A few nice business plan example images I found:
Southwark News Community Purchase
Image by The Sun and Doves
Dear Pub is the Hub
My pub, The Sun and Doves, is in south east London in the middle of some of the most socially and economically deprived wards in the UK. I have owned a tied lease on the pub since 1995.
We have always worked hard to make sure the pub has active community presence and involvement in many community activities since day one. It has been described as a 'gastro pub' and an 'alternative art space', 'a pioneering business' and 'fiercely independent'. We describe ourselves as 'the Contemporary Local'.
My long practical experience of the beer tie and understanding the pernicious abuse of it by pub companies led me to being one of the founders of the Fair Pint Campaign.
This is a busy pub but neither I nor my business partenr who runs it with me have ever made more than a modest living, we have no assets other than the lease, no pensions and so on. We are a great example of everything that is wrong with the tied pub regime in the UK. Being in business here is rewarding spiritually, morally and in terms of deep experience but financially it is a disaster. Unable to borrow money to improve the premises, perennially keeping trading just through working out of cash flow and creative ducking and diving is no way to run a business. If we were able to buy our stock outside the tie it would have been a very different experience - we would have made a profit every year, would have invested more in the business than we have been able to, which would mean that now the business would have be even busier and we would be making a decent living.
I have been pushing RBS and Scottish & Newcastle Pub Company to sell the freehold. S&NPC are very reluctant to even discuss this.
I have been asking the local community to consider buying their local:
www.flickr.com/photos/thesunanddoves/4407935737/
www.flickr.com/photos/thesunanddoves/4437179086/
The idea seems to have pricked a nerve in the local community as well as with the head office of S&NPC who don't like the idea one bit.
I am still working on a business plan and on how to make such structure work and would be very interested to see if there is some work we could do with Pub is the Hub on this?
I look foward to hearing from you.
With best wishes
Mark
J Mark Dodds
Runcorn Busway - a segregated system of roads in Runcorn New Town
Image by mwmbwls
Runcorn East station provides access to the North W
ales - Chester - Manchester rail service which offers
an hourly service (operated by Arriva Trains Wales). The station is approximately two miles to the west of
Daresbury as the crow flies, although the journey by road is nearer to four miles. At Chester andWarrington, there is interchange available to many other destinations in the North-West, although interchange with trains to Liverpool requires a change of stations from Bank Quay to Warrington Central. Trains to Chester link into the Merseyrail network at Chester itself and via the Helsby-Ellesmere Port -Hooton line.Access to this station is constrained by the station being located on the western side of the rail line,meaning the limited crossing points result in restricted access options. Access via bus between Runcorn East and the study area is limited to the Access 200 shuttle which operates a circular service between Runcorn East and Daresbury Business Park. Peak frequency is half-hourly and hourly off-peak, but a majorconstraint to this service is the fact it only operates in a single direction. Access via non-vehicular modes is possible, but the walking route is not designed for those travelling to and from the employment areas.
The Runcorn Busway was purpose built as part of the development of Runcorn new town. The Busway, Runcorn's rapid transit system, was opened in 1971; all but a small section being completed by 1978. This is reserved for single decker buses and aims to provide a fast public transport network throughout Runcorn.The new town stands up the hill on the south bank of the Mersey overlooking Runcorn old town, with its distinctive road and rail bridges across to Widnes on the north bank. The busway was built to a figure of eight design, enabling all residents to be within walking distance of the bus. This concept has broken down over the years as Runcorn has expanded beyond its original design and car ownership has become more common.
In the centre at Halton Lea, the bus way straddles the first phase of the shopping centre with separate high-level north and southbound platforms. Buses from off the system can enter the busway and access the shopping centre. Services operate to Chester, Warrington and Liverpool from Halton Lea. A striking feature is the elevated section through Halton Lea where in a manner later replicated by the Docklands Light Railway in London the busway runs along a dedicated viaduct. Unlike later examples in Cambridge and Leigh, the system is unguided – the drivers still steer their buses. The busway is single lane but each stop has a passing lane to allow following buses to pass.
Companies are like cities. They grow.
Image by dgray_xplane
What happens if we rethink the modern company, if we stop thinking of it as a machine and start thinking of it as a complex, growing system? What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?
Cities are large, complex, systems, but we don’t really try to control them. In Stephen B. Johnson‘s book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Softwarehe quotes complexity pioneer John Holland:
Cities have no central planning commissions that solve the problem of purchasing and distributing supplies… How do these cities avoid devastating swings between shortage and glut, year after year, decade after decade?
No, we don’t try to control cities, but we can manage them well. And if we start to look at companies as complex systems instead of machines, we can start to design and manage them for productivity instead of continuously hovering on the edge of collapse.
Cities aren’t just complex and difficult to control. They are also more productive than their corporate counterparts. In fact, the rules governing city productivity stand in stark contrast to the ominous “3/2 rule” that applies to companies. As companies add people, productivity shrinks. But as cities add people, productivity actually grows.
The Connected Company.
