I see Andrew Cooley (who it says is "Walking the Plank", whatever that is supposed to mean) has posted in the Other Place: "After considering what I would expect from a new management company and listening to what owners of boats at Tattenhall have said to me, I've put together some thoughts here on what the new company should - and should not - be and do. I shall be interested to learn what ideas others have."

It's interesting that the promised proposal from Ownerships people hasn't emerged in the two weeks that was promised.

I agree with Andrew about not giving company shares according to past debts. Generally agree with Andrew's overall intentions. A few thoughts here:

"5. It must be exclusively for the core business of managing shared ownership narrowboats, selling and re-selling shares and commissioning some new boats".I agree about the "core business" of the old OwnerShips. And it follows directly that there is no good reason to be commissioning new boats. That doesn't seem to be in the interests of the existing owners, and is an entirely separate set of risks. If another organisation (boatyard, builder, etc) could create boats with sets of owners, then Andrew has already mentioned that groups of owners could join the scheme. "14. It should be possible for existing groups of shared ownership narrowboat owners to join the scheme, ...." That seems a good way to do it, without risking the core business on the success or otherwise of new boats.

Similarly, the job for a new company would be difficult enough without taking on the job of reselling share: that's also not part of the core business, and we already have boatshare which offers an advertising service: others could straightforwardly set up competing services, particularly boatyards where the shared boats are moored.

3. The company should develop and operate its own help line to deal with all emergencies And on the same theme of not doing things outside the core business, we already have RCR, and if that had existed when OwnerShips was created, then surely Allen would have used them instead of inventing his own. I agree that a helpline to offer advice on non-emergencies (which remote control to use) might be helpful.

8. Local management to facilitate turnrounds, servicing and maintenance should be provided where possible. It's surely the essence of the service from the proposed company to do just this. That's what paying an annual charge would be for. Why would a shared boat be paying-in every year when the owners would be doing the work themselves?

6. An internal insurance scheme to guarantee owners' holidays should be included, and the arithmetic of this must be clear and transparent. Not convinced this is part of the core business, any more than boatbuilding is. The difficulty is that while the scheme offers a "guaranteed holiday", it doesn't actually have the means to deliver the promise. All the spare shares and not-finished boats in the old scheme were a feature of the mismanagement of the finances. Provided that Owners are happy to allow other people on their boats (there is little control of who uses them: remember the story of an Owner subcontracting their week to their friends who then are transferred to another boat) it is easy enough to find another boat at zero notice in March, but less easy in August. The alternative is a commercial insurance scheme.

8. Client accounts must be protected against any transfer to or from the company's trading account and must be available for inspection at any time. Quite so. And clearly each boat needs to have its own bank account. Remember AnthonyTrueman saying that pooling them would "allow the funds to be invested overnight on the money markets". I think he was missing the point there. Owners need the security of a properly managed account, without it being mixed up with others.

13. It should be possible for a group of owners to take their boat out of the scheme by giving reasonable notice. Needs to be an annual renewable contract, like insurance, like license, like mooring.

Hello Peter,

What I would say is that any attempt to start up ANY business must be have at its core "Making a profit".Many co operatives have failed eg triumph motorcycles as it lacked the will and means to make a profit.The new owner of Triumph has made a fantastic success of it but it's built on making a return on investment. OwnerShips "non profit making" boat club failed and any new scheme will also suffer the same fate. Of course any profit can be shared by its members but it is the number one objective of any company.All else is folly

The new company should make a profit to reinvest in its self at least.History shows co-peratives do not survive unless they make profits. The Kibbitz movement failed a truly fine example of a Co-perative, the failed USSR the list can go on.

Even the front runner the good old CO-OP makes a profit which is shared amongst its shareholders (remember your dividend number).

CO-OPs are to close to the border line of making a loss to continue long term, theres nothing wrong in making money just do it fairly.

Peter - I am not going to get very involved in the politics of this but...

If the new firm did not build ANY boats and grow it would die as older boats would, inevitably, leave the scheme and be sold at some point.....

Potential customers were drawn every Friday to Stockton Top etc. with a view to looking over boats and buying shares - therefore selling shares on behalf of its owners is almost an accidental by-product of turning boats around each week....so certainly is a service that could be offfered (AND I thank you for suggesting my site as a vehicle to do this).

