CCWB’s solution is to develop a service that will bring low-cost, bilingual, and co-op knowledgeable back office service providers together to form a one-stop in-house shop, providing bookkeeping, tax preparation, and business development support. By offering sliding scale services, we will support emerging entrepreneurs and business owners in building business infrastructure, growing their businesses, and increasing their self-sufficiency.

We believe that increasing revenue and entreprenuer skills have the highest return on investment, and, thus, our approach with an initial grant of $20,000 is to pilot offering business development support and coaching to at least three cooperatives whose gross revenue is still less than $50,000. Over three months, we will contract with Spanish-speaking and culturally informed service providers who will support the cooperatives in setting up their sales and customer acquisition systems, who will demonstrate how to use these systems to drive business development, and who will coach the entreprenuers in how to use these systems. We recognize that these three steps may ultimately take longer than three months to fully implement, but with this minimum viable pilot, we want to understand and track the highest impact activities and to measure what change in revenue emerges from targeted investment.

We will use the learning from this pilot to inform the larger buildout of the Back Office Support program. In the near future, we hope to expand the back office services to include accounting and compliance functions. Many of our cooperatives are in care industries that qualify for medicaid reimbursement and state subsidies, but not all cooperative members have been able to access these systems. We also anticipate providing services on a sliding fee scale. As cooperatives gain market share and grow their customers, they will gradually be able to afford market rates. If the service providers we are working with are open to it, CCWB may eventually support them in spinning off this service as its own worker cooperative business.

Back Office Support Pilot

Back Office Support Pilot