Overview – Charity Strategy Together (CST)
CST is a small organisation interested in helping UK-registered charities develop and own their charity strategy. We help charity teams build strategies they believe in and can deliver – strategy developed with charities, not for them.
CST brings structure, constructive challenge, expertise and facilitation. You provide knowledge, experience, ambition and judgement. Together we create a strategy that your charity understands, values and owns.
What else?
Charity Commercial Trading Operations
Charities are typically passionate about their core mission. The main board and other stakeholders want bigger & faster impact to achieve that mission. But income streams may be flat-lining. Or erratic in their fundraising success.
Often they turn to commercial trading sources to subsidise core charity activities and typically set up one or more commercial trading companies to ring-fence commercial activities – sometimes as distinct divisions within the commercial subsidiary entity. For example, commercial tenancies, charity retail shops, a lottery, online merchandise sales and/or non charitable events. It follows that forming a commercial board for the subsidiary, with board expertise supporting those divisions (market insights, risks, risk mitigations), will go along way to achieving commercial success.
As with the charity strategy (to achieve the core mission), there needs to be a commercial strategy. Michael Porter says start by understanding the industry you plan to operate in (one commercial division within the commercial subsidiary entity) including average net margins earned. Then, understand your own position within that industry – what competitive advantage can you exploit to match or exceed the average margins for that industry? If the industry is already highly competitive, average net margins are very low (commodity status) and you lack any competitive advantage to earn net margins (well) above the industry average, think twice about investing scarce charity funds to develop the commercial returns.
Commercial competitive advantage may come from ownership of intellectual property. Or leveraging another parties IP, naturally with their consent. Some recent case studies of commercial trading involvement by CST include;
- analysing charity IP opportunities to monetise,
- supporting the sale of publishing assets of a charity to a global publishing house,
- arranging commercial royalties streams for a charity,
- negotiating commercial contracts for registered charities,
- financial reporting to the commercial board of the main charity board,
- creating commercial business cases and doing deep-dive investigations into potential commercial partners.
Finally, if you need support in creating a stronger strategic plan, one that links mission, goals and resources available, quantified in financial terms, with scenario modelling, CST can work with your finance team, building multi-year financial plans that link I&E to Balance sheet and cashflow forecasts.
About
Simon has had a twenty year career working with; CEOs, SLT’s, boards and their committees in the UK charity sector. He’s worked for organisations ranging in size from research-led HEIs and large fundraising charities (>£100M annual income) to small professional bodies, with around 30 staff. The organisations include charities operating across the advocacy, empowerment, support and aid space, whether operating just in the UK, or globally. Sectors include UK health regulation, education, youth development, health and professional membership bodies.
As well as being a chartered accountant, Simon is an Associate CIPD member and holds an MBA from Henley Business School. He has extensive experience working with boards and overseeing teams, whether function or project-based. Simon has experience helping charities:
- understand the internal value chain, e.g. in a professional membership body context, research contract to course development to membership services,
- evaluate strategic options,
- quantify different scenarios financially,
- diversify income sources,
- formulate finance strategies e.g. the funding sequence to fund a major change management programme running across 6 years,
- build or leverage their intellectual property,
- identify natural allies,
- strengthen strategic alliances,
- assess their business resilience, using various home-grown and publicly-available frameworks.
Finally, in a charity trustee capacity, Simon has chaired a Finance and Resources Committee for four years for a London-based, single academy trust school, fostering discussion and consensus building.
Contact Details
sleicest@hotmail.com or Ph 07375 379979