4.284 back in the saddle

Monday 09/11/2023

Up at 5:30 in order to have time to read the agenda and stuff for the Strategic Planning Committee meeting at 10:30. Made it to the RA meeting a couple of minutes late. That ran until 10:15, and then off to the SPC.

At the SPC I made a bit of a fuss. The main point of the meeting was for Rhonda to introduce Yet Another Consultant to help with planning. This guy, Brian, talked about the “process” that his firm was going to help us through in order to decide what we want to do about a range of issues that Rhonda wants guidance on.

He had a lengthy presentation full of buzz-words and marketing-speak, and by lengthy I mean 20 minutes plus. He was describing a three-phase process, phase 1 would involve getting opinions from everybody and evaluating marketing conditions. That would take 3 months. Then a month evaluating the financials and where the money could come from to do the things that phase 1 had settled on. Then another 6-week phase of detailed planning the things.

I was pissed. When he finally asked if there were any questions, I went off. Not my usual glib presentation because I was angry, although I believe I kept it down to merely indignant. This all duplicates exactly what this committee has been doing for the past two years, I said. We got everybody’s opinions. As to marketing, we paid for a survey by a different consultancy and heard from them at length. As to financials, if there is anything in your phase 2 that Jaisie, our CFO, couldn’t give you in 24 hours, that would be her fault. We gave Rhonda good general goals and Rhonda and the staff have elaborated that into many specific actions, in fact (holding up the agenda) the next part of this meeting is to hear about how those actions are being implemented.

I was thinking, and at the end all you have is a plan, nothing actually done or even started, but I didn’t say that part.

Nobody backed me up on this. There was silence, then Rhonda nicely explained that re marketing, a lot has changed since Covid, people want other things than before. I did not say anything else the rest of the meeting. But I was thinking, if you know that, why do you need a consultant to tell you that?

Talking to Patty tonight — as ex-CEO of Habitat for Humanity she has much greater experience with planners and consultants than I — she points out that we already have a long list of things we’d like to do and don’t have money for. Having a consultant evaluate projects will not produce money by magic.

But nobody on the committee even nodded when I did my little rant, so I guess I’m outvoted.

From there I went to FOPAL and put in 2 hours on the post-sale triage and processing a couple of boxes of books. After which I was tired, and came home and took a nice 1:15 nap from 4 to 5:15. Dinner with Patty and the Goldens and Joan. Then I finished the edits on the C&W video.

Anyway, I feel fine, which I take to mean I didn’t pick up anything either in the airports or planes, (where I was masked) or at the festival where I wasn’t. Or from Bill, who Laurel says came down with some virus (not Covid) the night after I was there.