[Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in business development

[Florence Devouard]

Anthony wrote:
> On 5/17/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> First, an announcement, then some thoughts
>>
>> We just hired Vishal Pattel as part-time business developer.
> 
> This is horrible.  The foundation is having enough trouble trying to
> run a charity, and now you're trying to run a business on top of that?
>  The chair of the board doesn't even have a good idea where the
> revenue is coming from, save an old yearly financial statement which
> admittedly didn't provide enough details?
> 
> This is getting pathetic.
> 
> Anthony

Actually, I have more idea that I would want to say, because I believe 
saying it publicly would not be good business :-)
But getting good figures is a priority. Which is why I discussed in 
length the issue with Carolyn about 2 months ago, and Carolyn and the 
accountant are currently working on categorizing revenue and expenses, 
which will allow us to have a much better feedback. She is also 
currently preparing all data to get ready for the audit.

We do business. That is not a wish, that is a statement. Now, we do not 
do it very well, and staff is already overworked, so can not give more 
time to it.
Two solutions. One is to proceed not doing it well since no time. We can 
decide not to answer the phone as well, and to put propositions received 
by mail in the trash. Make no DVDs. No datafeed.
The other is to better organize the area. Which is our choice.

Now, please take a step backward.

Do you remember that just ONE year ago, we had only 2 employees, one 
being Brion in California (so, tech area) and the other Danny (the "do 
it all", "save the day" man) ? We did not have any clean financial 
statements ? Officially, Jimbo was our CEO, so in charge of accounting, 
which he did not really have time to do.

In one year, we created an office. There are people working in, issuing 
data we can rely on. We have enough money to run with, without having to 
bother you every couple of weeks. The website is hardly down any more 
now, which was not the case 2 years ago, whilst the traffic was much 
smaller. We pay our bills. And we pay them in time (not the case a year 
ago). Our financial statements may not be perfectly detailed, but they 
are *clean*. We have people answering the phone. We have a framework to 
receive interns (not the case a year ago). We have a file server in the 
office and a secure network. We set up a fundraising database to track 
every donation. We set up an acceptable procedure (by audit standard) to 
receive checks and cash them. And so on.

And this is *getting* pathetic ?

Hardly.