The Sustainable CO-OP Store weekly meeting #11

Keeping me honest.

Okay.

All right, so tonight's icebreaker is, uh, what did you want to be when, uh, when you grew up? When you were little? I don't know if I posted the question correctly. So when you were little, what did you want to be when you were— you grow up? So I'll start. Um, when I was little, I wanted to be a veterinarian. And then later on when I found out that you had to treat injured animals, not just cute puppies, I wanted to be a marine biologist. Okay, yeah, and I pass it to Ulla.

Oh, that's actually funny. I wanted to be a marine biologist, but that's later already. But actually I wanted to be a priest. Like, I swear I was always playing priest, uh, with my best friend, like giving, you know— well, I grew up Catholic, so yeah, I was being a priest, or eventually I wanted to be a nun, but that was like, you know, in the early childhood until 12 or something. And later, yeah, I wanted to actually be marine biologist too. Uh, thanks, Brad.

Yeah, um, I think I didn't really have one that I was like, oh, it's definitely going to be what I'm going to be when I grow up. For a while, I was a farmer. I really want to be a farmer. I think, like, we visited a farm or something, and like hanging out with animals seemed cool. Um, and then I think for, uh, I was a firefighter for a while. Both for like short periods of time, but those are the two I remember. Um, Jennifer, right below me.

Okay, uh, I went through a veterinarian phase too when I was younger. Then in high school I took a test that was supposed to be like, what, what are you matched for, what are you well suited for, your interests, and it came out lawyer.

International lawyer or something.

Oh wow.

Um, I, I always liked like easily definable professional type things like geologist, archaeologist, lawyer, architect, whatever, like one word. Type things and science engineering related, but yeah, so I was in those areas. Yeah. Who hasn't gone? Vivek, are you the only one?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I didn't like have huge— I can't remember too many big aspirations. I think the old, like, Maybe the, the biggest one I ever had when I was younger-ish is I, I wanted to be like a professional soccer player, but I was never really that good at it in reality. I tried really hard. I was like always hardworking, but just never was like super good. So, and then I guess when I was a little bit older, yeah, I mean, I think I followed up my dad's footsteps, always like always thinking about business. He was an entrepreneur, so kind of like, I think I was always thinking like him.

So So yeah, that was me.

That reminded me, I wanted, when I was very little, I wanted to be a figure ice skater and I grew up in Cancún.

So there was not—

my mom was like, "Yeah, keep dreaming." Where did that come from?

Did you watch it?

Yeah, from watching the Winter Games or something.

He was almost like a professional ice skater.

Right.

Yeah.

All right. That was a good icebreaker. Nice question. Okay, I'll go through the agenda real quick. So we're gonna dive into the business model canvas. Partnerships for 15, channels for 10, relationships 10, resources 20, activities 20, revenue 10, costs 10. Brad, is there going to be— do you need time for an intro and all that as well?

Yeah, like, I mean, 2 minutes or something.

I don't think—

you know, I think we'll just speed through. I sent you guys the slides, which you didn't necessarily have to go through, but, you know, I'll just kind of run through the first 2 pretty quick.

Okay, great. And then once that's done, we'll do the meeting-related chat, and then how did our meeting go. Does anyone want to add to that list? No?

Okay.

They don't then.

Maybe just a minor quick just update on the finance side of things. It'll take us like maybe 1 to 2 minutes or something just to get—

books a little update.

Okay.

Um, all right, Brad, we'll obviously start with you. Um, if you do get the sense that you need more time for each subject, um, okay, voice that for sure. Yeah.

Um, yeah, I think we'll, we'll kind of see as we go through. Okay. Um, but I, you know, well, the first 3, um, are kind of the most important, so I think that they'll be Jennifer, you're taking minutes, right?

Just checking in.

Cool, cool. Excited to see those awesome minutes.

Okay, here we go. Okay, so, you know, we've been chatting about this a while. I think, you know, we've kind of gone over the basics. Of what each of these blocks is, but I wanted to kind of frame it again, kind of recap things and kind of take a little pressure off of us because I know getting through all of this seems like a lot. I mean, it is a lot to go through for one meeting. So, you know, I wanted to kind of simplify things a little bit. I'm sharing my screen. Okay, okay, I did that part. Me.

My buttons are going to present mode.

There, still see it? Cool. All the way at the beginning. So to give it to— from like a very high level, I guess we're going to be using this like a lot to like move on with like a business plan and the feasibility study, but also I think this This is really useful for just like creating an elevator pitch. And this is kind of like a template. The Sustainable Co-op makes whatever we put in for resource, like one of the resources, and does the activity for customer, maybe or maybe not over channels so they can give, so that the customer can have this value proposition.

Right.

And I think that kind of. Hopefully that simplifies enough to think, oh yeah, this is how we're going to describe— this is a framework also for describing what the company does. And so another way to look at— as we look at activities and resources, that's where our competitive advantage is a little bit. We're going to take whatever we get from partners, and turn that into the value proposition. And anything that isn't really in that, we can kind of trim out things in there. If we don't feel like that is our competitive advantage, then maybe that needs to— we just need to find a partner to do that. I think there's going to be some moving back and forth between maybe something as partners that we really want to be a competitive advantage, and we can do similar on the other side, relationships and channels, when we go through those. For both of them, we want to think about what is the customer seeing, because that's going to be basically everything the customer sees. They're not going to see— they're not really going to see the value proposition. I mean, they're going to get the value proposition, but they're not necessarily going to, you know, they're going to see it through the marketing and everything. They may not really see our activities and our resources and everything else. So, you know, also it's not going to be perfect and we're going to just kind of iterate and keep moving. So, I want to go through an updated plan too because it changed a little bit and I think this is kind of a good way to go. We want to move quickly to the feasibility study to get as much as we can out now. It's still going to have like a brainstorming kind of feel, I bet. And so it's going to still feel like a list. It's going to be— we're going to list things that we want on there. And then looking back at where other progress we've made, I think it really worked out well where we had a big— we had like, there was a lot of research and then somebody or one or two people took that and kind of boiled it down, summarized it, kind of chewed on it a little bit, and then brought it back as like a— as like a— brought it back to the group and was able to like present it. And you can see the work that was done. So I think that's a good model for this too, for 1 or 2 people to take this as a small canvas and come up with the feasibility study of just a couple points from each block. Combine them and say, okay, this is— let's, let's do some research around how feasible this combination of things from each of these blocks is. And I think that's like both takes some pressure off of us today, and I think that's pretty doable. Whoever, you know, volunteers for this doesn't have to use everything, doesn't have to, you know, it's not like they don't have to like take this and turn it into a beautiful business plan. They just need to take a little bit of it and prepare this research. So I'm going to see, is that, you know, that's kind of a new, you know, it's kind of a change, and I wanted to see what people thought about that. If anyone is like, oh, that sounds really exciting, I'd like to do that right now, or, you know, we can hopefully talk about later at the end.

Just to clarify, like, so, you know, we kind of like— I think the example, one of the examples Brad may be like referring to is like we did this sort of with the shared objectives. Folks like put together their own, um, objectives, and then Russell and I sort of looked at them and tried to figure out like what things like grouped into what, you know, into each objective. And then we'd like present it to everybody like, oh, like each of your objectives fit into these bigger buckets and some things were removed because they fell into the core principles and there were some things that were debated and maybe just taken off in general, but we tried to summarize a high level. I think what Brad is suggesting is in that same vein where perhaps 2 or 3 people can take these laundry lists or maybe what turns into a laundry list, maybe it's not, but whatever the brainstorm is for each of these boxes and perhaps collapses them into a slightly shorter list that has overlap between certain groups and then presents like, okay, here's the remaining list so that we can take that list and then start doing more in-depth research, which would lead into our feasibility study.

Can I ask you a question?

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, the, the things that are being researched, is that all of the blocks on the business model canvas or a part of the business model?

I think so. I think we're going to want to— for, I think, for the feasibility study, and Vivek, correct me if I'm wrong because I think you know a little more about this step, but I think you want to take one or two things from each block and take them as like a, as one, as one business and kind of see how well that business, like that subset of the business works. Like, you know, double check that the partners do supply these and that it's a reasonable price, double check that customers would be willing to pay for it. Double check that the activities that would create the, this value, um, we could do.

