Skip to main content

A Scalable Recipe for Getting Out of Financial Trouble

THE ARTICLE I JUST READ ABOUT THE COLUMBUS SYMPHONY ending its season just a hair's breath in the black is cause for celebration in many ways.  As symphonies across the country struggle, merge or outright die, the Columbus Symphony turnaround is worth taking a look at.  What was the secret from going from a projected deficit of more than $1 million to a surplus of $200,000?  Were there lessons for the rest of us embedded in the experience?
In a nutshell, here's what symphony leadership did:
  • secured major corporate/foundation support, admittedly much of that was already in the pipeline, but the lesson here is that you don't give up on fundraising in a tough economy, you work the hell out of it
  • secured municipal support -- a tough sell right now, but one likely built on strong economic arguments.  Do you know how much your cultural organization contributes to your local economy? If not, you're overdue in pulling that information together.
  • musicians are now in their third year of pay cuts.  The typical salary for musicians went from more than $50,000 to $35,000.  Ouch.  They also gave up paid vacation this year.   Sharing the pain must encompass managerial and executive staff, too, not just your program staff or the pain you inflict cuts that much more deeply.
  • combined administrative functions like accounting, ticketing, etc. with a performing arts association.  Doing so reduced the symphony's office staff by two-thirds.  More of us have to be on the lookout for cost-sharing opportunities -- it's probably easiest with back-room functions, but there may be lots of synergy to be had by sharing program staff and, hmmm, maybe an executive or two.
  • and speaking of executives, the director of the performing arts association is serving as the volunteer managing director and CEO of the symphony.  Interesting concept, but a lot harder to pull off than sharing ticketing functions.  What could make this work for your organization?  (A tightly drawn job description is one key.)
There you have it, that's the published recipe.  Pretty simple, really.  It's a recipe many can follow.
What's the big lesson here?  Repeat after me:  NO SILVER BULLETS.  That's right.  If your organization is in financial trouble, it probably didn't get there in a day or a week or even a year.  It took a while.  And it will take a while to get out of the mess.  And it will take hard work and, yep, everybody gets to pitch in.
Is it scalable to organizations of varying sizes?  I think yes, mostly.  I think yes, definitely, if you're willing to put the sacred cows on the table along with the more obvious stuff and to accept that the solution, whatever combination of ingredients from the basic recipe you choose to use, will require months if not years of commitment.

Photo:  Columbus Symphony Music Stand from lottadot via Flickr

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin.  We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week.  If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014.  It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog.  I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs.  Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management.  Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for?  This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.)  Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although