Finances and Meeting Minutes

[John McKerrell]

I've generated the financials report for May ahead of this weekend's community meeting:

https://github.com/DoESLiverpool/somebody-should/wiki/Financials202605

Things are still not great. Last month we had an annual water rates bill for £570 which really didn't help. The report suggests we made a £900 profit which sounds lovely but then we also have £1500 unpaid invoices from then which obviously takes us the other way. It's still relatively early in June of course and there's at least one large invoice for £600 which I wouldn't particularly have expected to be paid yet but if you have an invoice that you've been meaning to pay, please do! Also if you're getting reminder emails for something you thought you had already paid please get in touch, it might just need to be connected up properly. If you have an invoice you don't think you will be able to pay then please do get in touch with us to discuss.

At the end of last month we still had a rent and service charge bill outstanding, I think this was the first time we didn't manage to pay our monthly bills before the next lot arrived, this is particularly worrying as these will continue to mount if we don't get them paid. We have now paid the rent and have the money to cover the service charge but of course June's bills have now turned up.

As mentioned it's the community meeting on Sunday so we look forward to seeing you there, I've also updated the page of Directors meeting minutes while I was in the wiki..

https://github.com/DoESLiverpool/somebody-should/wiki/Directors-Meeting-Minutes

John

[Mike Gorman]

With a lot of respect to John and the other directors, I don’t feel that this message is clear enough for how difficult it is for the DoES finances at the moment. I am not a director of DoES, just one of the organiser members, but quite active in DoES so perhaps I see things in a slightly different way than other members of DoES.

As a member of DoES, I try to attend as many of the community meetings as I can. When we actually talk about the DoES financial information in these community meetings, you get a much better view of the current situation and things are not good at the moment. Perhaps a better indicator of the financial situation is “The Cost of Doing Epic” that Adrian updated last weekend, as in this page on the DoES website - 

https://doesliverpool.com/cost-of-doing-epic/

This shows that effectively DoES is losing about £240 per month and has been doing for quite a few months now. This has now wiped out any reserves that DoES had and has led to things like not being able to pay bills at the moment. To reconcile this with the apparent profit in the accounts listing, the accounts show what was invoiced, but not necessarily if those invoices have been paid (this typically happens for Mailbox renewals, which then just become bad debt).

The directors are obviously looking at many ways to try and improve the financial situation, but options are very limited and may not be good for DoES long term, such as losing space to reduce the rent and rates, which consequently reduces the facilities available to the community.

So, as I understand it, we as the DoES community are very much in a use it or lose it situation. If we don’t get more revenue coming into DoES in the next few months, then there is a very good chance that DoES will have to close and we will have lost a very valuable resource in our community.

So what can we do about this. For one, if you have been thinking about getting a membership, now is the time to act on this and take that membership. It will only take 5-6 off-peak memberships or 1-2 desk memberships to get DoES back to a break even status (though there will still be some overdue bills still to be paid). If you are able to make a small donation, this will help with the overdue bills as well, every little bit helps. If you have been tempted to run a course or paid event at DoES, this could also contribute. I’ve actually acted on this myself - I took a desk membership 6 months ago, as I didn’t want to lose the valuable resource to me that is DoES Liverpool.

Next, if you have any idea’s that you think may help DoES, then either reply to this message, or contact someone at DoES to talk about your idea. Again, every little bit helps - this is your community and it thrives on your contributions.

Tell people about DoES as well. The more people that are aware of DoES, the more likely we are to get paying members and using paid resources in DoES. Our Free access Maker Nights and Maker Days are still running and are an ideal way to introduce people to our community.

So, apologies for such a heavy message, but we can’t let one of the best Maker spaces in the UK disappear because people “didn’t know” that they were in financial difficulties. DoES is funded by its members, so it’s the members who need to be aware of any funding issues.

Here’s hoping we can fix this and keep DoES as the resource and community that we all enjoy using and contributing to.

All the best

Mike Gorman

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[Omar]

Hi all,

Having read this, I also want to contribute a little more at making the space more sustainable. I really like the resources that DoES provides me and others and would hate to see it go. I personally have a membership with DoES but I reading Mike's suggestions, I would like to contribute even more. I would volunteer to run paid workshops. I believe I am capable enough when it comes to 3d printing so I would like to run workshops regarding that. This is not something I have ever done before though, although I am aware that some in the community have done it previously. I would like to know if there is some resource or guide as to how such things are conducted, what is expected from them, rules to follow etc. I do not expect much more help beyond that.

Best,

Omar

[Adrian McEwen]

Thanks for posting that Mike.

One minor note, in a things-are-a-bit-worse direction sadly, but although I'd printed off new Cost of Doing Epic posters last weekend, I hadn't updated the website version.  I've done that now, we're actually losing ~£300/month :-/

Everything else you said is spot on though.

