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
Managing the organisation: Don’t start with a fixed idea of
staffing and board roles. Understanding your trading activities
in detail will help to show what staff skills you will need and the
employment costs and management involved. This may also reveal
what qualities and abilities you need the directors to have and the
type of roles they should play.
Managing the future: The plan will be a blueprint for the
organisation you want to achieve, and will show you whether your
objectives are realistic, and what you need to do to achieve them.
It will also provide targets and timetables against which you can
monitor your progress.
Self awareness: If you are honest, preparing the plan will help
you to confront your weaknesses as a group and the underlying
defects of your project, even though you may not always mention
these in the document you produce. This could be the last chance
you get to do anything about them before they start showing up
in your work as practical problems.
Planning to be mediocre
The Emperor’s new clothes: Community trading in the UK has
been for decades locked into a cynical planning dilemma, where
groups can often receive generous grants on the basis of feeble
or fictitious business plans which only say what they think their
funders want to hear. But this can have disastrous consequences
for the credibility of community-based trading. The collapse of
the community business movement in Scotland in the 1990s is a
classic example of what happens when the Emperor’s new clothes
are revealed to funders for what they are.
Never mind the plan, let’s see the money – six types of cynicism:
There are good reasons for starting this guidance with a description
of how to do planning badly. Poor business planning is not going to
enrich disadvantaged people or poor communities. And it actually
helps to foster the very grant dependency which people are trying
to escape from. We need to look first at the obstacles to good
business planning created by the grant funding system itself.
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