I have a suggestion, um, how about we brainstorm the business model canvas tonight and then on, um, Slack to, uh, we each choose something we want to research. Does that sound like a plan?

Okay.

Well, I think the key, the key is we're gonna have this— it's— so today's gonna be a big brainstorm, probably continue to be a brainstorm from last week, right? So, uh, like researching any particular item from that list may not be wise because it could just— it, it may not lead to anything. Uh, as we— like we— Brad was just talking about, and I was just trying to clarify Ideally, 2 or 3 people will take that like longer list and sort of collapse it into like a more like organized list of items. And then from there, from there, there's gonna be a couple items that are like big assumptions, like items that like really we're not sure about, like we don't have super strong data or information right now. It was just like a thesis. And those will be among the first items that we as a team or individually, or actually more like closer to individually or maybe pairs of people will take up as items that will need researching first. Like especially the biggest assumptions, the things that like if this holds not to be true, then it would like affect most of the business model canvas. Like those items would be like among the first things that we need to research versus like if we start researching anything on this business model canvas that we propose today, like there might be items that just don't make sense at all and we won't use because we were just brainstorming, right? So it's a slightly different approach, but I think this approach would allow for us to be more effective with our time and focus.

I hope that is clear.

Maybe does it make sense that as a group we could narrow the— like brainstorm and then as a group narrow the focus down, like eliminate things that are less feasible?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a possibility too. I think that there's a possibility of doing multiple feasibility studies. We probably want to do one at a time, but we could do, you know, we could have multiple groups, like one person, one group finishes it and then another group says, okay, I like this group. I like these things from these blocks. So I want to, you know, I want to go off and do a feasibility study on those. And then we can kind of iterate from there, I believe.

All right, carry on.

Just, I don't know.

That's fine. And I think we, you know, if we have time, we can pick it up and make more sense after we go through the process to talk about next steps.

So, cool.

So, yeah, do, do, do. Let's jump into it. Did anyone else have any other Any other comments or anything, or should I just jump into this?

I lost you guys for 10 minutes there.

My internet went out completely, but, um, we were chatting about kind of next steps, and we had a couple ideas on how to do the feasibility study. We're going to follow up at the end of the meeting.

Okay, great. Um, all right, it's 20 after, um, we're a bit 10 minutes behind already, but that's all right. We'll push it out.

We're moving right along. Let me do this.

I'm going to—

key partners. So hopefully everyone saw that video that Vivek found, and then we've been posting on Slack. So questions? Yep, okay. So I get a link there. You know, I think this is definitely going to be— so let's— does everyone understand what key partners are? I guess, is there any—

I do.

Okay.

So it's like any— who wants to start? Who wants to start thinking about like suppliers, definitely, or packaging companies? Is there a type of, um, like, are you thinking like local vendors or are you thinking like, um, food vendors?

Oh, you guys are great.

Yeah, I mean both, kind of like all.

Okay.

Whether it's farmers, whether it's, you know, producers, they could be both local or not on a national level, I imagine. And maybe in some scenarios even international, perhaps.

Shipping companies.

Sorry, what was that?

Shipping company.

Distribution.

Distribution, shipping.

That's a good one. Yeah, yeah.

Who else? Other businesses we would interact with.

The competition, our competition.

They're not partners though.

Yeah, they are. It is competition with strategic partnership, with strategic partnership. Oh, for example, tech, there are tech co-ops. They actually collaborate with each other.

Those are kind of in like rare scenarios.

That's what I said in the video. That's why I have it.

Would you say like, that's if they're wanting to—

other co-ops?

Yeah, other co-ops.

What's the competitor that you would imagine us like, I mean, as a, I mean, key partners, like where you, like you would imagine?

I think it could be like, for example, they care and they would like to support us to see us starting and they're like, oh, they are just starting. So community, community businesses, like similar stores, even similar co-ops.

Yeah, similar co-ops, that's, that's true.

Similar co-ops or other co-ops.

I mean, that's good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because they are not like, they want more co-ops to exist, not less.

Yeah.

That's definitely, um, I think it's a, in a way it's competition because they are selling similar products what we do the same way. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a bigger umbrella. Competitive businesses.

What about advertising? Advertising companies.

Advertising.

Can we add local farmers?

Local farmers. Yeah, what did I say? Local producers. Do you think local producers covers that, or do you think local farmers would be a different—

I think it'd be slightly different. OK.

It would be like a different relationship.

Exactly.

Okay.

Um, what else?

Another community. Um, what else is in the community that would be, uh, local government? Really, I mean, local, um, like state, if there's like state grants or state, uh, national, you know, like general policies, working with like lawmakers and, you know, how like that support cooperative efforts.

Definitely, like, you know, cooperatives are known to pay better and have better job securities.

There's usually Definitely for like job creation, there's tons of, you know, job creation, like, I don't know about grants, but it's like tax breaks and stuff, right? So we'd have to work with them to get those.

I don't know if this would fit here, like, like banks or people that fund us.

What is it?

Banks?

Banks or like, like people that fund us.

Like, um, so like a Kickstarter, like, yeah, kind of thing.

Yeah, I don't know if that goes there actually.

I mean, that's kind of like a partnership. Yeah, I mean, like, that's not— that's pretty good. I can put that like Kickstarter backers. Is that—

or we could have members if we do like a member.

Yeah, consumer members, foundations on that line.

Oh, foundations. Do members, foundations on the same line then. I mean, actually like Kickstarter in gen— like the company probably, right? Because we're going to be using Kickstarter. Well, I guess I'm assuming we're going to use something like Kickstarter. I think Vivek, you mentioned it in an email with the group there.

Maybe educators, if we will have that education part. So some kind of educators we will have to partner with, unless you want to teach or educate people. But sure, and they're in like the field, so I think maybe it would—

oh yeah, like, yeah, speaking of what, yeah, maybe like, or like on that to Just like influencers, like kind of people who are not like had knowledge on that in the sustainability world, yeah, it could be true.

Like social media, right? Me too.

Or I mean, just even just broadly, like people who are like, are capable of speaking on this topic, yeah.

Yeah.

I was thinking—

Yeah, influencers and environment. Go ahead.

Environment, or, um, uh, if, if we're gonna sell, you know, there's groups that if you're gonna offset your carbon or whatever, groups that plant trees for carbon offsets.

Yeah, yeah, carbon.

Good point.

Um, groups, companies maybe. Yeah, I don't know too much about that ecosystem, but Yeah, there's definitely something there. Who else does complementary work that we could— like, what other groups like the Sierra Club or that we might work with that also do environmental—

We're thinking like foundation, nonprofits, foundations.

Members, foundations, let me add nonprofits in here.

Yep.

Like in the video, they, they suggest to ask this question, right? One of the questions was, what resources are we acquiring from the partners? So to help us find who it is. So what else is it? That we are acquiring.

We covered government, kind of talked about communities.

I think we were mostly like, you know, we're talking about, you know, money, uh, we're talking about the goods that we'll be selling.

There's definitely banks in general, probably local banks.

That's a good one.

Yeah, financing, you know, just like regular— yeah, loans.

Yeah.

Working capital loans.

Yeah, that's a good point. Financial institutions, credit unions.

Yeah, let me do credit unions because that's probably more— trying to think of a more specific word for that, but credit unions is good.

Yeah, financial institutions or banks. I mean, yeah, they both do.

Um, what else do we have on this list? My notes are kind of sparse for the first one. Partnerships, suppliers, maybe local community groups, some sort of, I don't know. Yeah, who would be like a—

it's like—

There's online communities and actually geographical communities.

Yeah, I'm just gonna put—

I don't know too much about these other things, but I think they exist.

Must have a good list going, the text is getting small. Yeah. How are we doing on time?

We're okay, 6 minutes behind. I think, uh, okay, start moving on.

Yeah, we have a good list.

Is any— yeah, this is pretty good.

I can't— there we go.

That's—

now we can move it.

Um, okay, cool. Let's leave it there.

Nice work, guys.

Moving right along. Good. Customer relationships. Okay, so this is going to sit in between value proposition and the customers. Um, Yeah, so this is like the relationship that the customers are expecting or that we can give to our customers.

Let me expand this box.

So definitely, because this one, this one's always tricky for me because I always overlap it with like channels. Like I always think like, oh, we'll send them, we're going to send them emails. Emails, and emails is really the channel. Just to— if I don't know if anyone else is like that.

