 Okay. Let's get started. So, obviously it's going to be a very intimate discussion. And so the, I guess the benefits of that is that I can come sit at the table after I go through some of my slides and we can ask, answer really specific questions that you have about your particular camps and situations. So, we can take part of the agenda to do that. So, my name is Matt Segawa and I'm the CFO of the Drupal Association. And I know a fair bit about financial planning and budgeting, but I've only been with the association for six months since March. So, I'm totally new to the community and I mean I love it and I'm new to Drupal. And it's a great industry, but you know, I don't really know about running camps. And that's why we have Ben here. So, Ben maybe you could give just a quick intro. Okay. Yeah. So, sort of have two parts of the agenda, this presentation, which is because of my experience is going to mostly focus on budgeting and sort of the financial aspects of the camp. And then I'm hoping we get a good chunk of time at the end to answer your questions. And I suspect that's where Ben will come in and that's where a lot of the interest will be, I think. So, I'm going to start out with some principles of budgeting. And depending on your experience, some of this might be basic and common sense, but nonetheless it's good to get a good reminder. So, I'm going to be going through these principles here. The first is just be conservative, especially if this is the first time that you've done a camp. Obviously, you want to be as realistic as you can, but being conservative also means that where there's uncertainty and a difficulty to predict volume, for example, which is where your revenue is going to be. If you're selling tickets or you're getting sponsorship proceeds, that's very hard to predict, especially if you're doing it for the first time. Even if you've done it for many years at the Association, we run these conventions and we have a lot of volatility. So, because it's hard to predict, you want to be more conservative in your revenue projections and expenses are a little bit easier to project. You sort of know what you're going to get, but you should still be conservative there as well and sort of err on the high side. And regardless of that, I want to make sure that there's space in between your revenue and expenses. If you can, you can have a profit because that can help to offset anything unexpected that happens. And with these kinds of events, things do happen. And if you're running it for the first time, you might just completely forget or omit a very significant budgeting item. That can hit you pretty hard. The other is, to the extent that you can, think about any external factors that might affect your event. So, some of you might have people coming across the border. There might be exchange rate risk. You might have other events that can reduce attendance at your event. Different things can happen depending on the situation of the country that you're in. So, you sort of want to plan for that, plan for the worst. Next, you want to have a leader, somebody who's going to be in charge of your, obviously, of the camp, who's going to be ultimately responsible, but you also want a team, right? And the more diverse and experienced your team is, the more you're going to be able to leverage them when you are running the camp. So, make sure that you actually, if you do have a team, work with them when you're actually building the budget. I think that's very important. And if you work with them and get input, they're more likely to help you actually execute on the budget in a successful way, right? And be motivated by the budget itself. So, another thing with budgets is that the first time that you put one together, it's, I mean, all forecasting, all budgeting is wrong, just right, just as a principle. It's going to be wrong, no matter what, right? It's just a matter of how much. And when I've done budgets in the past, we usually go through a very iterative process where we might be getting input from everybody and then roll everything up into a report, circulate that, get input from, you know, teammates and other stakeholders, and then you're going to go back in and revise, right? So, you want to allow yourself some time to look into the parts of the budget that are especially uncertain and also focus on material line items in your budget, right? So, for this, for these big conventions that we do, I know, for example, that the venue and catering expense is a huge percentage of the budget, right? So, you, if you want to focus on something, you got to focus on those, those budget lines that drive the biggest proportion of your expense, right? So, that 80-20 rule really does apply in finance. Also, documentation, very important. I think this is, you know, sort of like common sense, but a lot of times when you're creating your budget, you, in the moment, might think that you understand the assumptions behind a particular projection, but then you get to, you know, three or four weeks later or even longer and you can't remember, you know, what that was about, right? Also, it's, that's helpful in terms of communicating with your teammates and if you're going to be doing this next year, you're going to want to be able to look back in a year and understand what, you know, what the heck you were talking about, your budgets, right? So, be very specific. So, the budget is a planning tool, but it's also a communication tool. It's a, it's a tool that