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
Do you really want to run a business?
Burying anti-business prejudices: It is possible (though much
less likely than it was just a few years ago) that some members
of your organisation or the community will be hostile towards or
sceptical about a voluntary organisation which is planning to run
a business. (You may encounter similar negativity and dubious
advice, for completely opposite reasons, from members of the
business community.) Bias and ignorance within the third sector
– from those people for instance who argue that you should make
‘business’ subservient to ‘community’ – is one reason why the
performance of third sector trading has been rather disappointing
for the last 30 years. It’s time to sideline the sceptics and have
confidence in what you are doing:
• Don’t be ashamed of making money if your aim is to make your
organisation or your community better off.
• ‘Profit’ should not be a dirty word for community trading
organisations – if you only aim to break even you risk the business
failing completely the first time you hit a rough patch.
• Business is only unethical when it’s run by unethical people.
• Business activity in not necessarily incompatible with the needs
of disadvantaged people and communities – an open-all-hours
corner shop can easily make a greater contribution to the
social and economic wellbeing of an area than a poorly used
community centre.
• Community based trading activity is not incompatible with
‘community development’ as some purists used to argue; in
fact it can educate, raise confidence, foster skills and create
opportunities for people just as effectively as conventional
development work, and very often do so faster.
• The complaint that businesses tend to exploit their workers is
not easy to refute, especially when you are operating with your
backs to the wall; but social enterprises
− may offer greater worker democracy, fairer treatment, and a
commitment to improving conditions and pay if and when
financial circumstances allow, and
− may, if all else fails, give workers reason to feel less oppressed,
and sometimes even happy, when they are exploited.
Hard work and small rewards: People starting out in social
enterprise sometimes delude themselves that the experience will
automatically be better than work in conventional business, or
that their life will be much as it was while they were working for a
public body or a charity.
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