Planning tools for launch
What resources are required to launch your market? Who does what tasks? Which metrics need to be monitored? How do you define success? This section offers resources to plan and run your Slivers-of-Time operation through to the point that it becomes self sustaining; generating enough revenue to pay for itself.
Three planning tools are available:
(1) Spend-per-week spreadsheet
Based on your inputs, this spreadsheet will estimate how much spending power you will need to sustain your market for its first year. Note: by spending power we mean funds being spent on local people through the marketplace, NOT spending on setting up the marketplace. Your market is funded by a small charge built into each transaction, there are currently no upfront costs beyond the small amounts of time involved.
The key inputs in this spreadsheet are:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| number of sellers registered this week | total number of sellers registered | average hours that must be sold to keep a seller committed each week | average charge to buyer for each hour purchased |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| average length of bookings (in hours) | number of bookings required each week | spending power required this week | total spending required by this point |
Some further explanations of key columns:
1) It takes time to put sellers into the market, they have to be vetted and may need the system explained to them. Conservatively, we suggest you bank on 40 minutes to register a seller once they have entered all their details in the marketplace. Also limiting your rate of new sellers is that the number of sellers has to stay relative to the buying power. If you don't think you'll get the buying power shown in column 7 for a particular week then reduce the number of market entrants. Aim to start with 10 or so sellers so there is enough availability to meet buyers' needs from day one.
3) How demanding will your sellers be? Will they be happy with just one or two hours sold a week? Or will they walk away from the market with anything less than four? Experience so far suggests an hour a week sold this new way will keep sellers' faith in the market if they understand it is likely to pick up in the future.
4) What rate do you think your buyers will be paying for hours in your market? The rate paid by the buyer is the total of: (a) the pay rate to the seller (b) on-costs such as employer's NI (c) the agency's mark up (d) SMS charges - about 16p per booking (e) the system transaction charge, typically around 2.5% of the seller pay rate. (There is no transaction charge for local authority buyers until end of June 2008.)
5) What length of bookings will the buyer(s) you're starting with require? This figure is a key driver for getting the most from the available cash. In the early days of the market, the more you can persuade your buyers to bring their length of bookings down to a figure as close as possible to your entry in column 3, the more the available work will be spread around. That means it will sustain more sellers for the same spending. For suggestions about helping your launch buyers break their requirements down into small chunks of work see the how to launch page.
7) This column shows how much will need to have been spent on your market by this point if it is to sustain the activity currently planned.
Additional columns 9, 10 and 11help you plan the revenue generated by the agency from it's percentage cut of the rate paid by the buyer for each hour purchased. This can help you work out when the agency expect to break even for example.
For convenience, the spreadsheet is pre-filled with some sample data based on existing Slivers-of-Time operations. It shows a market which has had £120,000 of spending allocated to it for its first year and aims to get 100 local people selling their spare hours. Any further expansion beyond this will be dependant on additional buyers coming into the market.
(2) A project plan for launch
This is based on our How to Launch section and allows you to tweak individual activities according to your circumstances.
(3) A Prince 2 P.I.D.
Your organization may wish to treat launching a Slivers-of-Time market as a formal project with its own project board. If they adhere to the Prince 2 methodology (the most commonly used form of project assessment in the public sector) things will start with a Project Initiation Document. We have part completed one with some suggested inputs, including a risk log.
