ktf

Remind me, do they always close the wards in Dykebar at the Paisley Fair? The sooner they get these roasters back inside the better.

Remind me, do they always close the wards in Dykebar at the Paisley Fair? The sooner they get these roasters back inside the better.

I moved away from the dark lands out to the blue skies and green fields of Lanarkshire quite a long time ago now so I hope you don't mind but I thought I would use Google Translator. Unfortunately that appeared to be having problems too however in Slovak it translated to "Ah sure think you are quality". So I thank you for your compliments and apologise for not having crossed the language barrier sometime earlier.

That's a wee bit like the Gus must stay argument. Mibbae if we had kept Gus we would have toiled to survival just the same last season. The problem is that we would be in the exact same position this season. Being "in not bad shape" is hardly progression. The club needs to progress and the CIC is the only way to achieve that. It also protects the club for the future. At the moment the only thing stopping an Angelo Massone type character taking control of the club is the good guardianship of the current BoD. If you don't think there are any Reg Brearley's around these days have a chat with Lavvytic to see how that attitude worked for them. Underplaying the risk is as bad as scaremongering.

Haha!
Actually mate, I have no idea... I am guessing as much as you are. I just figured the big emphasis on "riding in from the east" etc in his posts maybe hinted that he worked there.
The real issue for now is why would Yul not just come straight out face-to-face with RA/10000hrs, or, if he does have the clout that you suspect, the papers/radio/tv and make his points clearly and properly? An internet forum is not real life. I am not really called ktf and I don't really act or talk, in real life, the way I do on here. If I want to say daft stuff, provocative stuff or just noise someone up, I'll come on here. I rarely do any of that in real life. Why? Because this is the internet! It isn't real and you can get away with things that aren't real.
When you try to use a stupid (sorry Div) internet forum to affect things in real life, you are onto a loser. Mainly because most people don't take it seriously (because it is the internet!!!) and partly because there are 1001 other people, just like you, who will be ready to jump on you and pull everything you have to say apart.
If Yul is serious about what he has to say and about the negatives of the CiC, then he needs to come right out, make himself known and publicly state his case. Until then, he'll be treated like he ought to be, a stupid internet alias.

If he doesn't out himself soon, I might just... Growing tired of it all. Especially when some of those with genuine concerns are beginning to raise them constructively and ask the valid, probing questions that can be answered.
The stupid aliases and idiotic posts are becoming more and more inane.
Come on Yul/Animal, come clean and make yourself known before someone does it for you!

If he doesn't out himself soon, I might just... Growing tired of it all. Especially when some of those with genuine concerns are beginning to raise them constructively and ask the valid, probing questions that can be answered.
The stupid aliases and idiotic posts are becoming more and more inane.
Come on Yul/Animal, come clean and make yourself known before someone does it for you!

One of my big concerns has never been addressed and I've laid it out as clearly as I can. I've e-mailed Richard Atkinson and I've posted to death on here. Perhaps I'm guilty of not posting it as a question, rather choosing to make it a statement, but I've said repeatedly that I think the main weakness in the whole plan is the involvement of St Mirren supporters. No-one has allayed that concern, no-one has really addressed that concern and watching the debate develop I think my concern has become more and more justified as time goes on. Quite simply St Mirren fans are not intelligent enough to understand the way this needs to work, they aren't open minded enough to grasp that business concepts that getting the stadium to operate seven days a week doesn't necessarily involve them, and they aren't generous enough to understand that having the club allocate a proportion of it's annual budget on community members projects could reap massive returns, without ever seeing an increase in gate figures. And if they aren't capable of grasping the basic concept of a Community Interest Company it's actually quite chilling that they will be involved in the process that sees members elected to the relevant boards. Indeed if they are looking for a potential money spinning use of the old club shop I reckon they should turn it into a sex shop selling mainly masturbation aids - because there's so many wankers in the St Mirren support it can't fail to make profit.
However having said that I don't think it will fail at all. Rather I think it won't develop to be as successful for St Mirren FC as it should be. A lot of people have been asked to take a punt on this and for community groups and corporate groups it's going to represent a significant gamble. If the elected boards can't deliver enough of a benefit to them those bodies certainly won't be there in year 2 or 3 - or indeed perhaps ever again. Add to that the fact that many other organisations will have been approached and whilst they may have rejected the initial approach they are likely to be stood on the sidelines watching to see if the successes are great enough for them to take their punt in year 2. Those businesses and community groups are fundamental to the application for funding and for future income.
Predicting the demise of the project on the basis that you can't buy a new scarf it just ridiculous.

