Using Backpack for nonlinear business planning

by Paula | 6 June 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: business planning, peak oil

Last fall, I published a blog post called Engineer your own soft landing? The nonlinear business plan which described a planning strategy that takes into account various decline scenarios. In a nutshell, the goal is to develop miniature business plans for each of a number of different scenarios, the pieces of which can be mixed and matched depending upon how events play out.

This is a followup to that post and describes how to use the free online tool Backpack to develop, and keep current with, a nonlinear business plan.

What is Backpack?

Backpack is one of a family of online business softwares engineered by a company called 37Signals, with which you are probably familiar if your work involves the web in almost any way.

From the Backpack website: “Backpack is an easy intranet for your business. Store, share, discuss, and archive everything that’s essential for your team. Safe and secure.” And that’s just what Backpack does — it allows you to keep notes, lists, write documents, keep a journal, and more; and, it allows you to collaborate and share all this with business partners, clients, or whomever you wish to invite.

The organizational features of Backpack make it a great choice for building a nonlinear business plan. It is also incredibly simple to use, and includes both a free version, which I’ve used to set up my example; a solo version for $7/mo that has some additional features; and a series of ever-larger versions for SMEs all the way up to global enterprise.

Getting Oriented

Backpack’s center of gravity is its “Pages.” Pages offer the ability to quickly add notes, lists, writeboards and dividers:

• Notes are brief snippets of information
• Lists are checklists used most frequently for to-do lists, which can be checked off as tasks are completed. They are useful for just plain lists too, however.
• Writeboards are full documents which are composed right in Backpack. What’s nice about these is that Backpack will save draft versions along the way rather than overwriting everything all the time.
• Dividers are simply page dividers that help keep your content sectioned off and more organized.

Pages can also be tagged just as a blog post, a link at De.licio.us, or a photo at Flickr would be tagged.

Each page is assigned its own email address so that users can email lists, notes and such to their pages; emailed content is added automatically, and can be re-arranged later.

Page content items can be dragged-and-dropped onto other pages. This is going to come in very handy for our purposes.

Getting Started

Backpack’s free account comes with five pages. I’ve set up the pages in my example account like so:

• Summary — Equivalent to the standard executive summary of an existing business plan
• Current — This page is set up with the subheadings of the Summary page, but is otherwise blank. It’ll be the repository for scenario planning items as they are needed.
• Scenario 1: Hyperinflation
• Unused
• Unused

The links above go to live, published Backpack pages. They aren’t interactive, but demonstrate pretty well what a Backpack page looks like.

Filling in the Pages

The “Summary” page describes where the business currently stands; this is important information to hang on to and shouldn’t change much. It provides an anchor for recalling where the business has been so that its owner can avoid repeating mistakes, and/or look back to see what worked in the past as the economy rides the bumpy plateau. The Journal feature of Backpack is also useful for keeping track of what gets changed and when, and can serve as a reference for the same purposes.

The “Current” page is where most of the action takes place. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The “Scenario” pages are for developing actionable alternatives to current business practices. These are just like the Summary page, but the information included under each heading changes to suit whatever scenario requires alternative actions. Compare the section headings on both the Summary and Hyperinflation pages linked above; they are the same, but the Hyperinflation page content is changed to reflect potential actions.

The “Current” Page

The Current page remains empty until needed. This is a record of current maneuverings and will change as conditions change. Content here comes from the Scenario pages: any list, note, or other item added to the Scenario pages can be dragged-and-dropped into the Current page. This allows an entrepreneur to mix-and-match preplanned responses, and to have a nearly instantaneous document to refer to when dealing with investors, creditors, employees, and for personal organizational purposes.

For exmaple, say hyperinflation does set in and money becomes nearly worthless. Barter will become a necessity, but rather than scrambling to figure out how to make barter work, a small business owner has figured out ahead of time what she can offer and what she can accept in trade. She simply drags the relevant items from her Hyperinflation page to her Current page; the Current page can then be emailed to employees, partners, or whomever; it can be printed out; and it can be edited as needed.

When conditions change and these items are no longer effective, they can be dragged back onto the Hyperinflation page to be reused again later.

If you try it

If you give Backpack a whirl for nonlinear business planning, I’d love to hear back from you to know how it goes. I am in the process of developing my own nonlinear business plan in this way and would be interested in comparing notes.

If you need help

If you’d like to try this but need a hand I’d be happy to help. What I’ll do is this: I can meet with you on the phone and give you a tour of Backpack, and walk you through the process of setting up pages and the like. Then you can pay me whatever you think the value of my help is. No set price — if this turns out to be a service I’ll offer through my business I’ll set a price then, but in the meantime you get to decide. If you’re interested drop me an email and we’ll see what we can do.

An open letter to Richard Heinberg

by Paula | 30 May 2009 | permalink | comments [12]
Tags: relocalization, peak oil

Mr. Heinberg,

I read with great interest the email exchange between you and Rob Hopkins, posted at Hopkins’ website on May 27. You bring up a number of interesting points which I would like to address.