So, right.

Um, this, this category feels more like a conversation than it does like a list of items.

Yeah.

It's like, I guess, like if you, if we're walking down the street, we see a store like this. Um, What type of interaction do you expect to have with the store? How do you want to interact with regarding sales and membership and all that?

Yeah, well, there's definitely the educational part, right? That's going to be a continuing thing, right?

Is there, is there a comparable business that people— is there like a Whole Foods or Costco or an existing business that seems in the lane of where we wanna go with our—

Yeah, I think we keep coming back to Whole Foods. At least I come back to Whole Foods in my mind.

So what, I think—

Well, when I think about education, I think of a store, I think about Apple. Or like Apple does like these classes and stuff like that on how to use your Mac or iPhone and things like that, which I think are pretty awesome. I sent out an article just the other day on Publix, the Florida-based grocery store, and they do— they focused a lot of energy and a lot of attention on the customer experience, like making sure the customers have like a really good experience when they enter the store. So that's also sort of in the same vein, I would say.

Yeah.

Maybe we— okay, let's get into like, do you guys see a membership fee if someone were to become a member of the co-op?

Yeah, I would imagine.

Yeah, I would imagine.

I would have to see how the—

there's like a clubhouse kind of— well, club, not Clubhouse the app, but you know, like Costco, maybe like Costco. Costco, that's probably a good one. Yeah, so it's got a little bit of a Costco thing where there's like a You're like part of a club.

I mean, yeah, that to me has been, I've been wanting to like understand that better because I think there, I've done a little bit of research on this and I've heard if you can set up some sort of membership system, there might be a way to get a price advantage for the customer.

So yeah.

Right.

I mean, I, yeah, in, I, I've been just knowing about Costco. They make almost no money off of, you know, most of their sales that they make off of their memberships.

Yeah.

I guess the question is, is like, how hard is that going to be, do, like, going to be if we have zero members to start? And at what scale would that would that be useful? Like if we have 1,000 customers, can we do it? Where versus if we have a million customers?

Yeah, you said that'll be for like the feasibility study, the component too.

Yeah, that's a good one.

If that like becomes one of our big— especially if that's like one of our big assumptions, like that's probably like an early one to like research.

I'm gonna say knowledgeable about Like, let me say staff. Staff is knowledgeable about sustainability.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like going into a grocery store in general, I feel like a good grocery store, you can like just stop anyone like stocking and be like, where is this thing? And they'll be like, oh yeah, it's just like right over there in the corner, second lane down, you know, second aisle, first row.

But just to get— but just even your point, I think before, that's a great one, right? Like knowing about sustainability, like stuff, you know, people are going to have questions and why is this sustainable and why is that not? Or why do you have this?

Yeah. What do these standards mean? Yeah. I'm sure that's like a—

yeah.

Also, like the question there is how often would you interact with your customers? I don't know, like Oh, that's a good one. Answering that question, on top of the mirror board or the mirror frame right there where it says customer relationship. So would it be like, I mean, yeah, that's good, a weekly, on a weekly basis, like more or less, or like, is that the kind of answer that goes here? I'm a little confused about this.

Yeah, yeah, definitely, because I think that, you know, you have a very different relationship with companies that you interact with daily compared to monthly, right?

Yeah.

So is this— yeah, so I guess like if you were just getting groceries, it's probably like once a week, right? That's what we would expect. Like even our like best customers or best members would be coming in once a week. Yeah. But if there's like an educational aspect, there could be like There's like online, online courses. People could be coming in, you know, every day for like a short course on something if we have enough content.

Yeah, or even like, you know, weekly email with some kind of information, educational information to start.

That's a channel, right? The emails you mentioned, that those are channels?

Yeah, so I was thinking like weekly. Weekly communication or updates.

Someone mentioned the possibility of events, that sometimes there are events.

Yeah, that's a good one.

It's a little bit of a channel. Yeah.

So it's probably, probably educational events come to mind for me. Do you think there's like other types of events? Is there like—

Yeah, we could have cooking events, for example, right? Because we will, if we have this kitchen, so we could have like monthly cooking class. How to cook with just sustainable Thanks.

Yeah, I think education and stuff is important. I think also fun is important.

Yeah, so I was wondering like what kind of fun things, like would we have like concerts or is it like more of like the book, you know, is it like the book signing crowd really that we're attracting here or?

There's a store near me where there's $2 drafts and you could just drink while you're walking around the store. It's really nice.

The Whole Foods near me does that. They have like a wine night you can go.

Or yeah, like on that fun component, it could be like, yeah, we could, we could organize it. Like it would play into the events component, but like we could organize like, you know, cleanups or, or maybe like, like organizing, you know, efforts like a lot of efforts like Jennifer did for that petition for, you know, petitioning our government to do certain things, especially on a local level.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Build a community, really, which might be kind of like to the— that, like, that could be just like one of these, like, umbrella statements is like customer relationship. Like, a lot of our customer relationship could be a lot about Building community. And like a bunch of the items just mentioned could probably fall into that.

Yeah, I'm just gonna put community building and we can— that'll be like a big one.

Just to expand on that too, it's like as if our store is the politician that people rely on to push our, you know, whatever they believe in, you know, which is in this case, you know, in this green sustainability, like we will advocate for the people who shop for us.

Yeah, or I mean, I, I hear that. I think what, uh, another way I think about it is like we create this, this, the space, the canvas, like the, the, the, like opportunity for people to, to come together. We like help with the creation of that so that people, like, like-minded individuals can come together. It's a kind of a hub for that. But yeah, I mean, I mean, these are all sort of the same.

Sure, yeah, I hear you. But it's like, as we get more powerful, like Patagonia—

oh yeah, yeah, totally.

Like, they do a ton of, like, land conservation that, you know, that their users cannot. So it's like, oh yeah, totally, totally, totally. You know, you're doing good things with our product.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, like, like I said, I always talk about organic value is like the you know, they push through USD organic.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

All right, let's keep moving.

Yeah, that's good.

Channels next. What do I got next? Channels, resources. What is the order?

Then I do channels. Okay, I'm jumping around.

This is probably good to jump around. Channels, channels.

Where were we?

Partners, customer relationships, just did. Now we're at channels, right?

Yep.

Okay.

Okay. Um, so we covered a couple of them.

Customers want to be reached. Um, yeah. Okay.

We're cruising today. This is nice.

Yeah.

So definitely website. I'm gonna get some like easy ones here. Social media, email. We already talked about events.

The store itself, right?

Wouldn't the store sort of count as a channel? Yeah. Retail space, I'm gonna call it. Just think about what else the— so we're building up this community. What else does the community use now as a channel?

So maybe that, right? Is it our community? Is that what that would be considered a channel?

Is that—

I think that's what the channel is like, you know, it's like, I'm gonna put Facebook down here. You know, it's the community is like a like a more broad term, I guess. And I guess events is too, but it's— what's the, like, how do people get to that community, right? And how do people— what's the actual space called?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Be like, I guess like something a little more specific would be like churches. Like, I don't know if this is Maybe churches isn't where we want to go, but like, it's true, just like the space, you know?

Yeah.

Which kind of is like the retail space is like the space that we're going to use that we fill up.

What about like online groups, maybe like, like a subreddit or Facebook group or something like that?

So yeah, definitely Facebook and do groups, Twitter, Reddit. That's a good one.

Definitely Instagram.

I mean, social media, yeah.

Is there communities? I'm not on Instagram. Are there communities on Instagram? Is it a little bit like Twitter?

Hashtags are big, you know. Yeah, it's definitely like, you know, influencers on social, like Twitter, on Instagram can be huge.

I always thought that on the issue of schools in America and the quality of food that they give to their students, not just that, but like students who were, you know, depend on schools for food would be a good way to kind of be one of our like charitable causes that also can get us you know, channeled into these schools. So say for mixed communities especially, like, oh, this co-op supports our food program in this school, so I'm a wealthier person in the school, I'm going to support that co-op as well. And so kind of democratizes those areas a little bit. But, and just as a media marketing strategy as well, just feels like a nice Do you think school fundraisers?

Is that a good channel in some ways? You know, some companies do, like they have the marching band walk around town with their catalog and they place orders. Does anyone know this, or is this just like a Midwest thing?

