{"id":239,"date":"2011-01-26T09:16:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T09:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/nonprofits-use-the-car-mechanic-business-mode"},"modified":"2021-01-02T12:44:14","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T20:44:14","slug":"nonprofits-use-the-car-mechanic-business-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2011\/01\/nonprofits-use-the-car-mechanic-business-mode\/","title":{"rendered":"Nonprofits: Use the Car Mechanic Business Model"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in Budapest, Hungary where, yesterday, I presented an all-day intensive<\/em> onsite workshop for education advising centers throughout Eastern and Western Europe affiliated with EducationUSA<\/a>, a global network supported by the U.S. Department of State<\/a>. My workshop was regarding business planning and creating revenue streams\/fee-based services. I’ve certainly done business planning and managed fee-based services at nonprofits<\/a>, and I’ve consulted on this subject before with nonprofits, but I have never trained<\/em> on it.<\/p>\n

It was a fascinating challenge for me to develop a hands-on workshop that would be relevant to an audience representing so many<\/em> different countries, and, therefore, very different rules, different cultures, etc. (countries included Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Georgia, Lithuania, Russia, Portugal, Ukraine, the UK, Germany, Slovenia and Spain). To get everyone on the same page regarding what I meant by business planning<\/em>, fees<\/em>, customer service<\/em>, and financial sustainability<\/em>, I used a car mechanic as a model — a car mechanic, it seems to me, is a rather universal concept, someone we are all familiar with, even if we don’t have a car. <\/strong><\/p>\n

To be provocative, I ofcourse used an image of a FEMALE car mechanic.<\/p>\n

And then I talked about what makes a car mechanic successful:<\/p>\n