You open the conversation thus:

Now, the reason we all see it necessary to transition away from fossil fuels is that if we don’t, dire things will happen. But what if it’s actually too late to prevent some of those dire things from happening, and they occur during our Transition period and process?

Indeed, what if they do? Mr. Heinberg, I fear your epiphany is too little, too late.

Back in 2005/2006, when I was still publishing Adaptation, I tried repeatedly to raise this very warning flag. It was obvious to me then that the effects of peak oil would be felt by individuals on the ground as a financial catastrophe and that this would almost certainly bring long-term preparations to a screeching halt. In Will Fear of Money Destroy Preparations? I wrote:

My personal great concern over collapse is the economic hardship that awaits us all, and that is even now peering over the horizon. We will all face economic problems much sooner than we will face blackouts; we will lose our jobs and our homes long before the lights go out.

Addressing these issues is, for me, priority. They also require discussing economics, markets, and money. Each time I attempted to broach the subject on the mailing lists, I was generally ignored, or occasionally met with hostility. I tried to establish a separate mailing list to keep economic issues off the main lists so as not to offend anyone. No one joined.

In time I began to get the picture. The subject of money was taboo among the list participants, so taboo that it was beyond discussion even in the context of a massive planetary die-off.

Back in 2005/2006 there was still plenty of money and time to spend on community-level mitigation against the financial emergencies now plaguing the developed world. The analogy I used then was that we should be building a sliding board down the cliff and worry about planting a garden at the bottom later. What the relocalization movement has been doing all along is trying to build a sustainable garden at the bottom of the cliff without realizing their efforts aren’t going to spare anyone splatting their guts out as we all go over the edge together. But no one wanted to hear it. The comments at the end of the link to my article are pretty typical of the response I got.

It’s probably too late now to build a sliding board. And I have heard no reports of relocalization/transition efforts being of any use to people who’ve lost their jobs, their retirement savings, who find themselves under crushing debt.

You went on to say:

Obviously, what Transition and PCI have been advocating (community gardens, local currencies, etc.) are in fact at least partial solutions to these very problems, but so far we have discussed them in terms of proactive efforts to keep the problems from happening, or to build a better world in the future. Should the growing presence of these problems affect how our solutions are described (to the general public, to policy makers, or among ourselves) and/or how they are implemented?

My own feeling is that the growing presence of these problems should cause you to jump up like your pants were on fire and quickly start brainstorming ways to phase national currencies out of community-level economic networks; and, to replace them with something more stable that will naturally become obsolete during the decades it will take permaculture consciousness to become the norm.

You continued:

I think the best way for me to continue the conversation would be to respond to specific points you [Rob Hopkins] made.

“Is it possible to design a bottom-up emergency response plan that is effective?”

If not, then I think that we (that is, those of us who desire to see an orderly, decentralized transition process) may be in danger of being written off as irrelevant at some point — perhaps in just a few months’ time.

There is already a significant subset of peak oil aware people who wrote off relocalization/Transition Towns a long time ago. Personally, I rarely try to keep up with developments because I don’t see how either is of immediate value.

You wrote:

I think communities are going to be left mostly to their own devices, once the efforts of national governments begin to fail — and fail they will. So how will communities get by? Who will help them organize their response to an almost complete economic shut-down, so that families still have food, water, shelter, sanitation facilities, work, and health care? I think anyone who can offer tangible help will be regarded with some respect.

You mean no one at PCI or TT has thought about these things until now? This is really… gosh, this is bad news. Relocalization has missed the mark even more profoundly than I thought.

You wrote:

It’s worth asking: What is Transition actually capable of doing to respond to an unprecedented economic crisis? In the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it.

. . .

If what we are proposing to do can only succeed if we have a decade or so of “normal” economic conditions during which to grow our base, train more trainers, and deploy our methods, then . . . it may indeed be too late. But if we can adapt quickly and thereby strategically help our communities adapt, the result may be beneficial both to communities and to those who are organizing Transition efforts.

. . .

As you say, many people will be focused on questions like:

“how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on.

If we can address people’s very real economic concerns, we will be offering tangible benefit. What are some strategies for saving money? Get family and friends to move in with you. Find ways to cook with less fuel (solar cookers are only one of many strategies there), use less water (gray-water recycling with or without re-plumbing your house), ditch your car, share stuff, repair stuff, make stuff. How to live happily without x, y, and z. How to live more happily and healthily than ever on a fraction of the income.

The big question on everyone’s mind is: How can I get by once I’ve lost my job (or now that I’ve lost it)? Learning how to raise capital and form cooperative ventures that benefit the community (and are therefore worthy of community support) could be a life-saver. Also: how to set up barter networks, how to make community currencies work for you.

Mr. Heinberg: Nowhere, once, in this entire exchange, is even a tiny mention of engaging the business community to help.

I can’t speak to what goes on in England, but Mr. Heinberg, you have got to get your people to engage with the small business community here in the U.S. No one knows short- and long-term scenario planning and prioritization like a small business owner. No one knows how to work with limited or no funds better than an entrepreneur who’s bootstrapped a venture into profitability. No one can design and execute a resilient economic network like a sole proprietor; no one can figure out how to squeeze return on investment — monetary, energy, time, or otherwise — better than someone who has to measure these things for herself on a weekly basis. The things with which you now seem to be wrestling are everyday fare for a small business owner.