If it was a genuine concern about the CIC it would quickly find its way into the Q&A. The current situation with the strips and the merchandising has nothing to do with the CIC. It is a decision made by the entire SMFC BoD, not the CIC. So it isn't even a genuine criticism of the CIC, it has more to do with a personal vendetta against a member of the current BoD who is not involved with the CIC BoD.
The only other concern expressed relates to Stu accusing Div of benefiting on a personal basis when the CIC goes ahead. Does that not bother you or is your bothering selective?
The anti-CIC campaign if you take Yul's / animal's post as being anything other than nonsense looks to be an organised and yet clandestine. The "concerns" have not been established or developed, just repeated ad nauseum without any supporting information. Running a campaign from a closet that consists of rumourmongering, treacherous, mendacious scumbaggery is hardly going to endear these fallacious sneak thiefs to the support.
Thinking it will fail in a "Yul thinks pink will be all the rage this season" is hardly going to have any impact on the CIC plans. The anti-CIC brigade are running out of time. They have been given months to construct a reasonable debate on the demerits of the CIC and have declined to present that...merely sniping hear and there about nothing from the comfort of their closet, whilst the CIC proposers have served their proposals through an open consultative process - the like of which Scottish football has not seen before.
The tactic appears to be post innuendo and to repeat the same drivel over and over again and then when they are called on it cry "no fair".
We keep hearing about the "alternatives" and yet we see nothing about the alternative "offer". Just more blah blah from the comfort of the closet with the tag line....."more to come"..or some such bollox along those lines. And yet all that ever comes is a regurgitation of the previous unuseful nonsense. If there is an alternative let's hear it. I am sure Div will give the closet proposers a Board similar to this one to present their proposals for the club. (For a slice of the action if they are successful of course - so Stu can feel equally morally outraged as he is now )
The reason they won't come out of the closet is quite simple and it doesn't require Yul Brynner or another Internet incarnation of the muppet behind it to post innuendo and general drivel to suggest it. It is blatantly obvious from the behaviour of the posters hinting at it.

That is a fair point. What would be good though is that people gave reasons for thinking it is going to fail rather than just adopting the defacto St.Mirren approach of "it's shite".
We have posters on this forum, apparently St.Mirren supporters, who genuinely believe this deal will be the end of the club. Yet they are doing NOTHING about it other than posting on a forum.
They aren't mounting an alternative bid, they aren't speaking up at the public meetings, they aren't going to see the selling consortium to plead with them not to sell, they aren't doing anything at all really. I find that difficult to swallow and leads me to believe that actually, they don't have any concrete reasons why they think it will fail, they just don't understand it, don't want to understand it, and love being negative as it's easier than embracing new ideas.
The CIC might fail, that is true, everything in life carries a risk and when you do something on a scale that hasn't been done before that risk increases. This is true.
Failure in this case means the majority shareholding being put back on the open market for sale, just as it is today, and at a greatly reduced price.
There is also the distinct possibility that the CIC may also be the best thing that has ever happened to the club. The destiny of the football club will be in the hands of the supporters, surely the very people who care about it the most ?
Give me clear reasoning and debate about why it is a bad thing for St.Mirren and I, and I am sure many others, will listen.
Posting in a wild western style about Motherwell having more scarves for sale than us isn't really adding to the debate IMO.

No one is disputing that SMISA don't have the best interests of the club at heart
I note not one of you have answered the following questions:-
What are the 'condidtions'. If you were handing over £50,000 to someone do you not want to know this ?
Will the money not simply go to Mr.Gilmour and Co. ?
If the CIC collapses in a year or two how will the £50,000 be paid back ?
How many shares in SMFC Ltd will the £50,000 buy ?
Answers please Sid and fellow CIC fans !

I presume they will make the cheque out to Mr. S. Gilmour and Co. because that is where the money will be going.
If the CIC collapses in a year or two the £50,000 will not be paid back.
SMISA have NOTHING to show for their hard earned cash. Not one share in SMFC Ltd.
Mr Atkinson must be having a good laugh at us all.

