheels to dust fretting; instead, we went home and got some rest so we could start again bright and sharp the next day. We did everything in our power to preserve our physical and emotional health, over and above the business’ health.
As a team, we do great work and have a wide range of talents, but we also know that when we’re tired, burnt out or sick, the product that makes us special suffers. And that takes away our edge, which is our ability to show up for our clients with our full selves.
Investing in ourselves and adhering to our people-first principles has paid huge dividends for us. It kept our heads above water when we were really in danger, and turned 2022 into another profitable year despite a horrifically bad first quarter and a regular-bad second quarter. I feel more confident than ever that we have the sturdy base we need to thrive and grow in 2023 and beyond.
As I look around the industry right now, I see other business owners trying to utilize the same dogmatism that turns into toxic productivity—AKA the uncontrollable need to feel productive at all times, at any cost—which ultimately turns into burnout. Sometimes setting a big strict boundary around your time is helpful, but other times it’s not. The true gift of anticapitalism and healthy productivity is that the thing that’s right for you to do is entirely dependent on you and your context, and those things change hour to hour, day to day.
One of the most memorable things the poignant Audre Lorde told us is: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Things like capitalism, racism, white-centered norms, respectability politics, and the hoarding of power are all tools of the master and fundamental values upon which most modern workplaces were founded. Dogmatic adherence to a set of rules—whether imposed from outside sources (an oppressive society), or from within, by a psyche shaped by that oppression—is not going to bring us into self-actualized liberation.
What we need is to listen to our bodies and leverage our resources for our own continued healing, so we can step into our roles as truth tellers, disruptors, and anti-capitalist change-makers.
Thank you for joining me on this adventure - I’m looking forward to seeing what year three has in store.
In Solidarity,
Marina Martinez-Bateman CEO, New Coyote Consulting