I love marching bands, but I don't know that.

I think we're thinking more of partnerships. Like with schools.

That might be more of a partnership. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, I was trying to think of what else. Um, let me go to the questions here. Channels customers want to be reached, competitors reaching their customers. What's like, um, so like what is Whole Foods?

I'm sure paid, paid ads. I'm sure all of us, or not all, not all, but definitely I'm definitely getting lots of ads from, you know, our competitors now.

Like, I'm going to do—

I'm going to split this up and just say online, magazine, or let me just say print.

That'll cover a little more. This is online, print, TV.

I don't know if TV really fits into it, but But too big too early, but—

Who watches TV now? We can do YouTube.

Sorry, Jennifer?

We can have a YouTube channel.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is why we need Russell. Russell, that would have been the first one. I just said Russell. Um, that's good.

What, uh, like, what about some local— I think Adam was trying to hit on this. I don't know if we— but like maybe some sort of local initiatives, like, I don't know. Especially when you open a physical space, like—

sorry, that doesn't count as an event.

Yeah, maybe it's events.

Yeah, I could expand on this. You know what's good that are kind of like events around me? Farmers markets have kind of opened up to businesses. I don't know how people— what farmers markets are like around other people, but they've kind of opened it up to like just kind of like all local craft businesses or just kind of like anyone who wants to put up a booth, really.

I don't know if that's how they are across the country.

Maybe we can write like local community centers, like to your point, like maybe we would work with like You know, like a local church, synagogue, mosque, or something.

Yeah.

Local, like a local school, high school.

Community centers is good.

I find the word congregation works for all those.

Okay, local congregation. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

Events. What's more, I'm going to put farmers markets. Are there any other events that like would be relevant that we can go to and kind of pass out, you know, like pass out flyers or—

Well, there's like, you know, those places where they do like compost centers or something like that. They really collect compost, you know, because they step— for example, in New York it's like that. Maybe over there they could put up flyers or something, billboards.

I'm going to add flyer and put flyers down here.

Could be like local concerts too, local concerts or events, you know. It's like sometimes like in smaller towns, I know they have like these like local bands and Or yeah, we could like sponsor events like that. Yeah, yeah, sponsorships. Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, cool.

That's amazing.

Okay, was that—

what do we say for channels? Do we want to do 10 minutes on channels?

Yes.

Okay.

Does that feel pretty good? We filled up that block.

Maybe, maybe also like, this is like a fun one, just thinking like, assuming like, you know, we're going to focus, you know, we have this heavy focus on delivery, like the delivery trucks itself. Or delivery vehicles themselves using them as like billboards, like FreshDirect. FreshDirect in New York, for example, has these trucks that cruise around all over New York and see their— like that.

Oh, you know what, that's a good— I'm going to expand on— we said distribution, right? Yeah. Over in partnerships. Yeah. Where do we say it? So I'm going to do shipping, delivery. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, because delivery, you're like interacting with the customer through these delivery apps. Okay, let me— is there anyone else have any last ideas before we move on?

Cool.

Channels.

Also, he suggested, like, after we try some of them, like, we need to do evaluation. So they said, like, you need to do a survey and see what's work— what works best.

Like, that's in the feasibility study component, probably.

Like, like, no, after we already are, like, open and we're doing all this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, total.

Yeah.

But that's one way that the customer's going to interact with us, right?

Yeah.

I think that makes sense. Yeah.

That's good.

Sorry, Erica.

Maybe that's, that goes in customer relationships.

Like, oh yeah.

Cause I guess that's ongoing.

Yeah.

Let me put that there. That's good.

Good.

Okay.

Customer surveys.

Resources. Okay, so digging in the resources. This is in between the partners and the value proposition. These are also going to include resources that we need to provide that customer relationship and get to those— provide those channels.

So So I'm going to get—

this might be one that people don't think of right away, but I'm going to put down steering committee. So all of us are co—

it's two Ms, right?

Two M's. C-O-M-M-I-T-T. Steering committee. That's one. That's a good one.

This is too broad a proposition.

So what do we need?

With financials?

Yeah, money.

Financials.

Yeah, like, I'm going to call it capital. Um, that's good.

Yeah, but knowledge now.

Oh yeah, okay.

Yeah, it's a good, um, yeah, broken into— don't break the capital into like the startup costs and the The startup costs and operational costs.

Yeah, I think we'll— in cost structure, we can break it down a little more. But, you know, for— in the context of resources, it's just like a pool of money, right, that we'll need. So I think this is good for this block.

The space?

Yeah, like, yeah, definitely retail.

Chain of space.

Website.

Website's good.

Really, the whole supply chain, I think, is— would expand on that a bit.

Supply chain isn't really— I don't think that's something you like— we would like own. Do you— I mean, would you agree? I think resources are like things that we we own as a group?

Well, the, the distribution network, the, um, the retail space, the distribution center component of that. Um, I assumed we would be more like a warehouse kind of.

Is that what you're thinking, like warehouse space?

I thought so. Yeah, yeah, I, I would agree with Adam. I think that the, the supply chain is like— I think actually that's going to be a real competitive advantage. Like, what I see Often when I do this research on comparable companies, I think where they oftentimes find the price benefit is when they work really closely with the producers of the product and then they figure out all the logistics of it so that there can be that cost saving on the product instead of dealing with the middleman. So yeah, I would argue that.

Okay.

It's also because existing supply chains I don't think could, um, curate what we want to do in our stores, so we have to own part of that.

Good point.

Yeah, really good point.

I'm trying to fit this all in.

Okay.

Okay. Let me go back to my list. What resources do we, our value propositions require? Let me go back to that value propositions list. It's kind of tiny. See. Yeah, so what kind of stuff do we need? Let's, let's dig into education a little bit. We talked about knowledge, so that's definitely it. We need, you need like teachers, right?

It's something that we acquire from the key partners. So what do we have in partners?

Yeah.

What else are we acquiring from the key partners?

There's definitely—

what's a good, like, stock or, like, inventory, I guess. I think it's a really basic one, but—

um, let's see.

Because they can be intellectual or human. Yeah, so you said like teachers, but also isn't it like the staff? I mean, meaning people who work there?

Yeah, I guess, yeah, sorry, I was going to expand employees.

What about just like, oh yeah, you wrote this inventory, yeah, that's right, yeah.

I'm still stuck on education, so we would need Let's say we were going to do videos, we would need like, you know, I guess there's like a whole bunch of hardware for that, right?

So you mean like filmmakers and the equipment?

Yeah, yeah. I think of what like equipment without getting too specific.

I just saw— I feel like you could have a small studio space like in your building where you do classes and then you do your YouTube and then, you know, just multi-purpose really.

Let me do—

yeah, that's good. Teaching space and equipment.

Okay.

I don't have to dig into that too much. Channels, online, the online channels are pretty self-explanatory, you know, we're just going to use your computers.

See.

Relationships, human resources. Didn't we say that?

Yeah. Is there any specific— without getting into things that we would do, is there a specific thing in HR that you think— like we talked about teachers as employees, like people we employ would be doing some teaching.

No, I don't have anything specific.

I think we've been thinking a lot about, there's like, you know, like any of these like Facebook groups, Twitter, Reddit, you know, the advantage there is there, you know, there is no like equipment we don't, we need, or like there's not much we, you know, it's like, it's kind of like knowledge work. There's not like, there's not like a lot of overhead. For the retail space.

But to that point, maybe to your point, like, right, content creators is, or is that falling to—

Well, teacher, like, do you want me to do teachers, content creators? I guess in some sense they're going to be— they could be doing slightly different things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I definitely could, you know.

Yeah.

I think we might all agree that we don't want to underestimate any of the workers in the cooperative. The, the, somebody who stocks the shelves can also maybe be a filmmaker.

Yeah, I'm gonna put retail workers in there. I don't know, I haven't really worked retail. Is there anything retail-specific, like resources that you would need besides the, besides the building, besides the space?

You would need, um, all sorts of systems, uh, point of sale.

Okay, yeah, that's good.

Inventory management.

Um, I'll just do inventory management.

Yeah, well, in that, in that sense, what is there? There's like, there's like retail furniture kind of stuff, right?

Furnishings.

I'm gonna put that all in the same. Let me make that different thing. That's gonna be like on top of the space, we're also gonna have to buy like, you know, tables and shelves and stuff.