I bothered to find out about the CIC because it affects the football club I support. I had concerns, I asked the questions, I got answers.
I went to the public meeting, I heard other peoples concerns, I noted the answers and even put them on a public website verbatim to try and communicate them to fans who couldn't attend.
I made my own mind up about the CIC and whether it was good for the club or not because I COULD be bothered.
I have said before I will be joining the CIC as an individual member, nothing more. I am not "getting" anything out of the CIC any more than any other St.Mirren supporter who wants to see the club try something different. If it doesn't work it doesn't work, the club goes back up for sale and is sold to someone else who may or may not be good for the club.
You can make your own mind up about "Yul" and "Animal", both the same person, and their agenda about trying to de-rail the CIC. Ask yourself why they attended the public meetings yet said NOTHING, why they refused a 1:1 offer from Richard and the team to address their concerns in person, why they ignored a request to attend a public debate, them versus the CIC to air all their concerns in public ?
Why would they continue to hide ? What is it they are trying or hoping to achieve ?
They may well have very valid concerns and if they do I'd love to hear them but all I am hearing is bitching about not being able to buy a scarf.

Green dot for that

That post is just a lot of crap.....with no information whatsoever...thought you were meant to be in the know?

The bar debate is typical of the parochial thought process of some of our fans.
Who cares who is running the bar, it is hardly going to be making millions. Also the individual commissioned to run it is unlikely to be on £50k a year. (the bar will struggle to make £20k profit a year.)
Also whats wrong with a bit of nepotism, if that is what happens, After all the largest contract we have given to a player in the recent past just so happens to be related to a Director of the club.
The business plan whilst not been formally published and issued to all the “so called business gurus” has very much been watered down to laymans terms and published to death on this webpage. If the CiC published projected turnover, P&L accounts them it would be lost on the masses and we would have further debate on “yea but they failed to publish this item or that item”. If you can’t grasp the business plan from whats published then you must be on a blind mission to the moon using Apollo 13.
This forum is to debate the merits of the CiC. I still have my reservations but to be fair they tend to be on a personal level rather than a business level. I am fed up with the debate not being constructive and being high-jacked with people who have an agenda. I have waited from signing up to the CiC to see how the debate went. I have yet to see a valid negative reason why I should not sign up. What I have got from that there are the usual detractors who are happy to spread stories dressed up as facts.
By contributing to the CiC you will assist in benefiting the Community and in turn will hopefully assist in raising the public profile of our club. In turn the success of the CiC could financially benefit the club.
I am also fed up of listening/reading fans who believe that their £10 month is going to the club. But then that’s down to how its been sold by 1000hrs.
Remember the Club will survive without the CiC.
The CiC will not survive without the Club and its fans so why would they have a Business Plan that could jeopardise their future

Gary, Yul posted openly slating anybody who backed the move. He used the phrase "shame on you" and advocated what in my opinion is a short sighted approach of spending big regardless of turnover. Has he not heard of Gretna, Airdrie, Livingston, Palace, Pompey, Wimbledon, Dundee, Bournemouth... It seems that while we all accept there are flaws in the CIC he believes his own ideas are flawless.
I don't believe anybody NOT backing the CIC should feel ashamed. Everybody has a right to their own views. What is inflamatory is patronising language and the suggestion that anybody who doesn't believe RA is Lucifer incarnated is an idiot. Frankly, yes that attitude pisses me off.

Saintsfan,
You may be better to email 10000 hours directly for an answer to your questions. You could then post answers given here for people to see.

10000hrs.....can you please reply to my questions (see below) posted 4th June. Thanks.
We will try and answer some of the questions for you below. A number of the answers appear elsewhere in the forum so will try and discuss with the moderators a way of putting together a Common Q & A section. Also becuase you have asked so many questions in the one mail we reach the re quote limit on the forum which is why the answer is split over two posts
This is for 10000hrs to reply to.
As a retired financial adviser and first time poster I am still unsure how this whole thing works and therefore I need more information before I part with my hard earned pension. Would 10000hrs or RA please answer the following questions and put my mind to rest:
Just does not work that way. In doing that you would effectivley be buying the club and then donating it to the CIC, it is a bit more complex than that but that is the basic. You would also need to use taxed income to do it so it wopuld cost a great deal more than 2m to do it that way.
If by support you mean currently sponsor St Mirren than we have spoken to a number of them and been approached also by them to us, but it is important to keep the two things separate 10000hours CIC is a separate legal entity, it cannot offer to current sponsors anything the club would offer as a freebie or an inducement. 10000hours on the commercial side has been working on engaging with new sponsors that have no current involvement and that would get involved more becasue of the CSR than because of the football element on 10000hours
REA will have no greater conflict of interest than anyone else who happens to be both a member of 10000hours and a shareholder in SMFC, so not sure if by "slice" you mean something else
It is not just about REA but about the whole team that has been working on the proposal. The funding foundations would not be dealing with us if the founding team did not have the experince to make the proposal work.
Not sure we understand what you mean. Any supporter (individual) or Communuty organisation can approach 10000hours through the website and engage in the process.