can be used to make sure that you execute effectively and also, it's also can be motivating as well. So, make sure that once you do finish the budget that you actually have a meeting so that everyone can get aligned on all the assumptions and all the objectives so that when, when your different team members are out there doing, executing on different things in your, in your camp plan that they are sort of equipped to adhere to the budget, right? Okay. So, I'm going to review a sample budget and actually, I made a template. It's really simple and the assumptions are, I mean, they're totally not real at all because I have no idea what would go into a camp budget. But it's, it's up on Drupal.org in the Drupal camp node and I've got a link to that in, in the presentation. But it's just a very simple budget and it follows some, some key principles that I think are very important. Can you guys tell me how experience you guys are with spreadsheets? Who would consider themselves a beginner spreadsheets? Moderate use? Advanced? Okay. All right. I would consider myself advanced but I don't do VBA or anything like that. But spreadsheets, you know, are I think probably also like doing good code. They're, you know, they have to be scalable, user friendly and error resistant and all of these things, those next bullet points are all sort of in service to, to those attributes, right? So you want to have in your spreadsheet separate tabs for inputs and reports. You also want to make sure that the format is as standardized as possible, including your formulas. And the reason is, is really preventing errors, right? So if you've got all of your tables and reports in one spreadsheet, right, they're going to have different column uses. And if you're not being consistent with the way you're putting in formulas, then you can't just drag things down, you know, it becomes very, very difficult to manage, right? And does anybody, does everybody understand what I mean by don't hard code within a formula cell? Who doesn't understand? So what I mean by that is, so within spreadsheets, you have formulas, right? You can do, you know, B6 times C6. So by hard code, I mean don't put B6 times 20 within the cell, okay? You don't want to do that. And then control checks are basically just alternative ways of doing a calculation so that you know that so they can validate the cell that is actually doing the calculation, right? And I'll show you an example of that. Okay, so this is a example of having separate tabs. So in that sample template that I created, I've just got four tabs. It's really simple. There's a separate reports tab. And then the other three tabs are input tabs. And the input tab for ticket sales, for example, is pretty much exactly the same format as for sponsorships, right? Just really simple. But you can get, you can add a lot of scale and complexity to something as simple as this provided that you keep everything very clean, right? So even within a spreadsheet, you want to make sure that your input cells are separated from your formula cells. So by doing that, if you look in, you know, columns B and C price and quantity, there's no formulas in those cells, right? Those are just input cells, you put your values in there. And you can change them very easily, you can do scenarios. And you make sure that they're separate from your formulas, right? So in that formula column, it's just a simple formula and you can drag that down or if you put absolute references in it, you can make them, you can peg them to certain fields so that you can do, you can replicate your, your formula cells very, very easily, right? And very quickly. So this is an example of the expense tab. And this is also an input tab. And so the first column, we've just got your vendors. I've added a category column. So this is helpful for your reporting, right? So you can break things down by large categories in your budget, and then roll them up by using a pivot table if you know how to do that, or SUMIFs, or VLOOKups. And that makes it easy to do that. And it can be quite useful. The other thing to note about this is that you can put in percentages, right? So again, this is all very basic, but it's helpful just to get a sense of what is the mix of your budget in terms of the actual dollar size, right? So I know here how the 80-20 rule is actually impacting my budget, right? And here's an example of the report tab. Very simple. This is basically an income statement or a P&L, a problem in law statement, if you're familiar with reports. But it's, you know, it's not rocket science. It's very, very simple. But this will just show you, you know, the difference between your income, which are potentially your ticket sales and your sponsorships, and your expenses, right? Whether or not you are generating a profit. Generally, you do want to do that, right? And then I've got my reporting categories in there from that expense tab. And I'm able to roll up all the expenses under those categories. And here I'm just, I think I'm using some ifs within that template that I created. And then the check totals, I'm making sure that the some formulas are picking up all the rows, right? And it's something that can really easily happen, even if you only have a few rows within your reports. If you miss a line item, that's actually that could be pretty catastrophic, right? One line item, where your sum is not going all the way to the top. And that can really screw you when you're, when you're, when you're doing your cash