Last week, the We Are Open team met for our monthly Co-op work day. I have to say, I really look forward to spending time with my fellow Co-op members. Especially as it’s winter, I’m working in my shed 5 days a week cooking up visual delights and the Co-op’s collaborative community makes me feel like it’s all worthwhile.

As ever, we talked and thought about a whole bunch of stuff, but a task high up our agenda was to create a financial model for the Co-op. Now I know that the words financial model can be a trigger-phrase for sleepiness amongst the most attentive of audiences, but bear with me…

3 questions any business owner must ask

I’ve run a number of businesses in the past, both commercial and non-profit. The first question that sits on my head is: WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE? The second question follows on: ARE WE MOVING FORWARDS OR BACKWARDS? Lastly, I want to know: HOW DOES THE FUTURE LOOK?

In every business I’ve run, I’ve always had a State of the Union spreadsheet. A fag-packet calculation that answers the first question. As a commercial operation, this usually centres around profit and growth, but can also take into account other indicators.

And so, we sat down to craft a State of the (COOP) union spreadsheet.

At first glance, this activity looks feels like we’re building a model. However, a better descriptor would be to call it a lens.

The aim is simple: what do we need to be able to see in order to help us make good decisions? Well, let’s start with the “Pot” (essentially the CO-OP’s reserve) and what’s in it. The COOP acts like a hub. It employs no-one directly, and generally only pays out on revenue brought in. So essentially, the game is not really about profit, but more about the central Pot and making good decisions regarding its contents.

The things that tend to muddy the lens are the usual suspects: money owed, VAT, but also (what I’m calling) CO-OP community projects. Giving things a name is helpful as it removes ambiguity from conversations. Co-op Community Projects means those projects that we have decided to embark on, but which may not directly bring in revenue. Member’s time is being spent, however, and therefore must be accounted for.

The other thing we named was the The End Game — that process at the end of the year, when we dish out members dividends and give some of the pot away. We’ve done a bit of thinking about this, and collected our thoughts in various etherpads, but creating a “what would the end game look like as things stand today?” set of calculations.

I should say, the idea is also to keep the lens as simple to use as possible. We’ll only update it at the end of every month, after all the bills are paid, and expense claims have been paid.

Now that we can clearly see what’s in the Pot, we’re in a good place to decide on a bunch of other things. Here’s how it all ended up: (the numbers have been changed to protect the innocent…)

Badge Boot Camp

One of the activities you might have heard that we’ve been working on is a Badge Bootcamp — a workshop designed for those who want to get up and running with digital credentials.

However, we’ve realised that by offering this in a physical location that suits us, it will likely only work for a fraction of our community. So, if you’d like to talk to us about how we can bring this workshop to where you are, then please get in contact.

For those with interwebbed feet, we’ll be delivering a version of the badge bootcamp just for you, by the medium of email.

If you’d like to help us Beta-test the bootcamp, or you’re interested in sponsoring it (or both!) then please get in touch.

Till next time, comrades…

Bryan and the We Are Open team