Woodstock Jag

I realised this after posting. I think we’d have made better use of him out wide.

If they’d left Firhill with a 4-1 victory I don’t think we could have had many complaints. Totally fell out the game second half. No off-ball runs, poor use of wings, fundamentally not at the races. Would have liked to see Zander brought on to inject a bit of pace and urgency into the game. Harry Milne had a poor game and yet probably single handedly salvaged us a point with his defensive efforts. We need an imposing defensive midfielder, should probably give David Mitchell a run of games, and Muirhead needs competition for the experienced centre half spot. No point having Neilson running out with the ball from the back if there’s no midfield out ball for him to pass to. In the circumstances, a point salvaged, probably undeservedly.

I must say Jim, I do find it very funny that you were very critical of the football club on discretionary cost grounds when your mate Colly was relieved of his duties (even though his notice didn’t have to paid all in one go). Yet you’re now also telling us that they were incompetent because they didn’t incur massive redundancy costs dismissing any employee who wasn’t directly involved in “putting a game on every fortnight”.

I am asking you to quantify, with sufficient specificity, what you would have cut, to achieve the necessary levels of savings. Since you are unable or unwilling to do that, we can draw the adverse inference that your claim it would be “straightforward” to make those savings is wrong. No that’s not my argument. My argument is that the sums of money that would have been saved by making even savage cuts to the non-footballing operations of the football club, between January and March 2023, wouldn’t have been even remotely close to enough to stave off a cashflow crisis. Therefore there was no compelling business case to slash and burn at that immediate point in time, while more sustainable and deliverable proposals were being developed and considered, such as fresh capital investment. Football Clubs are not normal businesses. They are affected by structural issues that are unique to the environment in which they operate. To list several relevant examples: (a) income from ticket revenue is extremely lumpy (mainly acquired in the summer), contributing to a cash nadir mid-season (b) income from TV, prize and sponsorship revenue also mostly accrues at the beginning or end of a season, also contributing to a mid-season cash nadir (c) many of the services rendered by the Football Club are done throughout the season, but to customers who have paid at the start of the season (therefore in-year cash savings are impacted) (d) health and safety compliance costs like stewarding and policing are a significant, non-discretionary, element, without which the Club cannot make its main product open to the public (e) the transfer window restrictions severely restrict the flexibility to make changes to the lion’s share of the budget allocation to wages There are others, but this explains why a Club Board, freshly appointed in December 2022, might have limited room for manoeuvre to completely restructure the off-field operations before the end of February 2023. If we hadn’t drawn Rangers, £100k would not have been enough to meet payroll in February. And the soft loans would not have been enough to see the Club through to the end of the season. Earlier in this thread, you were saying that the existence of the soft loans was a “handout” and evidence of incompetence of the December-March board. Now you’re saying it would have been totally fine for them to rely on soft loans if only they’d sacked some people. Which is it? No I don’t. I simply recognise that sacking some staff wouldn’t have made anything like the quantum of difference necessary to address the cashflow issue, and may indeed have made it worse! So you agree there is very limited room to re-structure off-field operations mid-season as a way to address an acute and massive cashflow crisis at two months’ notice? Glad we agree. The infrastructure needed to do this is the vast majority of Thistle’s non-footballing expenditure! But still a non trivial proportion of the non-footballing staffing costs of the company! A functioning football club. With staff. Okay Jim, off you go and set up a Football Club without any staff and show us all how it’s done! And TJF weren’t a shareholder during that period! QED! We agree! And we all shout “hurrah”!