planning, right? And some of you, you know, depending on the complexity, the size of the camp, you might not need to do this. But this is just a very simple example of a cash flow, a cash flow template. And to the right of this, I've got, I've got little inputs where you can put the percentage of the expense that lands in what month, right? Because if you're just planning everything in a big block, right, in a single column, you don't know what the timing of your payments are, right? But depending on your payment terms, or when you're actually collecting your proceeds, you could be at a pocket for some of the expense. And in that case, you're going to have some, you need to have some sort of funding, right? And that's that beginning balance, right? It seems like it could be your own cash, it could be cash collected from the community, whatever, right? But that can't be zero if you're going to be paying cash out, right in advance. So you can see a couple of, of, there's a couple of months, right? In the month, the three months leading up to the event, and within the event month itself, you actually have negative net cash flow. And you want to know when that's going to happen, right? And even after event, you could have cash coming in or cash leaving. So if you just plan everything against one month, when the event happens, you're not going to replicate the reality of how cash is moving in and out. And as Chris can attest, that she's, you know, she manages, how many camps do you make? 32 camps. And she's managing the inflows and outflows. And we're actually holding assets, the cash as it comes in. And we're making the payments, right? So we got to watch and all those are all those camps are actually fields within our accounting system. Okay, any questions about this part at all? No, okay. Okay, so managing finances before your camp, here's some of the things we can go over. Not going to get into a ton of detail here, because really all this, as Chris was describing before, depends a lot on the countries that you're actually going to host the camp in, right? But there are banking laws, there are tax regulations, there's a whole host of stuff that you need to think about. So make sure you go to the websites of the tax authority, make sure you understand what the registration requirements are, and what the thresholds are for, you know, the amount of dollars that are passing through your camp. So there are a couple of options with bank accounts, you know, you can open account for the camp, you can use a personal account, and then you can ask a sponsor to handle your money for you. And as I just mentioned, the association does do that for a fee. We hold that the funds within our bank accounts, and then we handle a lot of the the financial transactions on behalf of the camps, you don't have to worry about that. We do provide some reporting as well. So payment terms. This is really important. And I think that my guess is that, you know, most camps are going to be smaller entities. And so that we're negotiating with your sponsors or vendors that you have to pay, you're going to potentially you're always going to be the weaker party in the in the negotiation. But the basic principle obviously is, you know, collect money fast, pay slow, right? But, you know, unfortunately, vendors and sponsors also know that and want to do that. And so it is a negotiation. But you want to make sure that whatever payment terms that you negotiate in advance, both directions, you want to make sure that those work for you and you understand the implications. So that's, that's a place where that that budget template that I made, or your own template that can be very useful because you can model that out, right? Also, so I'm sure there are a lot of techniques that you can use to sort of motivate your vendors or not your vendors, but your sponsors to to pay. But you know, one thing you might want to do, for example, is if you've got sponsors, you might want to require that they are paid in full before they set up at your camp, or, you know, within a few weeks prior to your camp. So what you don't want is for them to have very little incentive to pay you once the camp is over, right? They've already, you know, set up, accrue the benefits of, of, you know, attending the camp. So track actuals for the budget, especially think about timing. And if you are sort of on the margin with your cash balances, you're going to want to be, keep very tight control of the transaction activity that's happening, right? Here's an example of, this is more of a report, you know, within that, within that budget template. If you're doing, if you're trying to track the transactions as they come in, then you probably want to blow this out and do it, you know, add monthly columns. But here you can see, you know, what expenses are in control versus out of control. And then, you know, you've got your favorable, unfavorable, you can put a formula in to tell you, you know, what's, what's in line and out of line. So after your camp, you're going to want to do these things. So chasing receivables, we've already talked about that. Again, this is really, really important. If you are, if you, if you've got a team, it's probably a good idea to debt, to make somebody a dedicated resource for just going out and collecting on your receivables. You want somebody to be monitoring that closely and making sure that your sponsors, for example, are adhering to the terms that you guys set up, right? And don't be afraid