Sunday's Annual Meeting and Location Rumors
Rory Bowman
annual meeting this Sunday, March 29, 2009. Long strong on promises
but weak on results or specifics, this meeting breathlessly promises
exciting news and updates, including possibilities for a location. The
two most prominent guesses among longtime observers of president
Sunrise O'Mahoney are either a subsidized county facility at 1919 NE
78th Street or an offer from the owner of the property formerly known
as August Moon. Although anything substantive at either of these
locations would be good to know (merely because it is substantive),
even a donated space is not necessarily good news or helpful to the
larger effort.
Having spent the last few years as a student of startup cooperatives,
I can confidently say that there are more ways to fail than there are
to succeed. Among the common causes of failure are (1) board dissent,
(2) failure to come up with a workable business plan, (3) failure to
convey that plan, (4) failure to sell shares, (5) early over-
commitment to a lease or other expenses, (6) exhausting member equity
on unrecoverable development costs and (7) inability to secure
adequate financing. Announcing a location without a solid plan that
can be conveyed to assure adequate financing is how organizations such
as the Medford Market failed, how New Orleans was endangered and may
or may not be an ongoing problem for The Daily Market in Walla Walla.
Magically attaching an address to a project is not necessarily a step
forward, as Richelle Purty of the River Valley Market can attest. It
takes more than an address for a startup business to succeed.
Cooperative Development Services has provided oodles of free training
to Vancouver cooperators, most of it based on their "four cornerstones
in three stages model" at http://www.cdsfood.coop/fourcorner. In
combination with the Karen Zimbelman's "How to Start a Food
Cooperative," published by the Cooperative Grocers Information
Network, (http://www.cgin.coop/how_to_start) there are clear elements
and stages which must be in place for any business to succeed. The
four cornerstones are vision, talent, capital and systems. Vancouver
Food Cooperative currently has major deficits in all three, as are
exemplified by its web page and current ownership drive.
After a strong start in 2007, a faction within the board unilaterally
decided to remove any mention of west Vancouver from VFC materials,
and to radically change the web site to make it less informative. This
marked a significant deterioration in vision and systems, which led
almost immediately to a drop in owner recruitment and a correlated
drop in capital. As vision and systems continued to deteriorate,
dissent within the board also led to a significant loss of talent. Key
volunteers at the beginning of 2008 were mostly gone at the end, as
were six of nine elected board members (including a marketing expert,
a CPA and two MBA's). Choosing an address for a possible location at
this point does nothing to solve issues of solvency, transparency,
accountability and confidence.
Vancouver Food Cooperative has lost its vision, alienated key people,
squandered money and provied itself unreliable. It will take more than
an architect's drawing of a shiny store facade to build a real business.
It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright, and gilded turds are
still mostly creamy center.