We were in the Premier League in 2016! I was talking about when we were last in the Championship. When you were a Club Director. Between 2010 and 2011! No it isn't "as straightforward as that". Cutting these kind of overheads isn't something you can just do overnight. It is something that requires transition to avoid compromising core functions of the business. By this logic, the Football Club should have sacked the entire playing staff and accepted automatic relegation, because at least then the business would have broken even. Investment is clearly a desirable part of the mix when addressing a cashflow crisis. This happens all the time with businesses that are capable of being restructured towards sustainability, but where that requires long-term changes rather than rash, short term fire sales. tl;dr "Yes, Jim is wildly speculating" You don't know that the redundancy payments would have been minimal. This is rampant speculation. Saving £100k wouldn't have been even remotely close to meeting what was necessary to deliver February payroll. So it would have been utterly pointless to do that. Glad we agree. £100k wouldn't have been enough had we not drawn Rangers in the Cup. A Football Club cannot make drastic changes to its spending commitments mid-way through a season, unsettling its staff, forcing it to withdraw basic amenities and creating rampant uncertainty for partner organisations. Anyone that tells you it can or should do this should not be taken seriously. Pounds and pence Jim. Quantify it. Name the things that would be cut. The things that money would not have been spent on in January, February and March 2023 that were in fact spent. Show me numbers, Mrs Landingham. You are speculating. The Directors of the Football Club do not "represent" anyone except the majority shareholder that sought their appointment. It is not correct to state that "TJF were up to date on the finances". Two TJF directors signed NDAs in order to have detailed financial information shared with them, to facilitate the development of an investment proposal. Even if TJF were kept fully appraised of the details of the finances, it would have had absolutely zero ability to affect spending decisions made by the Football Club. At this point in time it was not a trustee, so could not even vote on decisions of the majority shareholder. TJF, between January and July of 2023, had no more influence over Club spending decisions than anyone else who entered into an NDA with a view to investing in the Club. In other words, it had no influence whatsoever. This is bluster and nonsense Jim. Show me numbers, Mrs Landingham. Costed itemised savings. Pounds and pence. Show me how it would have increased cashflow by the end of February such that the Club could have paid its bills without soft-loans from directors. Show your working. Always be deeply suspicious of anyone who insists, with incomplete information, that something isn't complicated.

Except it isn't nonsense, Jim. The point is that the steps you propose would have failed to save anything like the money required to secure a break-even budget, and would, as stolenscone has pointed out, have in some cases actually increased the cash-burn in redundancy payments. The fact that employees have employment contracts and that redundancy costs money. Wrong, because statutory redundancy isn't the only thing to which people are legally entitled. Employment contracts are usually more generous than the statutory minimum. No, my argument is that we were running out of cash and that making a handful of people redundant wasn't going to make any fundamental change to that picture. That it was highly unlikely to save the hundreds of thousands of pounds that would have been required (without the Rangers money) to remain solvent. No it wasn't. Between January and April the strategy was to buy the Club breathing space to restructure the business by first getting a substantial injection of new capital. Hence TJF tried to pull together a consortium. Only when that failed did certain individuals step-in with soft-loans to alleviate the immediate cash problem. And having alleviated the immediate cash problem, the Club Board then proactively sought a more permanent solution in the form of new investment into the Club. Which is what was delivered in October. Two points here: (a) you have absolutely no idea whether savings were identified or implemented (b) you have absolutely no idea of the quantum that such savings could plausibly have delivered, or how quickly they would have been realised for the purposes of cashflow It is completely normal, when a business has a cashflow problem and/or needs fundamentally restructured, that it will seek either or both (a) new equity investment or (b) credit. This can and often does come alongside savings. But there is no point in completely gutting the underlying business if it won't save enough cash to keep it going, and if it jeopardises longer-term revenue streams. That just kicks the can down the road every bit as much, if not more, than short-term loans or lump sump investments. And when you've reviewed all aspects of the Club and it's clear that there aren't quick savings that can generate hundreds of thousands of pounds of extra cash inside two months? Then what do you do? Remember the cash pinchpoint, pre-Rangers, was February payroll. Even if redundancy saves you money in March, April, May and June that's utterly useless in January and February. And you'd have had the Club laying off staff, at additional cost, during that period? Absolutely wild, Jim. The investment process was an entirely external exercise, Jim, as you well know. The Club were not involved in those discussions; they were merely kept updated as to the broad outline of thinking from those that were involved in the discussions. There was an information sharing exercise done under NDAs, alluded to previously by the two TJF Board members who were given an insight into the Club's finances. The key point is that none of the people in that room had any say at all over spending decisions at the Club, whatsoever, during the period in question. TJF did not have a "nominated director" at the time. There was, and indeed still is, no entitlement in law or practice for TJF to "have a director" on the Club Board. We put forward the name of a person to the PTFC Trustees (when asked to do so) to help them to assemble an interim board. It was entirely open to them to decide not to proceed with that appointment and/or to remove the director in question at any time, without any duty to consult with TJF or to seek its agreement. That director was, and still is, wholly independent of TJF's Board. We have no power to demand any information from that director. We cannot remove them. We cannot replace them with someone else. They are there in their own right. Apologies, I expressed that poorly. It's about 1/3 expressed in those terms. I meant that £1 from the early 2010s bought you the same value of goods as £1.50 or thereabouts buys you now. This is according to the Bank of England's own CPI index. So when you say: "Ive stated that the previous Non Playing overhead in past years in the Championship - was circa 50% of what it was in Jan 23" Most of this is actually down to inflation. It is not realistic, once redundancy payments, cost of internal re-organisation and inflation is taken into account, then to pretend that we can somehow slash the non-playing overheads in half in the space of six weeks. All of this assumes you even have the figures for what the non-playing overhead is in January 2023. Which you don't. Because you're not party to an NDA with the Club which would lead to you being told what that figure was. And because the 2022-23 Accounts have not been published, meaning you cannot yet infer it from other financial information! You are wildly speculating from a position of very limited knowledge of the Club's recent finances, based on (one can only assume) financial information you were privy to between 2010 and 2011 when you were a director of the Football Club, in a very different financial environment.

