We sold out of clay last night. New clay has been purchased and will be delivered to the studio early this evening.
Awesome, way to stay on top of things. good work.
I delivered the clay at lunch. Lots of clay on hand, 1, 2 , 3 MAKE! 
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just curious for numbers sake… how much clay do you think we go through a year?
Last year was 1800 lbs
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I don’t have the exact numbers. But I seem to recall that so far this year we have gone through about 150# (25# increments) a month.
We are on David’s list to review our budget so we can get a better idea where we’re at on clay and glaze for the rest of the year. However his recent leg-breaking incident is gonna delay that (get well soon!). I’d agree with Scott. When does the new budget get decided on and approved by the board? We’d like to suggest some changes…
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Budget is usually started in December -January.
The new budget process should really be started in early November so that it’s completely done before the new year starts January 1.
Also, there’s nothing wrong with making some minor adjustments (if justified) along the way. It’s just that these adjustments should be kept to a minimum if at all possible.
The better you are at budgeting, the fewer changes you will need to make. The board should carefully review progress against the budget on a quarterly basis, so that issues and discrepancies can be identified as soon as possible. If 25% of the way through the year, a given area has already spent %50 of its budget, that should be a big red flag that gets closer scrutiny and adjustments made if necessary. You shouldn’t wait until your budgeted funds are all spent before making adjustments, either to staffing or the budget.
Some general comments regarding the board and budgeting:
The board should be spending most of its time establishing long term goals and overseeing the budget. And they should be spending of fair amount of their time regularly reviewing progress against those goals and the budget. That is a major part of what most corporate boards do (and we are a corporation BTW). In my experience, it is much more effective to spend time on those things than it is to spend time creating operational rules and policies that usually aren’t enforced or even communicated well.
Also, the operational staff (area leads & director) should ideally be the ones who come up with the budget in concert with the treasurer. The board should then review and eventually approve the budget, which they then closely track. In my experience it’s very rare for a corporate board to initiate policy or budgets. The board mostly just reviews/approves proposals brought to them either from committees or the operational staff. They also should be making sure progress is being made against long term goals. Just the fact that our board has to meet monthly and not quarterly, indicates to me it’s too far in the weeds. The board needs to delegate more and empower the operational staff, who are ultimately responsible for the day to day running of the maker space.
And in general, operational staff usually aren’t more than a minor part of a corporate board. But if our board is determined to spend most of its time in the weeds dealing with operational issues, it would be better if it consisted mostly of operational staff (area leads & director). You certainly don’t want a situation where the operational staff feel like they can’t do much of anything without board approval. We will also likely need to beef up our operational staff structure so that they can be more independent of the board.
Much of these changes will be necessary to accomplish our next stage of our growth. In my opinion, the current organizational structure is inadequate to manage what is on the horizon: a major fund raising effort, managing a much bigger facility, and a likely doubling of our membership. These types of issues should be the major focus of the board for the next couple years.
Curt
Good news. This year David and the leads did come up with the budget on their own. And we pretty much approved them. David is working on getting the stuff in quickbooks so it is easier for us to review. (I didn’t even know that the board had meddled in that in the past
It’s my hope that we can get a clearer picture of what we have and what we’ve spent so far, and what has come in from members. I don’t know how carefully this was accounted for in the past, particularly when we just had an open cash box.
I have made some assumptions about that, and expected there was a report somewhere that would answer those questions for me… From the feedback I’ve had from David, it seems he’s been working hard to make a shift in the accounting process to make it easier to account for things so he can answer those questions. Perhaps it is the responsibility of each area lead to manage and account for it on their own?
I think adding the standardized cash boxes across the space was a great idea and will be very helpful with all of this. I know in the past cash purchases were being made for clay, and I don’t know if there was any accounting of those transactions so they can be reported as part of our income and expenses, and so we can use that data to help predict future expenses.
We have made one big glaze purchase run, and since I knew what we started with I can account for that portion of our budget (have a spreadsheet out on the drive), but I’m uncertain about where we are on clay since I don’t know where we started or what we’ve spent, or what’s come in from members.
There has been a very significant increase in use of the ceramics studio over the past 8 months or so, which is fantastic. However, that means our consumables costs are higher than expected. My hope is to be able to prepare a budget going forward that accounts for this increased usage, as well as our expansion of the types of glaze we want to offer in the studio, and some other consumables we need to budget for (like thermocouples, elements, cones, kiln furniture, kiln wash, wax resist, bats, hand tools, sponges, and all the other various and sundry things that require routine maintenance or replacement).
Most of the clay and glaze cost should be flowing back in as income from members since we’ve been working hard both in our communications and visually in the studio itself to make sure members all understand what is and isn’t free in the studio.
From what I know, most of the Area Leads have been darn frugal in their use of funds.
But as membership and activity increases, Area expenses will continue to grow as a percentage of the budget, since many other expenses are fixed.
But it’s always interesting to look at income and expenses from year to year to see what the trends are and to try to understand the reasons for any changes.
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You’re awesome!