Security.

Is it— is that awful? Is all that fall into key resources? I don't know. I mean, I guess you're probably right. I, I hadn't thought about it that way, but, uh, let's get—

I guess that's getting pretty specific. So I mean, maybe it's—

I was gonna say contacts.

Sometimes contacts can be resources. Contacts.

Yeah, like a Like a database of contacts. Sure. That's good. I guess that kind of ties into— I guess I'm now on board with the supply chain thing because that's like you're, you're building up a supply, like a list of people you contact and relationships like that.

Yeah.

That's like has value.

Yeah. Where's that— where's the line drawn between that and key partners?

Well, I think the partner is like the actual company, right?

The vendors. Yeah.

Whereas this is like, we're kind of listing intellectual property.

Oh yes.

That's kind of what I— that's where it's like coming in my mind, you know.

What about a brand, right? We need a brand.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. Um, is there anything else which is— is there anything else that goes with brand?

Did I take any notes on the name?

What about like any of the tech work, you know, like whether it's definitely website, I think, beyond just like even like any of the backend resources for that, or, or maybe that just falls under website, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, we got website, point of sale, inventory management.

Um, and what about all the skills, customer relationship management?

Let me do that.

Like, um, are those like the skills that are necessary? Like, uh, I don't know, like, so like, uh, we need a lawyer and we need people that does like branding and marketing, all of those. How do you call them?

They fall into staff or office accounting?

No.

Well, I guess law, we wouldn't probably have like a lawyer on staff, right? But we probably would have an accountant though, right?

Yes.

Accountant.

But I say accountant. Yeah, not accounting. Jennifer, what did you have? Sorry, did you say another one?

I was gonna say I'm getting confused as to what are resources and what are Costs. It sounds like some of these are like things that are costs.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess all the resources are going to cost something, right? I guess the costs are kind of like almost like a summary of the activities and the resources and what the partners are going to charge, you know, I guess if they charge anything, you know, where that's applicable. So these are all going to come up, you know, again in cost structure.

Internal training.

Oh, that's probably an activity. That's a good one though.

Internal training. Cool.

I think that's pretty good. Does anyone have like a last— did we do— I think since we've already thought of one activity.

Any last ones? Cool, cool.

Okay, so activities are similar between partnerships and value proposition. It's also all like activities we're going to do to provide that customer relationship and through those channels.

Test value.

So these are like individual tasks that we're going to be doing.

So we can put this in series.

Marketing.

Yeah, let me do marketing.

Internal training.

Having the online platform.

Yeah, so like social media content. Let me do Social media managing?

I think you meant like the online maintenance, online store maintenance.

Oh, okay.

I mean, fulfilling orders.

Yes, that's the activity.

Um, customer support. You think— what do you, uh, I guess since we're talking about customer support, do you see email, phone, you know, social media customer support? I mean, you think like all of the above?

That would depend also our like customer relationship, what kind of relationship we want to have. So maybe it will be actually a physical person in the store, and another one online.

I think for me it's like any of those could work. I would be something I would want to research.

You know, like if you go for example to Trader Joe's wine store, which we have just one, and then you have all those people who know about the wine and they advise you, and you don't spend there half an hour but you spend 5 minutes, and you come come out with like 3 bottles of wine, right? So, and people, that's why people go there and shop. So that would be also good to have a person in the store who would answer all those questions, like personal assistance.

Yeah, but yeah, I might go more like the relationship part.

They have like, that's also a task, like it's going to be something like, it's going to be somebody's job in the store to walk around asking It's kind of both, kind of both, I think so, because somebody's also going to have to do that.

I mean, it's just sort of defined differently. It's like one is, one is like a, in customer relationships, it's, it's like I would define it as personal, like personalized touch or something, personalized experience. And key activities.

That's, you know, yeah, that's really good. First in customer support. Should I update that over here?

Was that where we put it? Customer surveys.

Why wouldn't we just selling key activity?

No, no, no.

Not just selling, it's more just, you know, like personalizing experiences, like you said.

No, no, next one, I was already thinking.

Oh, entertaining retail store. Yeah, like, what were you saying? You were saying you had something? I meant like doing the sales, so the actual like bagging, checking out, checking people's stuff out, cashier.

Stocking shelves.

Organizing events. We're talking about so many events.

Yeah, that's good.

Oh, I'm gonna put communicating with partnership partners.

Designing the physical space. And finding spaces.

What about choosing?

Well, those are kind of like less, like you don't do those so many times, but yeah, but I know they're considered key activities. It might be, I mean, once you do it, I guess it's kind of key, right?

You want to—

I guess if we're expanding, right? I mean, hopefully, fingers crossed, we're going to be always looking for new Yeah, but that's what I meant.

Like, it's not like— yeah, anyway, I think it's fine because it is, it's still very big. If you're going to get a space, it's a pretty— it's obviously a huge thing, so you would have to make sure that space is designed well.

And obviously, what about like branding? Isn't that like the same? Like, make sure that all the spaces have like the same concept and the website kind of has the same concept.

I'm going to say maintaining consistent branding, or like, I'm going to just maintain the brand. Yeah, because I guess there's like, the brand will also like evolve and stuff, and somebody's going to be maintaining that and doing stuff with it.

The product that we sell.

Yeah, collecting the what?

Sorry, selecting the products that we are selling.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And also like Like sustainability keeps changing, so maybe like—

Like evaluation of the products we sell.

Evaluating products. Jennifer, I think— did you have one?

Maintaining both— I guess I was thinking of the store in particular, but also I guess there's things to maintain with the online. Store.

Taking up— going to take up the whole board eventually.

Yeah.

And it was like maintaining the website, maintaining online and store. Do we say social? We kind of— yeah. Okay. Social media managing. Yeah. So that kind of covers a lot of stuff there. What's content? What's more specific? There's going to be like online educational stuff, right?

And working with other co-ops or—

Oh, like coordinating with other co-ops.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the community.

Outreach is sometimes a good catch-all.

Are you thinking like community outreach, like kind of like locally? Or were you thinking like, I guess there's, there's like the micro, like outreach inside the community, and then there's like, like, I guess like a national level. There's like, you know, more national issues we can get involved with. What do we say?

What about business? I would also mention like business and internal business education. Like, it's important that all the worker owners are like knowledgeable of how the company is doing.

You know, I think training, I feel like co-op training It's a little bit different to just training, at least in my mind.

Like when I'm thinking about training, it's— I'm thinking about just like teaching them like how to work in the organization, like what the co-op is about. What this is I'm talking about is just like a system that we— and our individuals that provide like input on a regular basis to all the worker owners so they know how the business is doing.

That's like, okay.

I think it may be the relationships.

Because like, if you're, if you're just one member of a team, you may not know how well we're doing like sales-wise or, or like in terms of, yeah, any of those business metrics, you may not have no idea. It may seem like it's going well. I mean, that's, it may seem like it's going really bad. And that's what that like individual or group of individuals would hopefully be helping people.

But yeah, I have communicating company news performance to employees or members. Does that sound— does that, does that cover it?

Yeah, yeah, that's good.

Yeah, any other co-op related things? I guess like running meetings, right?

Yeah.

Did we mention accounting, like keeping numbers and all that?

Yeah, keeping— I just say accounting.

The space maintenance, like cleaning and all that kind of stuff.

Retail.

Let me see what I have for retail.

Retail store cashier, finding retail space, maintaining the brand, designing the retail space. I guess I'm designing— I'm going to do designing and maintenance.

What about maintaining on the computers, you know, depending on what we will have?

I had, uh, something about the— maintaining the website.

Website, but what about like the electronic stuff in the store? Right, like, because let's say, okay, machines, it's like your end of the year, so sometimes like they have to do something. I know there's some stores closed because the machines didn't change the date.

I don't know, like IT, IT, some kind of IT maintenance, Y2K prep. Why 3K? We got to be prepared. We could put that in our like advertising. We are ready for any, any computer outage.

What about security so people don't steal?

Actually, I was reading about Costco and the, the just the fact that they do come in all bulk, there's like 80% less theft because it's like really hard to put everything compared to like Walmart grocery these days, which gets—

yeah, where you can just grab an apple and go. Oh yeah, now that I know, I mean, I'm just, I've been told that you can walk in and containers to steal steal, so they don't have to have an energy.