One more thing to put out there (lest there be any doubt about roles and responsibilities). TJF had no formal relationship whatsoever with the Football Club until the summer, when the PTFC Trust trust deed was varied to make TJF a trustee and its members beneficiaries. So it wasn’t even indirectly in a position of influence over any shareholding whatsoever during the period January 2023 (when the nature and extent of the Club’s financial difficulties became apparent) and July 2023 (when it became a trustee).

This is precisely it. The Club's challenge was cashflow. It was in trouble because it lacked the current assets to see out the season. The idea that the Club could have made the situation better by firing the hospitality or back-office staff in January 2023 and stopped providing hospitality to people who had already paid for it is frankly ludicrous. This conversation simply serves to suggest (to me) that Jim has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Club's financial difficulties.

Not vague generalities. Specifics, Jim. What would you have cut and how much would it have saved? Pounds and pence please. The value of money has depreciated by about 50% since before we were promoted to the Premiership. You are drastically overstating the potential for cuts, even if it were to be done in close-season with relatively less pre-committed expenditure. I'm afraid I fundamentally disagree with you on this Jim. If anything, the Directors of the Football Club have, in the last 18-24 months or so, been tasked with too much of the day-to-day running of the Football Club. Specifics please Jim. What would you cut and how much would it save? Pounds and pence. Show your working. Ladies and gentlemen, we should have shut the Alan Rough Lounge, broken sponsorship contracts for pre-paid hospitality, laid off the matchday hospitality team and probably still not saved very much money. Jim's grand plan! TJF isn't a shareholder. It's one of four trustees of the majority shareholder. We're not a shareholder, proper or otherwise! Not mid-season and at two-months' notice, no.

Perhaps you'd like to describe to us the £500k of off-field savings you would have made in January 2023, Jim? (After all, but for the Rangers money, which didn't exist yet, that's how much the Club would have lost in the 2022-23 season) Not vague generalities. Let's talk specific numbers here. Who would you have fired? How much money would that have saved? Which non-staffing overheads would you have cut? How much would they have saved? The bottom line is that the kind of cuts that would have been needed to avoid losses in the 2022-23 season were not deliverable because of (a) pre-committed spending that could not be altered mid-season (b) the quantum was simply far too big for small changes to make a difference. The harsh reality is that if you had insisted on slash and burn in January it would have been to the player budget. It would have meant selling several players and not replacing them.