to send out reminders before and after the due date, especially if they're, you know, you've got big receipts that you're depending on in order to make payments for your camp expenses, right? And a lot of times, this can take a long time to collect. So you got to manage your own expense, your own expectations around how quickly you can, you can collect. And you just got to plan for the worst too. So close your budget. Make sure that you keep a final record of your budget tracker and all the payments and expenses that you made. And then report out to your community, right? As an open source community, we want to make sure that we're doing that kind of thing. Here's an example of a report that you could share. Super simple. Again, it's income statements, but it's showing what actually happened versus your plan and, and showing the variance to that. So also you're going to want to debrief, you know, again, especially if you're going to do this, you're going to do this again next year. Well, you know, any ways that you can minimize your expense the next time you do it because you're forecasting better or, you know, you're, you're fitting the needs of the camp more closely with, with what you've secured with your vendors, like the size of the facility, they, you know, how much catering you need and that kind of thing. It's also, it's good to know also what your variable expenses. Does everybody know what variable expenses? Yes? No? So I'll just explain it. So there's fixed, there's fixed costs and then there's variable costs, right? Fixed costs basically don't change. So it might be like speaker fees and that kind of thing, right? Those, they can be variable if you get more, more of them, but they're not going to change with the volume of your camp, right? If they're keynote, keynote speakers. But catering, for example, right? You get, if you get a lot more people than you expect, then your catering expenses are going to go up accordingly, right? That is, that's a variable expense. Your facilities is sort of moves up in a step function. So it's a kind of a hybrid between fixed and variable costs. And so, you know, I think that, did that happen with this con as well? Our facilities expense went up? Yeah. And then of course catering went up because we got this influx of people who came and it was great. But then we know that, you know, the extra ticket proceeds we sell, that's not all going to be, you know, cash to us, right? We're going to have to pay a portion of that out with additional expense that we've incurred there. So that's it for my slides. But I've got that, the sample budget, again on D.O. So, you know, you can go there and down and make a copy for yourself and do whatever you want with it. And if you've got any questions at all about how to use it or feedback to make it better, just just let me know. That's it. So we can start talking questions now. We are doing our first, so we are very much in the... Yeah, we are. We actually have a lot of directors in Turquoise that we have, one from Germany, a German Icelandic which has actually done this most, I've done it before. But the two of us have never done it before and I actually have never been to a camp, which is something that I'm going to change in the next two months. Right, so you can see what's going on. Exactly, and I actually think that I would try to... I'm not sure if that is a good strategy plan, but I'm actually thinking of trying to come one or two days before the actual camp and tag along to somebody who is planning so I can get the bits of what the hell is going on and the hurdles that they will fall over, even though they are planned for the 15th or 20th time, it still can make a hell of a difference to have... and I've done it before in all the jobs that I have, to actually be able to tag along and see whatever it is. We're still missing you. You have to see it actually, but we also started to... We've got to see each other for the next one. Yeah, so we're going on to catch up and we actually have options, because we are both tied into the universe, into both universities in Iceland. So we are probably down with venue, Wi-Fi, and that can start for free. Keynotes speakers in my pocket who will come for free, except for just hotels and and not even flights because Iceland is so strategically placed that on your business trip between Europe and America, I can just pull you down and you can stop over for a few days. It doesn't cost extra for anything. You can apply for that. Yeah, so there are a lot of options we have. If we do strategic planning, I think we can keep the cost down. I'm very lucky also, my wife is an accountant, so she is not only enthusiastic about it, she has a great experience in keeping the books. So you wrote it earlier? Yeah, so we have some things that we have been planning and we realistically decided to have that in early 2017, so we have just over a year to plan it and we have the European DrupalCon to actually promote it as well. So we are trying to think of those things as well. I guess my biggest question is estimating or knowing, like you're saying, the manageability of your first one, how do you estimate it? The first year was quite tough because there's the balance of keeping the items of the community and then there's the question of finances. Then we got down to a balance point because the year 41 is the same thing. So the ratio is maybe 1, 2, 7, 2, 1, 2, 10? Probably less. Up to a certain point, but the ratio has to be in control