Business and Capital Development for...
markgoehring@columinate.coop
520-777-0058
Urban Greens Food Co-op in Providence, Rhode Island, which opened in 2019, had low sales and was running out of cash. In 2022 the board of directors contracted with Luke Schell as Turnaround Manager to assess needs, lead in creating a turnaround plan, and implement the plan. During just three months of on-site leadership, his work had an excellent impact.
How will you make your next meeting the best meeting ever? Here is a useful tool for helping you run effective meetings and create common ground with groups. You’ll find tips for meeting process design, preparing for a meeting, creating meeting materials and the agenda, as well as insight into the stages of group development and meeting process. “In this [...]
This process is a variation of the one described in the “Boards Acting on Ends Reports” Field Guide. Not all limitations monitoring reports will warrant this extra attention, but sometimes this approach can elevate the board’s monitoring work from basic fiduciary oversight into a more meaningful strategic conversation. Along with determining whether the report demonstrates reasonable accomplishment, the board can use a structured process [...]
By Mark Goehring 132 September - October - 2007 Our cooperatives aim to provide value on behalf of member owners and often take a wide-ranging approach on how to express and demonstrate that organizational accomplishment. When it comes to managing and reporting financial performance and condition, traditional financial statements do quite nicely. Financial statements are not good places in which to exercise “local control” [...]
By Mark Goehring 123 March - April - 2006 There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is commonly known to directors and managers. It is a dimension open to interpretation—potentially as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between too much and too little, between knowing and doing, and it lies between the pit of a director’s [...]
By Thane Joyal, Mark Goehring 173 July - August 2014 Loss prevention is a key piece of the retail grocery business. Co-op managers are aware of this at their level and manage against it every day, but everyone in the cooperative needs to pay attention to the possibility. Board members: don’t be complacent. There are myriad ways to steal from a grocery store: at the [...]
Online Recorded Workshop This is a thorough introduction to developing a good working relationship as a board with the co-op’s new general manager. The objective of the workshop is to show how to integrate a new general manager into the leadership team, set clear expectations, evaluate the general manager at regular intervals throughout the year, and to maintain an honest and open dialogue. This [...]
When a board receives an Ends monitoring report from their manager, a thoughtful process can transform the report from just another document to file away into a valuable resource that helps the board, the manager and the co-op’s member-owners better understand the “story” of their co-op. The board wants to know: Does the report demonstrate reasonable accomplishment? Are we on track for multi-year goals/targets [...]