That game was already a bogey when the 2022-23 budget, set by the old board, was found clearly to be unachievable. You can't just casually save hundreds of thousands of pounds mid-way through a season. The issue is not just that the budget was not balanced. The issue is that it would have led to insolvency even if it was balanced, because there wasn't enough working capital in the company left. Correct, so we should probably build-up reliable, repeatable, predictable sources of income and build those into the Club budget. Like, say, a fan fundraising vehicle pledging at the start of a seasons to put £10kpm minimum into the Club every month for the full season. But the nature and extent of the problem was such that this alone would not solve the problem. As TJF explained in June to the fanbase, new investment of £500k plus was an absolute necessity if the Club was to continue to be able to trade as a functioning Football Club in the 2nd tier of Scottish Football for the 2023-24 season and beyond. You have absolutely no idea whether the current directors are capable of doing this. There hasn't even been a full financial year in which any member of the current Club Board has presided over the Club's financial situation. Indeed it is exactly one year to the day that all bar one member of the old board went off in a huff and quit because they didn't like the fact that the PTFC Trust trustees had decided to do the adult thing and work with TJF to improve the ownership model and address fans' widespread discontent. You're right it isn't complicated. But you're frankly just speculating about the abilities of the current Club Board based on very limited evidence. We don't even have the accounts of the 2022-23 season yet (and they weren't even in charge of setting the budget that year).

Just on this very narrow point. The £500k cannot be "pulled". The conditions on the investment prevent the shares being redeemed unless Thistle's cash balance is in excess of £2 million and even then, only in relation to any excess cash balance over £2 million. It can only be pulled from a set of conditions that leave Thistle in a position of very considerable financial strength. Whilst the TJF pledge is a voluntary recurring donation, we have deliberately structured the commitment in such a way as to make it predicable for the Club. That's why it's a specific monthly amount, for an agreed period, rather than just ad hoc contribution. The intention is that, from the next TJF AGM onwards, the members will be invited on an annual basis to vote on the Club pledge. This will provide a degree of certainty around how TJF funds will be used.

Except for the bit where I didn't say this at all. You have completely ignored what I said and simply projected what you think is happening.

Yes, but the, ahem, previous incumbents did the opposite of this, eroding the margin of safety by spending significant six-figure sums of money in successive seasons that the Football Club did not have. We start from the position that there was barely enough working capital to see-out the 2022-23 season. We cannot build from there without capital injection, unless you intend for Thistle to go down to a third-tier budget and build cash reserves over literal decades before even being able to look at 2nd tier football again. But you're ignoring here why the residual debts (i.e. the soft loans to directors) were needed last season. They were needed because the working capital had been exhausted by the financial performance of the Club in the 2022-23 season (which was itself a consequence of the budget set in the summer of 2022 and the Club's failure to deliver on its underlying assumptions). The starting point in summer 2023 was that there wasn't enough working capital. So investment was needed to avoid a cashflow problem. Even with a break-even budget. Even if the Club were to run a small surplus! No, this doesn't follow. The investment ensures that at no point in the season do the cash reserves fall below £0, preventing the Club from meeting its short-term obligations. The actual amount of cash reserves at the end of the season depends entirely on the timing of different sources of income (for example).

I'm not sure I'd be throwing about St Johnstone too freely given they are expected to post losses of £1.5 million in their financial year 2022-23 accounts. They can at least stomach such eye-watering losses, however, because they've run surpluses for many years and because Geoff Brown pumped millions of pounds into their coffers, giving them an abnormally large margin of safety for a Club that size. The big lesson from St Johnstone is that it's a lot easier to build a sustainable Football Club when you already have several millions of pounds in the bank as working capital, and therefore do not have any cashflow challenges of which to speak. It is cashflow, far more even than failing to break even, that kills Football Clubs, though the latter eventually manifests itself as the former. The recent investment into Thistle was specifically done to begin to restore the Club's margin of safety, so that there was enough working capital to start building the business and making it more self-sustaining. That isn't going to happen overnight though. This simply goes back to the central point that the "begging bowl" analogy is misplaced here. Sometimes you need to put the money in to make the business viable. That's what Geoff Brown recognised at St Johnstone.