Just joke.

No containers.

Ah, no containers, so people can eat all on the go.

There's no eating in line.

What about like taking care of the produce that is spoiled?

Spoilage?

That's what it's called? Yeah, yeah, the name for it. So I've never heard it.

There's got to be a term.

I've never heard this term.

Stocking. It's like part of stocking, right? I guess it's like unstocking or restocking.

I think it's part of inventory management.

Yeah, here we go.

Also, we could have— that could be with actually our relations that we could— now I just came to my mind, like Um, sorry, key partners. It could be donating the food that is already not good enough for sale, you know, like many grocery stores, they donate their food.

We also do.

So that would be it.

But the kitchen, the kitchen food prep or food.

Press the button.

Ah, it's full or something.

Miro is full.

Maybe you can add one more.

I hit the button and I locked it?

Is that— is that true?

I don't know why is it telling him that's what I'm thinking. I mean, maybe it's going to be so small then.

Maybe you can't stretch it more.

You can maybe change the size of it.

That's what I was trying.

You know, size, there is, and yeah, you can put large and maybe this way.

Yeah, well, it's weird, it won't let me do, uh, can I type in here? Okay, I'll just do a second one. Yeah, let me drag this up here. We're kind of on a roll. So it'll be like the expanded activities. All right, sorry, what was the arrow to it or something? Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, what were the two I missed? There was like a couple I missed while I was, uh, getting locked out of Miro.

Food prep for the kitchen.

No, what was the waste dish? What was it?

Spoilage. Oh yeah, I think that, I think that falls into Well, it was donate, right?

It was like a donate, which is a kind of a donation thing.

Yeah, I don't know if that would be here or that would be key partners.

Also, uh, packaging. We'll be packaging things.

Yes.

Um, no, there's some packaging, packaging orders, packing online, say online orders.

Shipping and handling.

Yeah, I'm gonna do shipping. Mm-hmm.

It is just shipping and handling. I think that covers it though.

Shipping and handling. Um.

We have a couple more minutes, I think, right?

Probably add receiving to that as well.

That's good too.

Huge.

Yeah. Oh man.

Nope, didn't get it. There's an I in there too. Yeah, okay. Receiving. Yeah, what else seems good? Is there anything else we need to do for these partners? Kickstarter, what would we need to do for Kickstarter? This is like a one-time thing, but like, that's like marketing, branding.

Yeah, okay. Yeah.

And videos and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, marketing, branding, content creation, outreach.

Did we say, uh, like supplier relations, kind of? Now I can't remember.

Yeah, that's a good— vendor relations.

Vendor relations. Yeah, communicating with partners. Let me do—

I'm gonna replace that.

There's going to be like, you know, for working with local farmers, there's a lot of, you know, you got to call them, you got to schedule when they're going to pick it up and, or like drop it off and how payments are going to work.

Just within accounting, just because it would be big, would be like pricing, sales, Um, sort of thing.

Okay, okay. Moving over this one. Pricing is probably going to be big.

Yeah.

What's all that? What else is like, um, Like HR is like a— I, we covered IT stuff to a certain extent. Yeah, we covered IT pretty well.

We covered HR.

Well, we did like employee training, right? We talked about that. We talked about communicating inside the company. Is there anything, I guess, is there anything else in HR?

We just think this thing in just general employee happiness, like hiring.

And all that.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, okay. Hiring is going to be huge, something like this.

Yeah, pension stuff.

Yeah, hiring, I think.

Yeah, HR is going to be big, right? Like, from my research on these things, like, having a— making sure employees and workers are happy will help lead to less turnover, which generally better for the company and profitability and job satisfaction, all these things.

All right, we're, uh, we're doing good. It's 6— it's 24 after. Um, if we finish in a minute, then we're on track.

Wow, we're crushing it today.

Yeah, so what are they like? I'm trying to think of other departments in a normal company. Uh, we did some marketing, we covered some marketing things. We talked about social media management, we talked about branding, legal, advertise, like actually like promotions, right? Like product promotion, legal. I don't know, so specific things you're thinking of for legal, definitely like contracts, if we're gonna have contracts.

Yeah, with partnership contracts, even like leasing or renting or buying the property.

I don't know, so that's the—

you need a lawyer for that.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Um, and maybe some kind of liability.

Yeah, if you have retail for sure, if there's retail space.

Yeah, let me just do insurance.

I think lawyer for every small signature liability theft.

Let's do like blanket insurance. So what was that?

This is still key activities, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of overflowing onto everything else. Marketing, sales-wise, is there any partnerships? What kind of community outreach activities Like, if you could dive into that, what's, um, I have to leave at 9.

I can't stay.

Oh, okay, okay. Well, you want— let's do the last ones then. Is there any other last, like, last ideas there for Key activities. Kind of, kind of, we covered a lot there. Miro didn't even like how much we covered. Um, cool.

I think we just got—

cool.

Um, yeah, so the last two are easy, I think. Revenue streams. So revenue streams based on customers and value proposition. It's about how much value, what are customers going to be willing to pay for the value that we provide. I think it might be good to think of like, it's kind of hard to guess how much people are going to pay, but like how much of a premium do you think people are going to pay for for these products, for like sustainable.

You're gonna spend the week, we're saying like it's their food shopping, would that make sense there? What was it like, like an estimate of how much they would spend weekly, uh, doing their, their food shopping with us?

Yeah, I think so.

Let's say like $100.

Just say the number.

Sure, yeah.

Numbers or— yeah, the revenue streams. So how—

I guess it's mostly like revenue streams, but you know, we can, if we want to try to get into numbers.

So groceries would just be one sale, like asset sale or grocery sales, membership.

That's going to be like a Membership, regular subscriptions, yeah, depending on how we want to set that up.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Um, household goods sales.

So what kind of sales?

Like grocery? When I say— when I think groceries, I'm thinking just like food, food goods, but I'm also thinking like household goods.

And the kitchen, like the industrial kitchen sales, is that different?

Yeah, like pre-prepared food. Do you think we would, um, for these classes, do you think we would sell classes? Like, is this like a— people would come and—

no, hey, yeah, no, I, I— well, I think, I think some would be like paid tickets and someone we could Like any other sort of platform, like some, some courses would be free and some would be paid.

Maybe more in-depth would be paid, right? We want them to come. So if you have Apple, they don't charge you when you come for—

yeah, but we can also work with third parties. Like some third party might want to organize an event, they're allowed to, but they, you know, we take some small Yeah, let's say we would have some—

we would invite some famous chef, so then we would charge for this. Otherwise, it would be free.

Compost sales. Oh yeah, yeah, once, once we like, you know, we can have people return their compost and we can sell it back.

There's got to be a good business there of taking people's trash and turning it into dirt.

Yeah, uh, it's like licensing.

So we have licensing, licensing like content. Is that what you're thinking?

Yeah, I think—

what are you thinking? Like, um, or I was thinking, uh, like opening another branch, like a franchise kind of franchise. I mean, that's if we did the franchising model, but yeah, yeah, we could keep it for now. I'm gonna—

okay, like t-shirts and cups and hats or something.

Oh, merch, like, yeah, that's good.

Merch.

Yeah, and selling branded sponsorships.

Authorships?

From whom?

Like if we did events, sometimes you get sponsors for those events.

We had mentioned that we wanted to maybe sell our own line of containers.

Like a white label kind of— white label products? Or like store—

You buy in the store, you buy your containers, your bags, or whatever you need.

Branded products. Branded, that would go all into branded products.

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of all in that same bucket.

Too far.

Um, is it different, like would it be paid by cash, paid by credit card, paid online?

Yeah, I was just about to say, you know, like Like, what do they do?

The questions was like, how are they currently—

oh, how would they prefer to pay? Yeah, that's weird. That falls into the revenue streams. That seems like—

well, sure, because there's different— like, I mean, for us it might be pretty straightforward, but you could think of like other businesses, like some might do like fine, like, you know, a car dealership is going to do financing, or you could pay cash, right? Um, so we could do like, you know, maybe some people want to do Apple Pay, maybe people do want to do PayPal, maybe people want to do Venmo. Yeah, yeah, just those kind of things.

I always thought revenue streams like represented like the things that you were kind of selling, not like the payment processing. Yeah, but I see the, I see the question you wrote on your slide thing. How would they prefer to pay. So yeah, I guess that just comes from that presentation.

