Feeling lighter around the shoulders

Well it all still feels a little strange now, just as you get used to being Chairman it all changes... but it had to happen. It was all getting too much. The last 20 months have brought some incredible highs, but it has also dragged me to new lows that I never envisaged I could ever feel just from supporting a football team. We're not talking losing the odd game, not even the cup games, we are talking a feeling of total and utter despondency. That is wrong. Amongst all the rights, that was wrong.

Rather than try to catch-up chronologically (tedious) I thought I would opt for random ramblings.

Obviously now everyone is aware that I have stepped aside as Chairman to enable Brian McCarthy to take my place as part of a reshuffle in light of the Board's decision to recommend that Roger Payne becomes a majority shareholder; this was a decision the Board came to after Mike Warrick and myself presented two options to the Directors following several months of consulting with another potential new owner, as well as Roger Payne. Ultimately, the choice for the Board was very easy, but the work that went into getting to those two choices was tough.

Over my time at the club I have been introduced to several people "who might be interested in investing in the club", and you probably won't be surprised that nothing came from the majority, if not all of, those conversations. If it is too good to be true, it usually is. However, one December evening over a glass of wine and fish & chips in a very nice cottage down Fullers Hill (the home of another person who had been helping us with brainstorming over the past 12 months) we were introduced to someone who introduced us to a completely different way of looking at the club and some ideas we could implement to improve income. It was more than just talk, it was all a very carefully thought out concept. Innovative. It might just have worked, but ultimately I don't think the time was right (I'm delighted to say we parted on excellent terms and I received a text from said person during the game on Saturday at Redditch suggesting that we meet up for a drink at one of the games before the season is out - it sounds silly, but after all we went through over a three week period, a text like that pleased me beyond words; always said I learned a lot about myself in this time!).

In the new year we explored these options even further and drilled right down into the finances of the club, looking at every little detail. In fact throughout January as a club - outside of the football - we were operating under the guidance of, for want of much better words, an 'emergency team' that consisted of just four people, through whom every expenditure and payment had to be approved first.

We never went public on this, and in fact it didn't even seem to leak out (surprising). I now read posts on forums and hear comments from people saying that they didn't realise finances were getting tight; but there is a a very fine line between trying to get help and causing alarm.

I can assure you, if we had done a repeat of the Town Hall public meeting scenario, the vultures would have been around like a shot putting doubt in players' minds and poaching the cream of our crop. Players would have been affected mentally, sponsors would have started to have doubts, suppliers and the bank would be alarmed. It (going public) would not have been the right thing to do, of that I am still firm in my belief. As much as I alluded to the issues in my programme notes and blog posts, the route we took meant a huge burden resting on our shoulders, and there was only so many people that that burden could have been shared with. (Just to be clear, throughout all of this, players were being paid, HMRC were paid, all taxes declared and paid... we were a million miles from any of these horror stories you hear from other clubs, that is because of our excellent management accounts).

It was starting to become quite a gruesome way of living. Some people are cut out for hard-nosed business where you can just tell someone they are not getting paid for their services, repaid for their loans or their money they have been getting is being cut. I'm not like that unfortunately (which is probably why other people get rich and I don't!), but it was an incredible learning curve to be a part of it, and start to see the preparations for this ruthless business behavior in action.

I won't lie, around Christmas and the New Year things were looking pretty bleak on the finance front and we were starting to wonder if any of the irons that were heating up in the fires were ever going to be able to be forged into a rescue packet. It was a genuine, and very real, concern. At this point I should make it blatantly clear that as much as it was a concern, it was not a surprise. Our budget that we had set out back in July had highlighted areas where we were going to have to find other income sources, or improve on existing income sources, or the whole thing was in danger of imploding.

We had nine months to find a solution. You can never budget on a cup run, but that was a possibility for an easy fix with the large sums of money available, even just for winning the early rounds. But, as we all know, our FA Cup and FA Trophy exits to teams from lower leagues than ourselves were hugely disappointing. That was not the cause of our cashflow issues, but it was one possible solution out of the window.

The bar continues to prove our most important source of income, and although we increased the target for bar profits this year, we were aware that there was the potential that this might surpass forecasts and contribute towards the gap that appeared elsewhere. Again, through nobodies fault, up until now, this has proved not to be the case. We are under no illusions that if we can spend a fair bit of money on The Chess Suite, to tart it up, we would be able to recoup that money through having more functions at the club, but it really is the classic chicken and egg scenario because, that money is just not there. The tarting up, or even rebuild, of the clubhouse has been on the agenda for years now, literally going back 10-15 years I can recall conversations, debates and fall-outs regarding the need to rebuild the clubhouse. If the club did come into money, I do believe this is the area where money needs to be spent to get us going down the path of less reliance on donations to make the club tick.

