Greg Vanselow builds the operational backbone that lets mission-driven organizations scale without breaking. Over a three-decade career, he built systems from the ground up to provide the infrastructure for mission delivery with multiple Twin Cities organizations. This included a 29-year tenure at Special Olympics Minnesota (“SOMN”) — where he was promoted through five roles, from Administrative Assistant in 1996 to Chief Operating Officer — he became the integrating force behind a $12M statewide nonprofit serving 25,000 Minnesotans with 5,000 volunteers, holding executive accountability for programs, volunteer management, business intelligence, facilities, and technology, managing 30-plus staff and a $4M-plus operational budget.
His record is a study in durable systems. Partnering directly SOMN’s Board, he authored a three-year strategic plan that carried the organization’s mission reach to 28% above pre-pandemic levels. He redesigned the chart of accounts from more than 3,000 lines to roughly 500 and rebuilt Board financial statements from ten pages to four — changes that sharpened governance decision-making for years afterward — and created the organization’s first “statement of mission activity,” giving leadership a shared, quantified view of impact. When COVID hit, the cash-flow forecasting model he built with finance staff let the Board navigate extreme uncertainty and emerge with stronger reserves. And after a 2019 cyber incident, he led a multi-year enterprise security program whose initial response U.S. Bank’s global head of cybersecurity independently described as “everything he would have done.”
Greg’s leadership is people-centered by design. He built SOMN’s HR function from the ground up — position leveling, compensation architecture, and manager development that sustained engagement scores above 65% — and established a centralized volunteer operation that achieved record-setting fulfillment across a statewide footprint. He chaired the organization’s DEI Committee and is proudest of the work that moved staff and Board members with intellectual disabilities from token roles into embedded contributors, with real employment and an authentic voice in organizational decisions.
The thread that runs beneath all of it is craft. Greg founded a theatre company at fourteen and has sustained a 25-plus-year parallel practice as a professional scenic designer and technical director in the Twin Cities theatre community. Theatre, he says, is where he learned what operations really means: take a vision, a budget, a deadline, and a crew of different trades — and deliver opening night, every time.
Today Greg works in two lanes. Through G Works Consultancy LLC, his consulting practice, he provides governance support, operational stabilization, and fractional COO leadership to organizations in growth or transition — the moments when strategy is set but the work stalls. In parallel, he is pursuing his next operations seat: a COO or VP of Operations role at a mission-driven organization where the operational partnership is real and the infrastructure needs to grow up alongside the mission. Greg holds a BA cum laude in Theatre Arts from Hamline University, earned while working full-time, and and has continued to hone his craft through HR, leadership, and technology training. He serves as Treasurer and Board Member of Anoka Pride Day and lives in Minneapolis.