It just seems weird.

What about, let's say, we have like a— what to call it— like you can subscribe for like weekly, like a box of something.

Subscription.

Yeah, but it would be like a box that each week, or we have, for example, leftovers of this, then people subscribe. So you don't know what you're getting there.

It's like a monthly box where we fill it with like $40 worth of food every week.

Or Imperfect Foods, like they do it, right? So we could have something like that. That would be also different revenue stream.

Box? What is that called? Box? Surprise boxes? Subscription?

Um, got about a minute.

Um, yeah, okay.

Uh, maybe, maybe digital ads. Like if we have a YouTube channel, maybe, you know, we get money from—

yeah, like the YouTube. So yeah, like advertising on top of the content we create. Yeah.

Yeah, that's good.

Membership and subscriptions. What about like prep food?

Do we do that too? Like, I think Erica said that.

Prep food. What about like some stores, some places do like accounts, like you, like you just put it, like people go in, you just put it on their account and then like at the end of the month they kind of like send you a bill.

Oh yeah.

They send you a bill? Sort of like retail. If you know, like, is anyone on the like Starbucks app? On the Starbucks app, you can't, you don't, at least I think maybe it's just how my account is set up, but I don't pay every time I get a cup of coffee. I just pay once. I pay them $25 once. And then they like take it off my account ahead of time.

Yeah, yeah, ahead of time. Yes. So like customer account prepaid, it's almost like prepaid for—

yeah, for Starbucks that it's prepaid. So you— I mean, it's kind of like buying a gift card and then just using the gift card on the app. This might be like kind of gift cards.

This might be like kind of a hope one, but like if we took in some like packaging that we could recycle, we'd make money from that, perhaps. Cans and stuff.

Oh, and like returning it?

Like deposit?

Okay, deposit. Deposited. You know, I was just thinking of, is there any, I don't know too much about this, but this, I wonder if there's a way we can get carbon credits for selling.

Oh yeah, carbon credits. But even if this physical space, like, you know, it's like solar powered or like.

Oh, sure.

Temperate, you're like, maybe we could be carbon sequesters and like, yeah, you get carbon credits.

I don't know much about that either.

Yeah, I guess that's— we'll research it.

Carbon credits.

That's good though.

I think it—

oh, I can't really see.

Too many A's. Carbon credits.

Oh, all right, we're running over.

Can we Get moving to the next one.

Yeah, yeah, Adam's keeping us, keeping us honest here.

Well, out of respect to the group.

Yeah, no, no, it's good, that's good.

It's a hard job to interrupt.

Yeah, yeah, it is the worst. It's very thankless, um, until we thank you for doing it. Okay, cost structure. Cost structure. I think it's mostly going to be a summary of like, you know, what are the big costs from our activities and resources and partners, but focusing on what's the most important ones, what are the big ones we're going to like really want to pay attention to.

What are we—

where do we want to focus our efforts? Want to spend most of our money.

Yeah.

So it kind of feels like all— every key activity has a cost. So sure, definitely kind of mirrors that list.

Yeah.

Well, I think that like you don't need like umbrellas. I think you would say like, you know, cost of goods sold and like salaries, wages, those are like— would be the main—

I'm gonna do this. I'm going to put it up here and I'll move it and then we can look. I think you're right. I think we're going to be talking about activities a lot here. All right. Can people read that? Is the text too small?

Oh, it's tiny, but it's okay.

But isn't that right, like Brad, right? Like a lot of these activities are like staff-related work, right? So that wouldn't they fall into just like wages and Salaries. Yep.

Yeah, sure. Um, so you don't need to really know all that, I guess. Yeah. Um, well, I guess what's the best way?

Because it's like, we, uh, and there's still other, other categories below those, but those are the big—

some of the big ones. Let's do salary. Let me do employee salary.

Trying to think if like, because some members, some of them, would we be paying out to members? I guess I can't remember how we were like, are we, is there some membership where you like work there and you get paid, you pay out to those members?

There are some like that, but depending, you know, how much you give annually, then you have to dedicate, let's say, like 20 hours. And then you pay less annually, and then you dedicate less hours, right? And then also you have some kind of discount, but you don't pay them.

I think it depends on the structure.

I'll just leave it at employee salary, and we'll know. Yeah, it means any payout to members or whatever. So I was thinking retail space, maintenance, mortgage, anything else for retail space?

Maintenance, mortgage?

I mean fixed and variable costs associated with it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cost of goods, retail space.

Advertising. Yeah.

Marketing.

Marketing.

Yeah.

I'm gonna do marketing. And that probably includes, I mean, that could include all of the educational stuff we wanna do. Community building. I guess that's kind of a big umbrella, right?

Let's see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let me break that.

Let me break this down. So advertising, I'll just list them now and we can kind of sort later.

Content.

Including educational stuff, advertising content, branding.

No, that would be in marketing.

What else would be in marketing?

Branding.

Um, so it pulls again, like the salaries in my book, because like, yeah, because I think it's just going to be something that's like something somebody would do unless we— well, I mean, unless we would like outsource it, I guess, if we were going to like hire an agency, we're going to go that route.

Um, that could be like right now, I think it would fall under like employee salary.

Like, it would be—

yeah, we don't know that, right? So it's going to be—

or you could, you put just like an umbrella item for consultants.

Yeah, we'll probably have some kind of consultants. Consultants.

Distribution.

Yeah, do shipping.

Where the supplies themselves.

Cost of goods sold.

What is it?

Cost of goods sold.

Yeah, cost of goods.

Goods.

Equipment like computers or things like that.

Are you thinking mostly retail? I'm gonna put retail equipment. Taxes. What a bummer.

Yeah, tech, tech, certainly online services.

Tech costs.

And what about what the food and things we want to donate or charity, like all the charity events and things we want to do, is they're going to cost us, right?

Yeah, from an accounting standpoint, is that considered— do you like write that off?

Well, I would just like put that under like community development.

Okay.

I'm sure there'll be some costs associated with these type of things, not just like what Erica said, but a bunch of stuff. But I will say, like, what about like online service, like, um, you know, so like website, website stuff, uh, software, um, yeah, I think that kind of covers.

But where would that be?

Yeah.

Yeah, what other— retail has a lot of expenses. What else is there?

Contractors or that's employees?

Well, I guess contractors because there'd probably be like contractors for like retail maintenance, right?

Like, no, yes, like lawyer would be a contractor.

Okay, yeah, that's a good one.

Oh, is it? I thought consultant.

No, I don't think so.

Yeah, what are we—

what are—

kind of the same thing, but anyway, consulting is like a fancy contract.

We can always— this is a brainstorm. We can all like, whoever sort of—

they can sort of This is a small one, but there's like filing fees for starting a business.

There are, yeah.

Yeah, submit anything to the government.

Oh my gosh, that's—

I just think so. Like, I'm sorry, fees. Um, filing fees.

Yeah. What else is there?

As far as, um, I, I mean, how— I don't know how much into the weeds we want to go, but like usually like for POS systems, like you're gonna be essentially renting that from whatever company.

Oh yeah, so let me do website software and hardware. I'm going to combine That kind of covers a lot of bases there. We've already kind of talked about in here point of sale inventory somewhere.

Where did we—

we did it.

What about like losses and resources?

That's interesting. What about what?

I don't know if that accounts like losses, like when you like product goes bad or like due to Yeah, I don't know how to call it.

I don't know if it's— I don't, I don't know if that's considered a cost though. I think that's like a cost of goods sold, I think.

Okay.

Um, yeah, I guess that, yeah, that would kind of go under there. Um, is there any— we talked about marketing.

What about like just— I mean, you wrote maintenance, but I think exactly covered, but just like running the space, electricity or whatever.

Utilities.

Utilities, yeah, that's a better way to put it.

That's on your retail space generally.

I can put utilities.

We have some utility costs, right?

What about all the, all the fixed costs, all the variable costs, like that's all under retail, I assume there, no?

Yeah, yeah, you can just add it.

Yeah, there's like the Visa, MasterCard company has a different— that charge for that.

Oh yeah, totally. I'm just gonna—

I'm gonna add finance fees too. There's gonna be like, you know, for loans or any kind of Every time we walk into a bank, you know, they have to get you for something.