Even now, if someone would just step forward and offer to put forward a very brief business plan for the clubhouse outlining what needs repairing and redecorating, what materials are needed, what labour, and how long it will take to start earning that money back through extra bookings and drink sales, I am sure the club, or the Supporters' Trust, would jump on the opportunity to back it. But this is just one instance, there are many other such circumstances where someone's head poking above the parapet with an offer of help could make such an incredible difference. You might argue that this is something that "the club" should be doing, but the plan was that we (supporters) wanted to be the club. And, more importantly, this sort of example was why it was destined not to work.

Our commercial activity will always have room for improvement. That is no criticism of Giles who looks after advertising and sponsorship, but it is the reality of having to juggle a full-time job and other matchday duties. Again, another ideal scenario would be a full-time Commercial Manager who could exploit every possible opportunity, get out into the business environment and organise events at the club, promoting the facilities we have...but how do you get yourself to the point where you feel as though you can justify investing £20-30k in a full-time employee. It would be a huge gamble, and Chesham may not be ready for that. I know Weymouth is a bigger club than us (albeit lower in the league), but I am always looking on enviously at some of their commercial activity which includes having all four stands on each size of the ground sponsored by a local company. That said, this is about the only thing I am jealous of at the way Weymouth FC seems to be run at the moment!!

As a club we have been incredibly fortunate to have so many donations coming into the club. The reality is that these donations have been keeping the club going, putting us into a false position when it comes to looking at the business model - the level of this income source is very much out of our hands. There was an intention to try and build a business model excluding donations and instead using those donations towards capital projects. That way, any fluctuation in the donations received does not have any impact on the cash flow or stability of the club. This is where the calculations started to become a little tricky - to make that work would have involved some fairly dramatic cuts, probably both on and off the field.

Another aspect to that model would have been introducing community shares as a means of community ownership, but also a means of raising funds. This would have involved a huge scale campaign, going out knocking on doors and attending community events to get the number of shares sold required to fill the gap created by donations. This is the sort of model used by Lewes FC, and one I have massive admiration for, but even if we have got all the other bits right, I'm just not confident enough that we could achieve our ultimate goal with the limited resources we have. I'm still not 100% convinced we could not do it, but I guess I became convinced enough that our support base was just not big enough to sustain this in the same was as Lewes, Ebbsfleet or Wimbledon.

Another key income source is fundraising, this operated under the banner of the Supporters' Trust and doubled up as a means for the Trust to buy shares in the club - hold a fundraising event, the money goes to the club in return for shares. There is a huge question mark about whether money raised by supporters should go into the running costs of the club. After all, when we were a supporters' club I was adamant that it should not just go into that "black hole", indeed many of my fall outs with the club revolved around that (the empty breeze block shells in the corner down The Meadow End serving as a constant reminder of how this philosophy caused untold arguments - another day perhaps).

However, when we were under the circumstances of planning for supporters to take over the ownership of the club then it did not seem unreasonable that some fundraising is done, and contributions made, towards the costs that are providing our entertainment. The decision to use the Supporters' Trust to effectively buy ownership of the club, and the subsequent u-turn decision to not buy more than 50% of the shares, were both approved at AGM's of the Supporters' Trust. Everyone is entitled to join the Trust and attend AGM's and have a say in what goes on...but the interest just was not there. Both meetings were probably conducted in front of a membership attendance of around 20-30 people - the norm for any meeting of the Supporters' Trust; not just recently, but since it's formation.

With that in mind, it is only natural that we might start to question the feasibility of being a fully supporters' owned club. Yes, the people running the club are, and were, supporters; but that almost seemed to be par for the course rather than any deliberate intention as a planned supporters takeover. In fact, what ultimately happened was that many of the pro-active supporters within the Trust set-up moved over to run the club which left huge holes in the running of the Trust (which still should be the voice of supporters), and probably even left an element of resentment amongst supporters as some of their peers moved over to "the other side". It should never have been like that, it was not meant to be like that - We were presented with ownership of our club, it was there, on a platter, but we (a collective "we" - the board, supporters, the town) don't seem to want it enough to really make it happen successfully.

