A guide to third sector trading - WCVA

It’s an idea, but is it business? A guide to third sector trading
1: Getting
started
2: First steps 3: Business
planning
4: Legal and
governance
5: Funding
and
resourcing
6: Financial
controls
7: Managing
growth
8: Management
and
governance
9: Social
enterprise
10: Sources
of support
• pay and conditions (including the affordability of posts)
• the roles of the chief officer and possibly other senior managers
• the way the organisation now values paid jobs
• the relationship, in some businesses, between paid jobs and
volunteering.
Defining roles and jobs: Section 8.1 discussed the need to focus
on the value of paid staff as generators of business income. This
means that the content of jobs needs to be thought through
carefully. You will need to:
• define not just what you would like each worker to do, but what
they must achieve in terms of contributing essential income to
the enterprise
• recruit, provide training and supervision, and monitor the work
of employees to ensure that the business gets the value it needs
from their work.
This may seem obvious. But the profit margins are likely to be
tight, and workers are often oblivious to their own vulnerability.
Recruitment: Interviewing and recruitment for jobs will not
change significantly. But you may need to examine candidates for
some new qualities:
• their previous experience of working in a business environment
• their capacity to adapt to the curious in-between world of
business activity in the third sector – look for flexibility, avoid a
laid-back approach
• their capacity to work to deadlines
• the ability to be customer focussed and to deal with the
public, perhaps.
Appointing business managers: There are particular challenges
in recruiting staff to senior positions. In many enterprises there
is only one manager who must straddle the worlds of enterprise
and community development or social care. They will need to
set the tone of the operation, represent its community benefit
credentials to the outsiders, and at the same time understand
what is involved in running a small business. Very few candidates
will have had previous experience of doing both. This means there
may be a choice between:
• employing someone with a business background and making
sure they ‘learn’ the third sector
• employing someone with a charity or community background
who is instinctively entrepreneurial (people can learn business
practices, but the drive and opportunism of good income
generators tend to be more innate qualities)
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