David_Morrison

Good stuff! Give Arquin a shot at centre back and tell him to face Ridgers, no chance anythings going near our goal then.

Is anyone allowed to join in here? Went through a wee phase last season where I made an icon, sig and wallpaper... sig and icon are on my profile and here's the wallpaper I made. Then Wardlaw left and McGregor got injured for the season... so I might have to make some new ones!!

Great stuff

Good to hear!

I quite enjoy reading the latest twitter feeds, but this newcomer is ruining it a bit with their blogs about c*ltic, Hibs, Dunfermline or whatever. I can't really remembering reading one about St. Mirren, so it seems to me that whoever is tweeting is just using it as advertising for whatever site rather than having a general interest in St. Mirren. Any chance she can be blocked from appearing on the homepage or something? Thanks

Quite like the idea of starting a female team, I assume they play on a Sunday though? Would certainly add a completely new dimension to the club, and hopefully would help bring in money. Would it not be quite expensive to start though? We'd have to sign players and coaches and stuff and our playing budget isn't that great at the moment... It'd be great to scrap the 5 a-side pitches that we have at the moment and build some decent ones and think about a complex. I've played once on the current pitches and they're crap and too small, but it'd be great to have some good quality ones at a decent size. Using the car park is great as well, waste of space at the moment - if we at least got people to pay a wee bit for easy access to St. James then we'd be getting money for nothing practically. As for developing whatever land we possess, I think it'll be a while before we can afford to start building stuff there. Would be great to see just what we could do with the land, and really exciting to see it develop, but it's a while away I believe.

Would love to take a chance on him. Would be really excited about having him!

Seriously? Must have been him not wanting to re-sign because he plays all the time and Dave Jones loves him. Must have an offer from a bigger team or something. He's not gonna come back to the SPL anyway!

Chris Burke? He's played like every game for Cardiff since he moved down there and they've been in the playoffs twice in two seasons. I'm pretty sure he's not ready to leave that career for a move to St. Mirren.... With Gavin Rae I think there's slightly more of a chance of us being realistically interested, but I'd be really surprised if he came here. If he's coming to Scotland it'll be with Aberdeen. The Grant Hanley deal is a good shout, I'd thought about it a few times, but haven't really heard much about him other than Levein rates him highly. He's been getting some game time this year too, but they might like to see him go out on loan for experience - and I'd be disappointed if we never made an enquiry. Whether he'd have better options remains to be seen, but I doubt we'd be the most attractive option

If we brought in the likes of Thompson, Cuthbert and look at getting Carey/McGowan back on loan we could have a cracking team... cautiously optimistic of a top ten finish with them here!

I get annoyed by jimdickloyal as much as the next guy but I'm not sure he's done anything wrong here! He's just saying that having a group like SMISA support the CIC shows that there must be positives to the model, and it might sway people who aren't sure?

Maths seems fine to me! The interest can be as high as 8% so the debt is maximum of circa 1.3million, although with more grants/quicker repayments/social return on investment/lower interest rates it'll probably be lower. Also noteworthy that not every corporate membership holder may be paying £10,000 - it's negotiable depending on what they want for their money (seats) and what they can offer. 10000 hours said on a different thread that there were other corporate pledges though they were just making sure everything was solid before updating the site and holidays were getting in the way, so hopefully that number will jump a bit in the coming days. Financially I think we'll be all right under this proposal. Given this is only membership fees we're talking about and we're not considering the extra trading money then I think we'll have most of the debts paid back earlier than expected!

Presumably whatever percentage they decide to give to St Mirren. While it's not ideal I think the point is if we get 50% of the profits from 100 weddings/funerals/parties it's more than 100% of 10. I don't know exactly what the figures are for percentages, or how many events we currently have and we plan to have, but I think the point is having a decent cut of a lot of money is better than having all of a small amount. I think the additional steams of business aren't so much that the current board can't think of them, it's they can't afford to implement them without either putting themselves or the club into massive debt (i.e., the bar (which I assume is a necessity for most events) costs over £100,000 and the current board can't afford that, while under the CIC we can get it for much less by working with Kibble, and get the rest paid initially by a grant which wouldn't normally be available to us. Yes we do. They've already said publicly that the maximum amount of debt is 1,200,000 so we're getting at least 40% as grants. From what I've read this is a conservative number, so it's possible we could be getting more grants. The loans take between 3 and 10 years to repay with interest rates varying from 0 to 8%.