An obvious solution to any of the financial issues would be to cut the playing budget, drastically if need be. We probably should have done that by now if I am honest, though there were other reasons why we did not. I know I differ from some people here as there is so much more that goes on at the club than just the First XI, and all of these other elements of the club are extremely important, an integral cog in the wheel, but, like it or not, the First XI is the flagship and will dictate our media coverage and larger scale interest from the town. To that end, as Chairman, I felt duty bound to make sure that we could put out the best possible team on a Saturday afternoon, a team that will challenge the ambition of the supporters.

If we had exploited every source of income, maximised our efforts, and got everything operating like clockwork, but still found ourselves short, then we would have had no choice but to slash the playing budget down to whatever we could afford, and accept whatever league position that might dictate (As it happens, if you had a league table of budgets, I suspect that we would be no more than mid-table wannabees). But that wasn't happening. That's not blaming anyone, I still believe 100% in the business model, but with the number of bodies we had, and the time those bodies had available, it was proving too much. I promised myself that if we reached the stage where we were having to put out a weaker side because of our inability to do what we needed to do, then it will be time to move aside and let somebody who is more capable of pulling it off to have a go; and that is where we are today.

You have no idea how immensely proud I was to be Chairman of the club I love for 20 months. Parts of it were everything you dream of, but if you are doing it without your own money to back you up, it can soon become the impossible job.

The relief that I feel as I write this is more than I thought it would be, already I find it hard to imagine what it was that I used to do as Chairman that caused me so much worry, it is difficult to explain what it was that made me feel that way. I suppose for the first time in 20-25 years we were running as a club without a financial benefactor, someone who can back up their action with their own money. If you wobble on the tight rope, there is a safety net. For the last 20 months, if we wobbled too much, looking down was not a pretty sight... That, in a nutshell, is what made it what it was.

Don't get me wrong, the positives are incredible, and I hope people will remember a lot of the good things that have gone on over the past couple of years. Not necessarily because of me, but because of the culture of the club under the running of basically a bunch of supporters off the terrace; doing the things they want for the club, the way they think they ought to be done. I believe this has improved relationships with the mini league and junior sides. There was still much more I wanted to do there, but it got held up for various reasons, but I am sure we will continue to pursue that avenue. All the time we spend wallowing in the shame that we cannot get more people involved, there is a bunch of parents putting in endless hours for the club at a junior level, but they have probably never felt a part of the club...and we have never succeeded in making them feel a part.

On the field, what can you say? On the whole, it has been fantastic. Those great cup runs continue to elude us, but to be established in the top 6 of the Southern Premier League so quickly after promotion is way beyond our expectations. Trips to the likes of Rothwell, Malvern and Stourport are soon forgotten when you are visiting the likes of Hednesford, Weymouth and Salisbury City - that is a massive step up, and we have slotted into that comfortably, to the point where we are already regarded as a scalp in the league. To be a part of that set-up and in daily communication with the manager discussing things ranging from contracts, wages and travel arrangements to training facilities, scouting expenses and media arrangements is an amazing feeling. All those years of writing a fanzine and running supporters' clubs, gagging for any snippet of information from the Chairman and Manager - there I was, making up half of that duo. I think we had, and still have, an excellent relationship. I never interfered with Andy's team selections, but we had regular conversations discussing things, sharing opinions and options - I hope that will continue. The thing we get with Andy Leese and Jon Meakes is two people interested in more than just the First XI, and more than just the football, they take an interest in every aspect of the club, and help out in all areas they can.

What is not so blatantly obvious is the way that over the years Andy and Jon have built up the football structure with Paul and Gary from the youth team and Steve Benitez (and Ross Eames as well) with the Reserves team. One of the things I wanted to do and spoke with Andy about around Christmas 2010, when Geoff Glasgow had just left, was putting the Reserves into a more competitive league where they play more games at a level that will prepare them more for First XI football. That move into the South Midlands First Division has proved a great move, the players are benefitting from that and it has provided a proper link now from the youth team, through the Reserves, to the First XI. That was important, and with the youth team management working with the junior set-up, there is a genuine path now for any young kid starting in the mini league to look down and see a clear route all the way to the first team and, if they are good enough, beyond. Things like that don't just happen, they take time and they take a lot of work. For that we should all be grateful, and very proud.

I think that is enough for now, I promise not to leave it so long before the next post, but hopefully now you might understand why I had gone a little quiet on the blog?