There are practical (mainly admin burden-related) difficulties associated with issuing new micro-shareholdings, which is why the Club hasn't done it for many years. The only times really since Save The Jags that new shares have been issued has been for substantial one-off investments of money into the Club. The four most notable examples of this happening were: David Beattie investing in the Club in the mid-2000s Billy Allan doing likewise shortly afterwards Colin Weir investing in the club in the mid 2010s (leading to the Weir family shareholdings, now held by Jacqui Low, and the creation of the PTFC Trust) Donald McClymont, Stewart Smith and Mark Tyndall (the preference share investors from the autumn) I think the one thing that most people can agree on is that the last thing Partick Thistle needs is yet another fans co-ordination vehicle, given the complexity of the three-body relationship we have at the moment. As things stand: PTFC Trust has the majority shareholding (68%) but no direct fundraising capability, and its voting beneficiaries are ST holders or members of TJF and TJT The Jags Foundation has the mass membership and fundraising capability (1650+ members, pledging £10kpm+ to the Club) and will soon be one of only two trustees of the PTFC Trust The Jags Trust has a key minority shareholding (slightly less than 7%) and is also a trustee of the PTFC Trust, but has a much smaller membership and very limited fundraising capability If any new shareholder would be none of these, that means setting up a new legal entity. Is that really worth it? If it's to be the PTFC Trust, who's going to administer that, and what's the advantage to (essentially) no material change in its existing shareholding? If it's to be The Jags Trust, fine, that's a matter for their members. I personally see the attraction of TJF acquiring shares commensurate with its existing fundraising for the Club, but I know why others don't (if anything we want to be simplifying the fan-owned shareholding, not complicating it further). The decision was taken in the summer that TJF's contributions to the Club should principally take the form of a recurring donation, rather than a subscription for shares, because it's a lot simpler to administer. Having more shares, at this stage, is also less important than getting the fan ownership model right. The fan-controlled bodies already have the shares: it's about translating that into a proper set of structures for power and accountability. Beyond that, frankly, small shareholdings are a nice-to-have but not really the ball game. Unless there's a large cohort of Jags fans that will only put money in if there's shares in it, it's not really worth the hassle and that money can find its way to the Club other ways.

It's one of those irregular verbs isn't it? I bring in more revenue to create a sustainable business You put out the begging bowl He's dependent on millionaires to pay his bills

It's working capital.

That's fine. TJF isn't a shareholder. It's a trustee of the majority shareholder. If we felt that Andrew Holloway was doing a bad job as a director of the Football Club, we would ask him to step down, and I'm sure he would probably thank us for relieving him of the burden! Ultimately, however TJF does not have unilateral control over board appointments and decisions. Those are taken by the trustees collectively, and TJF is only one of four trustees (as things stand). So to be clear your argument is that the Players' Fund shouldn't exist and that the Club shouldn't promote it?

Okay, let's put it another way. We specifically saw a spike in new memberships on the day this was announced and subsequently (slightly over 20 new members, just under half at the General rate, and the remainder evenly split across the Concessionary, Basic and Junior membership categories). The value of the pledges for those memberships, over the course of a year, will be about £1500 extra. Does it fully cover the cost of the hospitality? No, obviously not. But it is growing the organisation and building the income base, which is good news.