Older boats would leave the scheme, and newer boats would need to be attracted to join. If the only way of attracting them was to BUILD them, then the focus of the company is on BOATBUILDING and the boat-management becomes an adjunct to the main business.

And there's the rub. The boat is a 'kickable entity': it actually exists for holidays for its owners. Similarly a marina/boatyard exists to provide services, employs people to do work, gives places to moor. And a boatbuilder (landlocked, in Poland, or wherever) does some real work on real things.

But a management company that (just!) organises all these other businesses and boats to do things for one another is hard-pressed to pay anyone it employs and the (otherwise unnecessary) overheads it creates - for example authorising filing paying invoices that could just as well go from provider to client directly; scheduling boats into WW drydock, when the drydock owner could do that directly with their clients.

Those who think a NEWOS might work (and I don't) might see my earlier analysis of old-OS functions here and do a business plan for each. Anthony Trueman's "I-promise-to-write-one" assumed lots-of-boats, assumed they would all be happy to pay £4,500 each year for management services (on top of the sinking fund of course), that they would commit to a 3-year notice of leaving, that they would pay up-front each year, that they would agree to pooling their sinking funds "so that the money could be invested on the money-markets overnight", and that those on the OS-trainwreck train would be involved in it all. Why would you?

John Lewis!

You can motivate people by making their salaries performance related without making huge profits.

There are of course many other reasons but Businesses can and do fail because the motivation wasn't there or the staff were over motivated to the point of taking reckless risks ( on ridiculously designed boats in our case)

There seems to be some confusion re making / not making a profit. I recently retired from a very large national non-profitmaking organisation - this incorporated into the Royal Charter!!! The organisation did however operate at a significant trading surpless which was all used for the benefit of the business / ALL i.e. none set aside as profit for distribution to investors!! Co-operatives do not fail because they are not for profit operations but because they have an inadequate business plan in the same way businesses paying profits to stakeholders fail if their business plan is not up to muster!!

Not many messages about Ownerships on here recently.

But another new board is here: (clicky)... to add to all these others:
- the one Allan Richards moved us to: (clicky)
- Malcolm's here: (clicky)
- The Old One here: (clicky) (which has just started with adverts on it presumbaly because AllanRichard's credit card has stopped giving it money)
- The Very Old One: (clicky) - just for the sake of nostalgia

And compliling these inspired a summary of some history:
Background: During 2003 AllenM raised capital of about half a million pounds from his Free Services Scheme (FSS) in order to build a high-tech, seagoing, wide, metal boat “Whisper” (with a patio-door at the back) which he hoped would generate orders for clones and, as he put it, a pension for himself. He told owners their FSS money was being used to build OS scheme narrowboats and published in OwnerSnips magazine that Whisper had nothing to do with OwnerShips and was financed by his bank manager. When it was clear that Whisper was a technical, financial and moral failure, AllenM rewrote the rules of FSS to allow its funds to be used for %%bbCodeItem_1%% boat project. But for each £2,500 capital raised by the FSS, OS surrendered £350 or so of %%bbCodeItem_2%% income, and by 2006 there was a cashflow crisis - even allowing for AllenM’s belief that he had patched-up the moral/legal crisis by retrospectively legitimising the use of his customers’ investments. All that has been published before.

From my letterbox and inbox leading up to the 8May2010 meeting comes news of a May2006 meeting at which AllenM briefed his people about what he called a ‘cashflow crisis’. (The whole document is of course postable if anyone wants to see it.) The briefing document shows the BigBoatFund – that’s the combined Sinking Fund for all the boats - being predicted by AllenM to run out of money in June that year and go into a deficit of about two hundred thousand pounds by the year-end. That’s the fund that has the whole year’s expected boat expenditure paid in by all the owners in advance, by 1January each year. Some time thereafter there was a (small) meeting-over-dinner - AllenM wasn’t there - and the discussion included how to persuade AllenM to retire from active participation in OS in exchange for a pension, and how then to recover from the hole-in-the-OS-finances. This was not ultimately successful, but nonetheless a wholly honourable attempt to protect the Owners' investments that had not already been lost. But AllenM carried on to waste-away most of three million pounds of customers’ and investors’ money. Whether we would have any more information about all this from the 8May2010 meeting, we will never know. Despite asking about the 2006 meeting in my published written questions, I was shouted down before I could ask about it directly.

Any idea what the outcome was of the court hearing in devon last week?