Services

GPS believes that too often the process of finding the next leader for your organization is a cookie-cutter process that focuses on developing a community profile and quickly finding a candidate and collecting a hefty fee. As former public executives, we understand how important it is to understand your community. As part of our process, one of our principals will spend a significant amount of time getting to know your city or town and the members of your governing body, both individually and as a collective. Only then do we begin to develop your recruitment profile. Our founders understand the job, the public sector, and the needs of your governing body and the community.  We have been the hiring authority and the candidate.  Because of this experience, we know how the process should work successfully for all parties. We do not operate like most national search firms because we know the pitfalls of that standardized process. With GPS, you get a fully customized search led, beginning to end, by one of our founders to ensure that the match between community and candidate will be a lasting one.

This is one of the cornerstones of GPS’ founding. Managers do not often have the time or opportunity to spend the necessary time developing their leadership team. GPS provides a full range of development services for your department heads or other leadership groups. From coaching to unique team cohesiveness activities, we spend the time building your team from within. We also provide facilitation services for your elected officials to help develop them into an effective governing body. We even have a specialized curriculum designed to work with groups that currently struggle to work well together. So, whatever your leadership challenge, we have a customized program designed to help your teams perform at their peak.

The annual budget is perhaps the most important tool to achieve your community’s goals. We offer budget preparation services for cash basis, modified accrual or full accrual states. We are familiar with budget specific statutes and requirements for your state and have experience developing your budget to submit to your state budget authority. We can also help your community craft a capital improvement plan that is seamlessly included within your budget to ensure that your community’s budget plans for all necessary growth and contingencies. As former managers, we know that the fiscal responsibility to safeguard your community is a useful and well-designed budget document. We also know how to present a budget document that contains helpful graphics and comprehensive information to communicate with your public.

Our founders have strong backgrounds in utility management having managed electric, water and wastewater systems throughout the Midwest and Texas including having served on the Executive Board of the Kansas Municipal Energy Agency. Whether your utility needs to implement reserve policies, capital improvement plans or a rate study to ensure you are charging your citizens and customers a fair and responsible rate for their service, our experts have been there and done that and can help shepherd those projects to completion through an open and transparent process.

Managers and governing bodies can never have enough expertise and advice at their fingertips on human resources matters. This arena has only become more complex and riskier for local governments. Our expertise including the experience of a former employment law attorney can help you navigate these dangerous waters with confidence. We can provide salary studies or devise comprehensive compensation and classification structures as well as assist you in offering competitive benefit packages to ensure you keep the valuable employees you need to offer the best public service possible to your community. We know that many managers do not have a deep bench with respect to internal HR issues and we can provide third party investigation services to ensure you are as protected as you can be when dealing with sensitive issues. When
you don’t know which direction to turn, turn to GPS, we can guide you to your destination.

GPS provides project management for your community’s Comprehensive Planning or Strategic Planning process. This includes a complete scope of community planning with in-depth comprehensive and strategic planning facilitation and production, including inclusive community engagement, multiple stakeholder interviews, and unlimited customization.