Peak oil is the cause of economic problems such as we are currently experiencing; economic problems manifest as financial problems, which are by definition business problems. Locking business people out of the discussion can only hurt your efforts — we have the missing pieces to make relocalization work. I can’t speak for other business owners, but almost everything you’ve discussed here is something I’ve tried to bring to the table, only to be met with hostility.

Activism can only go so far. Activism relies on donations, which in turn rely on someone, somewhere, making money from business activities. At some point relocalization must move from the activism stage to the self-sufficiency stage, generating its own income, and — if the term is to live up to its own definition — supporting relocalized economic activity in the community. I understand “no money” is an appealing vision to many relocalizers, but until national governments collapse so thoroughly that there is no longer a national currency, some amount of money will be necessary to pay taxes on the land housing permaculture gardens and the like. Money will remain a requirement for the foreseeable future; ignoring this reality dooms relocalization efforts, as you seem to be realizing at the moment.

I am certainly happy to see someone with as large an audience as you have bringing such issues to public attention. I wish you the best of luck as you move forward, and again, I urge you to engage with the small business community.

Tectonic fat

by Paula | 30 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: peak oil, science

To the notion that fossil fuels are stored sunlight — this is only partially true. In fact, the much larger part of the energy stored in fossil fuels comes from the great heat and pressure of geological forces applied to biomass over time. If this were not the case, the EROEI of biofuels would be comparable to fossil fuels. Biofuels are, in effect, fossil fuels without the “fossil” part.

The phrase “ancient sunlight” is awesome prose, but it would be more accurate to refer to fossil fuels as “tectonic fat.”

A small-business bubble?

by Paula | 20 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: credit, entrepreneurship

WSJ is reporting a thaw in SBA-backed small business loans, which have evidently seen a pretty significant uptick in secondary market sales. This, in spite of the fact that the SBA has missed deadlines both for getting a new secondary market up and running, and for setting out regulations “on lending to broker-dealers in the secondary market for SBA-backed loans.”

I’m sure this has a lot of people breathing a sigh of relief, but the good Dr. Cornwall throws a wet blanket on the good news:

I see two possible outcomes once the SBA gets its act together. Neither are particularly encouraging and they are not mutually exclusive.

One outcome would be the flood of small business lending that the administration wants. That will inevitably lead to a small business loan bubble that will surely pop sometime in the not too distant future. Too many small businesses will be given loans that they cannot afford. The SBA programs often put social agendas ahead of economic ones, just as we saw with the home loan disaster fueled by government meddling in those markets.

The other possible outcome is that the bureaucratic complexity will bog down SBA programs,adding nonproductive costs to the lending process.

Emphasis mine.

A small-business bubble would be absolutely fucking disastrous. Imagine this: what’s happened with the housing market happens to mom-and-pop businesses, new startups, and small service providers.

Even worse, as the US attempts to get its manufacturing feet underneath it again, a bubble would cause a big bloom of small producers only to see them implode, taking down with them the few existing small manufacturers still in operation.

A small business crash would be a stake through the heart of whatever remains of the US economy after the current crisis finishes its work, as well as through “buy local” and relocalization efforts happening at the community level. It would also crush every last community currency project that depends upon easy conversion to federal reserve notes.

Short of a full-blown transition to gold, silver, and nationwide alternative currencies I don’t see how any small businesses could escape the effects of a small business bubble, even if they did not have any SBA or other loans on their books. This is the crappiest thing I can imagine. Really.

Blogging around 05.20.2009

by Paula | 20 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: news,

• Scientists hail stunning fossil — “The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a “missing link” between today’s higher primates — monkeys, apes and humans — and more distant relatives.” I love science.

• Wolfram|Alpha — everyone’s all a-buzz about Wolfram|Alpha. Note, this is not a search engine, but it looks like it will be quite useful for looking up demographic data and such for business planning & strategizing purposes. Example: a search for Pennsylvania reveals all kinds of information you’d have to track down through census data. For more general feedback here’s the Twitter search for WolframAlpha.

• Ganja #1 cash crop in the US — Gee whiz, imagine that. (Via CAF.)

• Microformats and decentralized online currencies — From Guillaume’s Blog, a super interesting idea for open-source digital currency: a microformat to track who owes whom and how much. Reader comment suggests doing away with the “store of value” aspect of this currency in order to diminish security costs & issues. Definitely worth a read, as this would be way easy to implement compared to existing alt-digital currency proposals floating around out there. Warning: geek speak ahead.

• The Renewables Hump: Digging Out of a Hole — The ever awesome Jeff Vail gives a breakdown of the math involved in planning and financing a transition to renewables. I think the financial implications of EROEI have been pretty plain to most of us who think about these things, but as far as I’m aware Jeff is the first to lay it out explicitly. This article is evidently the first in a series; can’t wait for the rest.

• Main Street Cash — An online magazine dedicated to local currencies, emphasis on the present. Nice!