Sorry, I'm confused. What part of the job is TJF doing for the Club Board? We're not involved in the Players' Fund. It's a Club initiative. TJF is the primary fan fundraising vehicle. It was agreed at the start of the season, after discussions with the Club Board that we would make a £10kpm minimum contribution towards the operating budget of the Football Club. If we're able to provide additional support to the Club ahead of the January transfer window, while giving something back to our members as a thank you for their efforts, that's great and the beginning and end of it really! Let me get this right... we should criticise the Club for prominently advertising a mechanism to donate specifically to Kris Doolan's player budget just before the January transfer window? On the contrary, it's my understanding that the Players Fund is specifically ring-fenced. As for TJF's contributions to the Club, we're damned if we do here and we're damned if we don't. If we tell the Club how it should spend that money, people will be accusing us of trying to run the Football Club instead of leaving those decisions to the Club Board. If we don't tell the Club how it should spend that money, you say there's no clear line of accountability about who's in charge. So which of these is the right approach? This isn't true. TJF had no say in the appointment of Richard Beastall as a Director. That decision was taken by the PTFC Trust, long before TJF became a trustee. Dougie McCrea was invited to join the board at the urging of Alistair Creevy, before any direct TJF representation was on the Club Board at all, and before TJF became a trustee. Caroline Mackie was a PTFC Trust appointee on the recommendation of TJF, and appointed before TJF became a trustee. She acts on the club board autonomously and without direction from the TJF board. Only Andrew Holloway sits on both the Club Board and the TJF Board and has routine interaction with both boards. You're forgetting that the current Club board is, and always has been, a temporary arrangement. As you'll have seen in a recent Club update, there are discussions ongoing about the implementation of a Club-Trust agreement, making more permanent provision around how Club Directors are to be appointed, how direct fan representation is going to work and more besides. We are hoping this will be at a final or near final stage before the AGM in January. That investment was done to begin restoring the Club's margin of safety. The Players' Fund is an initiative specifically focused on boosting the player budget. They are two different, complementary, things. I'm not a businessman, but I do know that there are two ways that you can deal with "not having enough money". One is to "make cuts" and the other is to "get more money". TJF isn't the shareholder (I know you know this). I don't know what, specifically, we are supposedly "enabling" but you're entitled to your opinion.

Several points here: Club is getting full value for the hospitality places The cost is being met partly from TJF's sale of tickets to members, and partly from TJF's accumulated funds (in much the same way as we've used excess funds to pay for other members draws and events) TJF will have contributed more than £150k to the Club this calendar year In those circumstances, it seemed only right to give something back to members and to acknowledge their efforts The way the hospitality event has been structured is designed to enable funds over and above those in the £10kpm pledge to hit the Club's coffers just before the January window January fixtures are ones the Club traditionally struggles to fill hospitality, so there is often a deadweight loss in empty seats at hospitality This arrangement ensures a fully sold-out Alan Rough Lounge at no risk to the Club This event was possible because TJF has been raising comfortably in excess of its budgeted commitment to the Football Club (and will still do so even with the new Youth Academy pledge) There are also strategic justifications for an event like this, beyond the immediate economic benefit to the Club: Introducing hospitality to a new audience TJF is experimenting with variation to the hospitality itinerary and experience (so it's a commercial learning exercise for the Club) TJF has seen an increase in members and pledges since the event was launched (getting people to pledge more and for longer is critical to what we can promise the Club in future seasons) The Club will maximise its revenue raising longer-term by having genuine options that appeal to lots of different people. If some people want to donate to the Players' Fund but not to TJF, that's completely fine and up to them. Personally, I will be channelling my own resources wherever possible through TJF initiatives, because I think it's important to build the sustainability of the fan fundraising vehicle. The Players Fund helps Kris Doolan in January. Building a mass appeal TJF helps build a sustainable football club for generations. There is wider social value to building up a strong supporters' association, with connections into the wider community. This isn't just an exercise in tipping as much money into the Club as possible. It's about building a set of institutions that makes income streams deliverable, reliable and repeatable. That's what protects the Club's future, and a vibrant supporters' association that regularly does things to value its members is a critical part of that.

Excellent piece of business that.

I believe that shareholders have been informed the AGM will take place in early January.

Jamie Hepburn saw me wait several seconds with my hands under a soap dispenser at Alloa, with me thinking it was automatic dispenser rather than manual. He found this very amusing.