Co-op Support
We can offer support with the following:
Legal Structures and Incorporation:
We can help you navigate your way through the range of different legal structures available to you, and will be able to inform you of how that decision affects the type of capital available to you, whether you pay tax and what on, your ability to distribute profits or lock your assets, as well as who the owners will be and how you can govern your new co-op.
We will also be able to help you through the process of incorporation and depending on the structure chosen may be able to register you.
Business Development and Financial Planning
We have supported over 200 successful businesses to grow from an idea to trading. We can help you write your business plan and raise the best capital for you. We will use our experience gained through managing a successful loan fund and supporting businesses just like yours to enable you to make strategic decisions and asses the viability of either a new start, a new branch of your business or your plan for growth.
Financial Health Check
We can also support you in understanding how your business is performing. We can perforn a financial health check that will enable you to understand where you are on the business curve. We will highlight what that implies you should be monitoring and how you are performing against those benchmarkes. We will also look at how resilient your business is.
Community Share Offers
We can support you through the whole process of undergoing a community share offer. We will make sure you comply with your legal requirements, help you write your business plan, help write your share offer document and develop your publicity and marketing plans.
Strategic Planning
We can guide you through the process of designing your strategic plan. We will assist you with identifing the obstacles preventing you from reaching your goals and help you identify strategies to overcome them. If your organisation hasn't yet we can also facilitate you through writing your mission statement and creating goals.
Financial Systems Review
We can review your financial systems, identify weakness, propsoe solutions and train your members in implementing them. From a thorough review of what happens to each peice of paper that comes in, through looking at whether your bookkeeping fulfills your legal requirements, producing management accounts that enable strategic decision making, reviewing financial polices, to enabling you to extract finacial perfomance indicators and supporting your whole co-op in understand them.
Employers Responsibilities
Once you have set up your new co-op you will have a number of legal responsibilities and we can advise you on all the different responsibilities you will have as a new employer. We have experience in how to manage these in a co-operative fashion and in environments where people work by consensus. Some of the things we advise on are:
What the law says as to your employment/ self employed status;
How to manage grievance and disciplinary procedures;
Record keeping and tax;
And your health and safety responsibilities.
Please note that our services are covered by £1,000,000 of professional indemnity insurance.