How we work
There are two options that we find our clients are most comfortable with.
Retainer
One is to keep Arena Partners on a retainer, to be available to you for an agreed number of days a week or a month, to support your team and your business in an open-ended way.
Think of it as having another trusted, senior member of your team, with no day-job to manage and all the time you need to support you. This works well when there are lots of challenges to wrestle with on a longer-term basis, as it gives you access to a wide-range of skills with one single point of contact, all wrapped up in one pre-agreed fee per month.
No surprises on costs and no need to recruit to fill those gaps in your team.
Project-based
The other option is to bring Arena Partners in to handle a specific project for you.
We’ll spend time with you, understanding the scope of the work involved and analysing the skill-sets we’ll need to provide to get the job done. We’ll present you with our proposal and a price for the work.
We don’t bill by the hour or by the day, we use a Values Based approach to the work…a set fee to deliver the agreed project in an agreed timescale.
We’ve also put together some packages, aimed at driving your business or project forward.
All-In.
We know that sometimes, whilst you recognise the advantages of delivering this particular project, and you’re fully committed to doing so, you simply don’t have the right people with the free time required to pull this off. Arena will jump in and take the lead operationally, getting things up and running and working with you to recruit the team you’ll need to take things forward or to train up someone internally.
This is a bespoke package that is based around your needs and the needs of your business or project, and we’ll roll our sleeves up and get stuck in, in order to drive things forwards.
Hands-On.
Not all teams will have the experience they need to successfully manage their key project and they’ll want some hand-holding to make sure that the end result is a triumph. Reputations will be on the line and the reassurance of having a safe pair of hands on board will give everyone confidence that this will be a success.
Arena Partners will be with you for ten days over a number of weeks, guiding and coaching the team and bringing in the skills you may not have in-house.
Light-Touch.
Five days of on-site support, offering more confident teams with in-house experience the opportunity to call on specialist knowledge to fill the gaps in their skill sets.
Often delivered over one or two days per week, the light-touch package is often all you need to develop your business plan, kick-start your project or to bring the focus back to the things that really matter.
Additional packages
Start-Up.
You’re passionate about combining social impact and revenue generation and you’ve got a business idea you think might just work. But starting up a social business can be risky, time consuming and intensive in the planning phase. Bring in the Arena team and we’ll spend five days understanding your idea and the motivation behind it, working with your team to develop a compelling business plan and drawing up a plan for raising the start-up funding you might need.
By the time we’re done, you’ll have all the assets you need to present to your Board or team to gain the buy-in you need to proceed. You might want to move from the Start-Up package to the Hands-On or the All-In packages, if you decide to push ahead with launching your business.
Scale-Up.
We know that some of the organisations we work with already operate social businesses, to varying degrees of success and ambition. Sometimes, the inspiration you need isn’t to start something new, it’s to kick-start what you already have and that’s something we have considerable experience of. Over five days, scheduled to suit you and the team, we’ll meet the team, assess what you already have going on and find out more about your dreams and aspirations. We’ll work out what the barriers are to your success and we’ll come up with solutions and suggestions to kick-start your growth, increase your profitability and reduce your reliance on grants.
Our report will make recommendations for the future and if you’d like us to, when we’re done, we can move from strategic review to operational support in order to drive things forwards with your team. Check out the All-In package for more details.
Impact Evaluation.
If you already have a social business in your portfolio, you’ll know exactly what impact it creates, how it performs financially, how stakeholders feel about you, what difference you make to your beneficiaries, commissioners and the local community. Or do you? Talk to Arena if you’d like us to measure your impact and make suggestions for improving.
We’ll give you the insight you want and leave you with the tools you’ll need to continue this process after we’ve gone. Oh and our social impact reports are award-winning… just check out this report we wrote and designed for our client, Community Shop, which won 2018 Social Impact Report of the Year at the Social Enterprise UK Awards.