About — The Growth Group

Founder

Jesse Martin

Rev. Jesse Martin, M.A. · Founder, The Growth Group LLC

"We ran this on our own organization before we ran it on anyone else."

Jesse is the CEO of an international ministry serving vulnerable children across seven African countries — 43 care points and operations in fourteen nations, in the organization he leads. An ordained minister, he spent a decade as a pastor and church planter before moving into international development. Before stepping into the chief executive seat he served as Chief Operating Officer of an organization working in more than 120 countries — which is where he learned what scale actually demands of systems and of people.

He holds an M.A. in International Development and is completing doctoral studies in organizational leadership and management. He lectures at Liberty University and serves on the leadership council of the Accord Network.

Credentials

Ordained Minister
M.A., International Development
Ph.D. candidate, Organizational Leadership & Management
Lecturer, Liberty University
Leadership Council, Accord Network

He built The Growth Group because he needed it — and couldn't find it.

The Bench

You get the specialist, not the generalist.

When your diagnostic surfaces a governance problem, you work with someone who has built governance at scale — not a generalist reading a framework.

M&E

Monitoring & Evaluation

Architects of outcome measurement systems at global child-development organizations serving millions of children.

FINANCE

Financial Leadership

Former chief financial officers of international relief and development organizations.

OPS

Operations & Scale

Operators who have scaled national brands and led multi-billion-dollar relief portfolios.

FIELD

Business as Mission

Practitioners who have launched dozens of sustainable enterprises across closed and restricted nations.

GOV

Governance

Board chairs and trustees from seminaries, mission agencies, and international NGOs.

DEV

Advancement

Development leaders who have built major-donor programs and church partner networks from zero.

The bench

Practitioners, matched to the constraint.

Most firms sell one specialty and then find that problem in every organization they walk into. We measure first and bring the person whose actual experience matches what the diagnostic found.

Everyone on the bench has run something. These are people who have made these decisions with real consequences — several from the senior ranks of the largest child-development organizations in the world.

Leadership & Governance

Executive leadership, board development, governance, organizational design, strategy, transitions and multi-site structure.

People & Culture

Executive coaching, HR systems, organizational culture, leadership pipeline development.

Programs & Impact

Programme design, holistic child development, safeguarding, evaluation, poverty-alleviation frameworks, savings groups.

Financial Management

Nonprofit finance, compliance, risk, reserve strategy, investment and donor-advised fund infrastructure.

Communications & Donor Experience

Messaging strategy, brand voice, donor communications, customer-journey architecture and experience design.

Technology & Systems

Technology architecture, enterprise systems, digital transformation and integration.

Research & Foresight

Global religious and demographic trends, geopolitical foresight, impact analysis.

Strategy & Partnership

Missiological clarity, strategic evaluation, global programme partnerships, and partnership-readiness for organizations working toward INGO alliances.

How we describe the bench

We name individuals only once they have agreed to a specific engagement, and we describe them by what they have actually built rather than by title. If a governance specialist is assigned to your work, you will be told where they built governance and at what scale before anything begins.

We would rather under-describe the bench than overstate it. If nobody on it genuinely fits your constraint, we will say so and point you elsewhere.

What We Believe

Three convictions we don't compromise.

Radical transparency

We publish our own numbers and expect the same. Trust is the currency of this sector, and it's built with disclosure, not assurance.

Sustainability over dependency

A hand up, not a handout — for the communities you serve and for your organization's relationship with us.

Built to outlast the founder

An organization that collapses without one person was never really built. Governance, succession, and systems are how mission survives leadership.

"It's His kingdom. We're just stewards of the root system."

A note on what belongs to whom

Operational figures cited on this site — fourteen countries, forty-three care points — describe organizations Jesse Martin has led, not work delivered by The Growth Group. They are offered as evidence of practitioner experience, not as a client record.

The Growth Group is a young practice. Its assessments are built, deployed and in use, and its advisory bench is real — senior practitioners across eight business functions, several from the senior ranks of the largest child-development organizations in the world. Anything still under construction is kept off this site until it works — we would rather be accurate than impressive.

What another three years costs

Nothing dramatic happens. That's the danger.

It just stays exactly this hard — and the drag compounds.

Capacity sits unused

You keep turning people away while the infrastructure you already fund runs at partial output.

Your best people leave

Burnout takes the ones who cared most. They always have options.

A donor asks the hard question

Retention rate. Program ratio. Outcomes. There's no answer — so the gift goes elsewhere.

It can't survive your exit

Decades of work resting on one person's presence, with no succession behind it.

Practitioners, not theorists.