Time Til Starve

Back in the early days of We Are Open Co-op (WAO) three of the four founding members, including me, were "wet behind the ears" when it came to running a business. Thankfully, we had Bryan Mathers who had already built and sold a couple of companies by that point, as well as running a non-profit, and his own consultancy business.

The spreadsheet that ended as 'The State of the Co-op Union' started life as a very simple "Time Til Starve" (TTS) spreadsheet and a divvy-up for ensuring client money went to the right places. The TTS itself isn't much more sophisticated than simple ledger:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield)

Since the co-op went full-time in 2000 after I left Moodle, I haven't really needed to run Dynamic Skillset as a 'proper' business, as WAO was 99% of my client base. So now, a month after we dissolved WAO, I'm getting my house in order. So now I know that, without getting any more work in, I've got X amount of months before I'd have to shut up shop.

The TTS for Dynamic Skillset will evolve, but for now it's just a record of how much I've got in various accounts (actually virtual spaces within a Starling Business Account) and then what my regular monthly outgoings are.

Of course, I have irregular monthly outgoings, but they can all be curtailed. Spending money on those is more of a choice than the fixed outgoings.

It's funny, I created and fully intended to use Groundwork but although it seems like it works pretty well for other people, it's not really how I currently think about things or organise my work... 🤔