Beak wet. Say what?

They gotta get their beak wet.

Yeah.

Um, was there anything that's like co-op related with like, there's a couple in the activities where it's like communicating internal communication. I guess there's not really— trying to think if there's like a cost to that. Is there like any, um, I think it just goes under employee salary probably. It's just like it's stuff we're gonna have to do.

What about like, uh, events just for the employees? So I don't know, for example, like yoga events or some kind of, you know, to make people—

definitely events. Um, like event rentals for employees.

That's for employees.

So maybe that's like— that would fall into like, yeah, human, like, um, events or something. Employee events.

Employee picnic.

Employee, employee benefits.

Maybe employee benefits.

Employee benefits. Yeah, so it kind of covers like Even like health insurance and like—

Like a Christmas party or something.

But events is a good one too, because there's like event space you'd have, you know, if we're going to do a big event, we'd want to like have space for it, we'd rent, or if we want like an event coordinator.

Right.

All right guys, we have 10 minutes.

Yeah.

Oh wow, we cruised through it. Nice.

I think it was good though.

I think that's the last one.

That's the last square.

That was it.

Oh wow.

I guess we need to figure out how to get back.

This is—

as we went, the boxes got bigger. Start over here and we're like, oh, whatever. Next thing you know, we can't even—

yeah.

Who is going to be volunteering? Everyone.

All right, let's, let's keep moving. Um, while we're on track here, Vivek, do you want to get into, uh, the to finance or meeting related chat?

I would, I actually kind of like, well, I don't know, how do we tackle this? I, I, my part can actually wait. I'm kind of curious, like, how do we go from here?

What's your steps? Talk next steps.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, you wanna stick to the BMC for a minute?

Yeah.

So I think the next step is to take this and I think somebody should take what we have here and do their best at trying to figure out what we should research first and then kind of bring it back to the group and say, I think we should research these things and see if there's— and start to make connections between these and kind of have research behind it.

Should we not be grouping these a little bit more, Brad? Like, should we not be consolidating this a little bit, like organizing this, like, very long laundry list and then trying to figure out, like, which ones we should be, like, researching first? Or am I mistaken?

Um, no, I mean, like, that's definitely something— that's definitely good to do. Yeah, I mean, I guess, do you think that's something we should do as a group, or do you think that's something we should do like outside of a meeting?

I would do that. I mean, that's what I did last time.

We—

everyone gave us like sort of authority. We showed the process of how we like sort of categorize stuff. Okay, so maybe that's the next step, or maybe it's like a couple of us, like 2 people tackle each of Like couple of squares or something to summarize.

Yeah, I think that's good.

Yeah, yeah, maybe it's 8 of them, right? So maybe 2, 2 per couple, and then people can work together.

Yeah, maybe, maybe like I have like someone can volunteer to like figure out Or figure out like who, you know, the 2 people per box or something, just randomly, because like just randomly we don't need to. Yeah, but someone can just create—

I can do it then.

You'll create like a little doc for like—

okay, I do it and then like I do randomly and then you'll send it to that group and everyone, uh, will know it.

They can send it on Slack or something.

Yeah.

Okay, okay.

So the first thing is just categorizing it, is that correct, Brad?

And then categorizing it and then kind of sorting. Um, yeah, I think you want to sort it. Um, I guess it's a little different for each, but like, uh, kind of by size, like customers you want to— like bigger customer groups probably put at the top and like have really small customer groups at the bottom just so you can quickly see what are more niche. And what's like a big customer group.

Okay, so first, so the task is, who's going to figure out like who's going to handle each boxes or like maybe do it in pairs so people have support because this could be a little tricky. And then those people are going to like categorize this like long list into a slightly shorter list because there's probably a bit of overlap on some of these things, right? And then once those are categorized, then we're going to order like the ones that we believe is most important, um, you know, based on our knowledge and skills or whatever. And then, and then next week we're going to show those groups to to each other so that we can review it. Is that the process?

I think that's good. Yeah.

And then from there we can start researching like the top, top ones in each box.

Yeah. So I guess the top, I guess it's not necessarily going to be the top in my, in my mind. Like we may, you may actually want to research like, some of those smaller ones or like, I guess that was my thought. Like you may, we may want to start with like customer segments. You may want to start with like a niche customer group, right? And then kind of expand from there. So it's not necessarily like the top one.

Well, anyway, we have time. So the focus is, we have a bunch of tasks between now and next week. And we can figure out that part next week or during the week. We can figure out some of the logistics of how to go from there.

Okay, that makes sense to me.

Because I have to jump off at 9.

Okay, okay, yeah, that's fine. I think that's it.

I'll quickly summarize. Yeah, so just, just so folks know, like, um, you know, just thinking ahead, like And been talking to some finance folks. Russell and I had a conversation with like a bank or like a fund that loans money to cooperatives. Also myself, Erica, and Brad talked to somebody about feasibility study who also does some fundraising stuff. And— or not fundraising, he— they also have their own fund. And, you know, A, we're like, the process-wise, we seem to be on track. Like, it sounds like we're doing all the right things. And actually, this is going to take a little longer, so I think it's probably best— I'm going to try to dedicate a little time to like summarizing it well, but I think just generally speaking, I think we're doing all the right things, guys, and, um, but it requires a little bit more time. I don't want to rush this. And I want to get to the last thing of sort of seeing how everyone's doing and stuff.

So yeah, I think we are not thinking about the time meeting.

Oh yeah, because actually, yeah, Russell and Calvin still didn't get a chance to fill that out. So, uh, I, I can't tell like if we, we can, you know, figure out an alternative time or not. So Russell's out this weekend. Calvin, yeah, Calvin was sick.

So okay, okay, we'll push that to next week then.

Yep, thanks guys.

All right, so let's get into, um, how did it go, that section.

Jennifer, do you want to start and then you don't have to worry, you can jump off if you gotta go.

It went really well, I thought.

Want to pick somebody, Jennifer?

Uh, Oolong.

It—

yeah, I think that went well. Um, very hot. I mean, we were thinking brainstorming high speed. Um, yeah, thanks Brad for like— and like for the video, for the slides. It's made everything easier. Otherwise I think it would take us 3 weeks if we will be explaining everything, you know, before each block. So yeah, great job.

Next, um, yeah, I think it was a great meeting. I think it's like interesting, it's an interesting example of like a meeting model that maybe we can consider, which is like, you know, something that's really— try to think about something really big and just like do it one thing per meeting. But yeah, awesome execution. Um, Brad, Adam, Nate, behind the scenes, you're also helping Brad prep for this meeting. Thanks to you. And obviously, Adam, thanks for keeping us on track. So yeah, awesome meeting overall. I feel really good about this. Next steps, I'm gonna pick Zia, or Erica's dog Zia.

Sorry guys, I can move. Yes, I agree with you guys, like definitely being prepared for this meeting helped a lot, and I think that's why we achieved what we achieved, which is finish this. We didn't even think we could do it, so thank you Brad and Vivek for finding like the resources to get prepared, and everybody because like everybody participated and it was really light, really went by fast. Thank you. And I pass it to Brad.

I'm pretty much the same. Um, yeah, it was kind of a roller coaster. It kind of went by fast. Um, I think there's a lot of good stuff here. Um, I think it's going to be a— I think it's going to take us a while to really like condense it and like digest everything. Um, But I think it's good. It's good. I think it's just good to get everything on the board. And now we can look at it. And like, now there's something to talk about. So great. Was that everybody? I think that Adam—

Adam.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, this is good.

I think developing how, when you try to work from separate locations, balancing the core meetings versus the working on your own is kind of— is a challenge. So, um, this— I think this was a good use of time to just get a lot, a lot done during a meeting where everyone could kind of quickly contribute and react. So, um, I think it's a good model for the future, definitely.

Adam, thank you for keeping us on track. It's not easy.

Yeah, I think we might leave on time.

Yes!

Cool, awesome guys.

Uh, great icebreaker too.

Yeah, happy birthday, Erica!

Happy birthday, Erica! It's already your time.

No, wait, almost, almost, almost.

It's still 3 hours.

Just 3 more hours.

Happy European birthday. Thank you, guys.

Thanks, everybody.

Cool.

See you.

Have a good—

we'll see you next week.

Take care.

Bye.

Have a great week. Bye, guys. Good night.

Good night.