Member spotlight
A two-person council in Cheyenne joins the shared-services pilot
The Rocky Mountain Outfitters and Guides Council now shares a finance manager with the Southeast chapter's pilot, hundreds of miles from its Charlotte hub.
Hollis Greenleaf runs the Rocky Mountain Outfitters and Guides Council out of a two-person office in Cheyenne, Wyoming, representing 420 licensed hunting and fishing outfitters across the state. In 2025, his organization joined NANA's Southeast chapter shared-services pilot remotely, sharing a finance manager based more than 1,200 miles away in Charlotte.
Why a two-person shop needed help
Greenleaf had handled the council's books himself for years, on top of running licensing renewals, member communications, and an annual conference. "I was doing invoices at ten at night because that was the only time nobody needed anything from me," he said.
The Southeast chapter's shared-services arrangement, hosted at the Southeastern Textile Manufacturers Council in Charlotte, was built for exactly this kind of staffing gap. Five small associations originally split a finance manager, an events coordinator, and a single AMS license when Southeast chapter chair Dana Whitfield launched the pilot in 2023. By 2025 it had grown to eleven organizations, and Greenleaf's council became the first to join from outside the Southeast chapter's own footprint.
What a shared finance manager actually does
The arrangement gives Greenleaf's council access to a finance manager who processes invoices, reconciles the council's books monthly, and handles license-fee collections during renewal season — work Greenleaf had squeezed into evenings and weekends.
"I don't need a full-time controller. I need eight hours a week of somebody who knows what they're doing," Greenleaf said. "The Southeast pilot gave me that without hiring anybody."
The council pays a fraction of a full-time salary for the shared position, split proportionally among the pilot's participating organizations based on each one's transaction volume.
Joining remotely
Whitfield said the council's participation tested whether the model could work outside the Southeast chapter's own geography. "We built this for small associations sharing a building or at least a time zone," she said. "Hollis is three states and a mountain range away, and it still works, because the finance work itself doesn't care where you're sitting."
The pilot's success with a remote participant is one reason NANA plans a national rollout: the Southeast Shared-Services Forum, scheduled for August 2027 in Charlotte, will introduce the model to associations outside the pilot's current membership.
What other small associations should know
Executive directors running lean staffs, like Greenleaf's two-person office, can:
Contact their chapter chair to ask whether a shared-services arrangement exists or is planned in their region
Expect to pay based on transaction volume rather than a flat fee
Plan to keep their own licensing, membership, and event work in-house — the pilot covers finance and, for some participants, event coordination, not every back-office function
Greenleaf said the council will decide next year whether to add the pilot's shared events coordinator role as well, once it sees a full budget cycle under the finance arrangement. In the meantime, he's kept the council's annual conference planning in-house, but said the extra evening hours have gone toward outreach to outfitters who let their membership lapse rather than toward chasing down invoices. He plans to present the full first-year numbers to his own board before deciding on the events role.