There's also the income breakdown page that shows how much income we get from the different sources over time: https://doesliverpool.com/income-breakdowns/

It's good for us to be discussing this more as a community, and that's tricky for us to communicate as there isn't one place where everyone is.  This group, in theory, is that; but I think there are lots of folk who aren't subscribed.

So talking about it with other people in person would help, as would telling people outside of the community about the services DoES has, so they've got chance to join and give us some money :-D

As you say, we're (not just the directors) trying to work out ways to get through this; and that includes things like downsizing the space or reconfiguring it to better suit our changing membership, but some of that pulls in things like fire regs, etc.  Finding more people to take the existing memberships (we have plenty of empty desks available at the moment) would be the easiest, but we've also been trying to do that for the past year or more without much success, so maybe we do need to give up the existing events space and reconfigure the rest of the space to fit in a smaller events option.

To steal a line from the Cambridge Makespace folk: DoES Liverpool is what we make it.

Cheers,

Adrian.

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[Sarah Smith]

Hi,

This could be a very unpopular opinion but having read a load of the directors meeting notes, it doesn't look like there's been a price increase since 2024 and maybe there should be one.

Given that a large proportion of the bills that DoES has to pay will be impacted by inflation, it seems a bit weird to me that the membership doesn't track an index like everything else.  The total inflation based on CPIH from 2024-2026 seems to be around 4.89%.

Applying that 4.89% to today's income for DoES would go some way to stopping the bleeding, is something that is within DoES' gift and can be turned around quite quickly, where trying to get new income could be a bigger challenge (it's not sounding like it has been easy so far).  Tracking an index on an ongoing basis might also not be a terrible idea as it'll help stop this drag, plus feel like less of a big jump when things eventually need to catch up again.

In real terms, the uplift to members would look like this:

Membership	Current	Uplifted
Desk	£210.00	£220.27
Flexidesk	£96.00	£100.69
Workshop	£72.00	£75.52
Off-peak Workshop	£42.00	£44.05
Hotdesk Day	£15.00	£15.73
Hotdesk Half-day	£7.50	£7.87
Mailbox	£149.00	£156.29

Cheers,

Sarah

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[John McKerrell]

Hi all

I wanted to mention that June's financials are live as I got them prepared for the community meeting that we had this afternoon https://github.com/DoESLiverpool/somebody-should/wiki/Financials202606

You'll notice that things suddenly look a lot healthier, but don't get too excited yet. We have had a few donations, and one or two people upgrading their memberships which is wonderful (I won't name you as I haven't obtained permission to but it's very much appreciated!) These donations actually ensured that we could pay the monthly bills by the end of the month and paid rent for this month already.

But... most of this extra income is one-off donations so we still need to increase our monthly income to ensure we break even.

In fact we have had an offer of a £400/month donation for 12 months (the first month of which is already included in the financials), but it is with the requirement that we come up with some sort of a plan to change the fortunes of DoES. We can't do this without help from the community. We discussed this in the community meeting today and if I recall correctly Adrian is going to post about arranging another session to discuss options. We are already talking about paid advertising, whether that's on Instagram or even on the back of busses and hopefully there's more we can think of.

Back to Sarah's message that I'm replying to - this is absolutely a fair comment, especially as we did say when we previously raised the prices that we would review them periodically. To be honest I wondered whether it would "really make all that much difference" but if I look at the income from April (the last "normal" month) and multiply it by 1.0489 it does increase our income by about £300 which technically brings us to break even. On the other hand there is the feeling that "if we could just get one more desk and a flexi desk that would cover things".  I suppose having both (if it actually works out) would be even better! One thing putting me off it personally is that the last rise did seem to be difficult to stomach within the community, we did allow some people to continue on the old prices for a period. It would probably be worth doing some more work with the numbers similar to what you've done so far, perhaps taking a look at how long we continued the lower prices and factoring in assumptions around doing similar things this time. If anyone wants to be involved in this perhaps let me know and we can collaborate on a spreadsheet?

I'll leave it there for now, hopefully Michael will have the meeting minutes up soon and you can see what we all discussed :-) 

John

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[Alex J Lennon]

Hi all,

For me there are these basic key points that need to be addressed

- tidy professional space (yes I know I'm not one to advocate on this, but this is what I've heard from people who don't come to the space. It's messy). 

- coherent brand (people don't know what this space is about until they arrive at the door and even then they aren't sure)

- raising awareness (nobody knows we exist. they love it when they arrive, but they arrive by accident).

This is not a challenge to anybody or me seeking to raise an argument.These are the issues I feel we face, and if we need to fund the space (as we clearly do) with people paying for desks then these for me are the easy wins.

Cheers,

A/

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