Everyone is asking why current board haven't just went and built the bar, but no one really seems to care about the initial set up. According to RA the initial price of setting this bar up is a six-figure number, which is quite expensive. Maybe we can't really afford to spend the money without it damaging our club greatly. Under the CIC ownership we've persuaded Kibble to do this (as part of the community) for free (I think?) and we can start reaping the benefits immediately. Just an idea. I agree with everyone talking about Gordon Scott, but there doesn't seem to be much way around this. There must have been a reason for what they've done? There's certainly little the CIC can do.

I'm not sure enough is being done to make everyone aware of what's happening. If you don't follow St. Mirren online then that's seems to be it. None of my friends have any idea what's going on unless I tell them because they just enjoy going to games and watching the football. I know there's been a couple of articles but not really that many so you'd have to be lucky or looking for it to see it. They might not have the resources available to make them a viable investment for corporate companies, and the idea would be dead before it began. As well as they fact they generally have smaller fanbases. They know things about business and I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that we need to be ran as a good business to succeed because nowadays money means everything. The fans will be getting a chance to talk about how the team gets run, not them. They're also putting in thousands of hours of work, which doesn't come at no cost to them. While they might not be financing the purchasing of shares I'm pretty sure they'll be running up expenses getting the idea running anyway. As far as I'm aware we're still an LTD company and nothing is changing in that respect. All that is changing is our major shareholder is a CIC (which can't progress to an LTD, all it can do is remain a CIC or become a charity). So if this is to fail then we'll be in a similar position as we are now with regards to our ownership.

He said that before we he could have guessed the new set up. The likely takeover would have been a businessman or a consortium who'd make up their own board I assume. Now there is this new development with the CiC in which there will be an elected board. He's already shown that he is quite up for staying in some capacity or time, so I wouldn't rule out him having an in intention of staying the club. While saying that I think he's happy to let the fans decide what we want, and if it turns out we want him he'll be happy to do so.

We put all our eggs in one basket. We all put a tenner a month away, wait for the next Euromillions rollover, buy thousands of tickets and hope for the best!

Good stuff. Were there not any who had everything ready but were just waiting to see if we got the numbers though? Or are all these enquiries new to us - because I'd have hoped we'd have been working on getting more before the pledges began. Yeah, pretty much as soon as I pressed it I got the email.

You've also got JD (who are making the strips) and Fitzpatrick's taxi company (I think) so it may be as little as two who we're not sure about.

Yeah, I got one. I was hopeful that once we passed the 300 mark we'd see a small jump in community/corporate members who were waiting to see if we could attract a certain level of individual members - I'm a bit worried that this isn't the case

Kenny? I know that, I'd just thought we were the first team to be involved completely. Anyone know how well it's working for them? Second bottom in the second and third divisions is hardly inspiring but I assume the takeovers weren't that long ago. Suppose it'd be almost poetic is the perennial second worst team in the SPL got involved as well

I'll green dot you for that : Seems that both Stenhousemuir and Clyde (271 members) are both CICs! http://www.stenhousemuirfc.com/cic/ is an interesting read for some of the facts. Cheers Stu! So the extra £400,000 loan and £300,000 grant will come in five different pieces from smaller funds, and the interest rates on these loans can also range from 0 to 8%. A bit of an annoyance to find out the highest interest rate is on the largest loans but ach well

I know everyone else on here seems to run a business but I don't and I've been wondering what this means; "Interest rates of 0% to 8% repayable over periods 3 to 10 years across these debts." I've read it a few times and was thinking about what it means. On the slide there were eight numbers making up the 2,000,000. So it's safe to presume we're taking out around six different loans? Are these all from different lenders or are they all from the same "big company" and we're eligible for lots of different loans rather than getting a one off 1.2 million loan? Is each individual loan then associated with its own interest rate and are these flexible depending on how successful we are with the social return from their investment? So if we ticked different criteria for each individual loans and the excel in what they are meant to do is it possible all values of interest will be 0% or are they all fixed at different rates just depending on who we're getting them from? And also, "There are some Scottish football clubs which ARE community interest companies, St. Mirren are NOT going to become one." Which clubs are CIC's already? I was under the impression that we were unique too