6. A past posting from 10000hrs mentioned that 'there are experienced people within 10000hrs' able to run the new bar. Who are these people and what is there background? Are they connected to RA in any way?

We have as part of the team ILPH's and others who have owned and operated such facilities in the past.
We just have not done it that way, but instead focused on raising the support first. 10000hours is a Community interest Company, and it was considered more important to confirm that the community was first interested than putting out more deatailed financials. If the deal concludes then the business plans will be avaliable to be fully scrutinised by the membership.
Less money in obviously means less money avaliable to support and pay back any debt elements of the 2m fund raising. However the business plan is robust and very conservative and the pledges are currently running a more than twice what the buisness plan requires.
No
In one event:
Kibble benifited by providing the food and service, they were both paid but importantly can also identify over 1000hours of training that they have provided to their user groups in the performance of the operation
One of the other organisations rasied a 5 figure sum via the event
The club took a four figure sum in bar takings
We are sorry you feel it has been poorly explained. we are happy to meet one on one if you feel you would benefit from further explanation

The bar is not going to be operated by an external operator but by the CIC. The CIC will make the profit on a match day and not an individual operator.
It is just not practical to issue the sort of level of detail that would give enough for comment on at this point, but be assured that the plan has been assessed in some detail by independent organisations and found to be robust.

For 10000hrs to respond to. Thank you.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post. I am not convinced you have fully answered my questions, for example; you know who will be operating the new bar.... I am asking you if it is anyone connected to you - a family member perhaps. Please confirm.
You confirm that the business plan is robust and very conservative yet you are not able to publish an outline business plan that prospective investors/saints fans can study prior to commiting to a purchase. Providing a business plan after purchasing shares in the CIC could back fire on the CIC if the content of the business plan doesn't sit with anyone who has baught into the CIC.
This may come over as negative thinking however I am sure 10000hrs will agree that I am simply engaging in my own due diligence before I commit. Offering to meet on a one on one basis is very much appreciated however there shoul be no need to do so if the business plan is as robust as you claim it to be. Lets get everything out in the open, otherwise it can come accross as there is an alternative agenda.
I have supported Saint Mirren all my life and want to continue to do so therefore I ask 10000hrs to clarify if anyone running the new bar will be related to RA and if you will publish an outline business plan to allow all interested parties the opportunity to make an informed decision 'before' deciding to commit to any financial arrangements with the CIC.

For 10000hrs to reply to.
Thank you for your reply.
You have confirmed that you are able to provide a business plan however decided not to provide one for public scrutiny for reasons only fully known to CIC and/or RA....this is a concern. If you have complete confidence in your proposal then why not give everyone, not just the funding organisations, the freedom to study the business plan before investing in the CIC?
To the question of who will run the new bar. I have asked this question twice and have asked you 'who' they are and are they connected to RA in any way. Twice you have replied yet refused to provide a straight YES or NO. I will break the question down for you one more time as I am sure there will be a few fans interested in your answer.
You have confirmed that you know who will be running the new bar....I am asking you if it is anyone connected to RA, a family member or friends etc? The answer is a simple YES or NO.

That's a tad harsh. You posted your first message on a Friday afternoon, and the second on Monday morning. Are people not allowed a weekend off?!

I tend to agree that the focus has been weighted towards the 'community' aspect of the whole deal. However, as things stand, I don't find that either surprising or worrying. The basic fact of the matter is that the group formed to buy out the consortium is a Community Interest Company, and in order to receive the requisite grants and loans - has to prove in great detail what benefit to the community at large they will be delivering. 10000hours CIC is coming into the football club, and of course, it goes without saying that the football side of things is vitally important - otherwise they really shouldn't be bothering, but I can understand why they would want, as this juncture in proceedings, to be majoring in on the community benefits side of it.
I don't think it would be betraying any trust to relay this story. During a meeting I had with Richard Atkinson about graphics related matters, the meeting was interrupted while he conducted an interview with a national newspaper about the deal. He was speaking passionately about the whole deal, but he was talking football, about what can be done here, about sweeping away the negativity that surrounds our national game, and how with genuine supporter engagement, instead of things wobbling along at some other clubs on the knife-edge of sugar daddy dependency, we can change the entire way we do things - for the better. He wasn't talking about churches using the suite, kids being trained in bar work, coffee baristas working their magic, or boat sales in the car park.... important as all of that is. He was talking football.
He might not be a lifelong Buddie, but I still haven't seen anything to alter my view that he deserves backing and support to give him a fair go at really making this work for the benefit of the football club and community.