as well because you can't have 50 volunteers in 60 attendees because that's only 10 people actually who pay that. Yeah. So that's really bad, we have to balance that too. That's part of the budget scheme. Right. You need to decide that number of days because the university is going to say, fine, you're only allowed 60 days, health and safety, or the rest of the room is going to be in control. But every day of the work, you're going through those 60 seats and then five of them are going to go to sponsors. If five of them are going to go, 45 seats out of 60. It's about responses. We have a very small community in Iceland, but some of the companies who have, who run through now are large governmental places. We have City of Reykjavík, we have the University of Iceland, we have the weather people, and we have, I work for the National Broadcasting Station. So do you approach them for sponsorships or do you approach people who, what are the best places to go for sponsorships? You've got to think this is exactly the same as any sales situation. You've got to think about what's in it for them. So we're going to give a really good example this year for us with the BBC. So they're doing some big group of stuff and they're wanting to start hiring more people. So I think it, from the sponsors angle, if they're really big, if they're a public sector government, they're not sure you're getting money whether they can sponsor or stop. If you look about the size of the organisation versus the size of the cabinet, you know, if it's going to be a small person thing, are you going to get some massive multinational company to pay for the safety and environmental stuff? Yeah, yeah. Like not a clickable, not a clickable, but you've got to get into their payment systems. Yeah. So, you know, if you go smaller companies, it's less headache. You mean the cabinet? Sometimes you might have to get through there. Yeah, well, I pretty much have to put my fingers to say, this is a particularly practical and security thing and then you need a really good contact inside the organisation. Right, that's a good issue, yeah. I think for some reason. What other group of shops? Here again, there are very few, I think there are three. One of it is a single person shop. One of it is an international shop. And one might be going out of business. It's a highly out-specialised, so these people are trying to recruit. And so those are the awesome people to talk to too, because if there's sponsors, you know, even in Iceland, they need those. We actually have Ukrainian sponsors. Exactly, exactly. We have, we can't go from that. Yeah, exactly. And, yeah, that is a positive thing. And that is another thing that I just came to mind, is that, I mean, who is the target audience? Is it the local community? Is it the local people that play within Drupal Iceland? Or are we trying to reach out and get people who don't know Drupal to comment? You know, our, you know, is your mission, you know, Drupal Camp London to develop more Drupal developers? Is that your goal? Or, you know, what's camp riskals group? Are you looking to, you know, increase the skill set of your camp attendees? What's your purpose? What are you still in that defining mode? We are definitely in defining mode, you know. I think I can probably say this is my... Can we get more, you know, we come from the, not to stay within the Drupal community, but to call out the other and see if we can get a person. And then trying to get them into Drupal community. Mm-hmm. That's the story of Drupal. Keep to 18. So you were, so you took to HP recently, so they had your best in the same day? Yeah, we run the HP day on, uh, on, uh, parallel track and the, and the Drupal people. Yeah, for us, for our Drupal developers, are quite interested in being at the same point, track. Why same point developers are not really interested in the Drupal community? Yeah, so you, we have to look at the tracks and try to keep, you know, like the tracks we have at this con, maybe not offering eight tracks, of course. Try to consolidate them and try to have any business track versus frontend track and a backend track. So everybody would get... I think that the one track can be completely okay. It's just degrees of... Yeah, the question is more, like, how many can we handle on that first one, large enough to be impressive? It's one thing you can do for three or four people. And really be sort of about that. What do you offer to the world leaders in order to be even though they are not just doing the same? I think you've got a tipping for the weekend, but you only have to volunteer for like a month. I'm going to put you on the podium, please. On the day... I mean, you're not overreacting. I mean, before that our great leaders could get sponsors around. Yeah, but it wasn't over the end of anything. It was tight to the neutral, so all of the people build up a cap rate this year, but then two other people, they send emails like, I wish. It would have been unfair. It was a really successful camp, so I wanted to see a transition out of my screen to lose three or four people out. Do you put your own tickets? It's actually one of the realities there where someone's had a baby in something and they're not. We're kind of a similar model to you guys, so like, you have an assignment, you want to share finance speakers, and the spreadsheets and everything. It was their job, really. So, although, I think it was very spring-based, for example, but that was one of the things that we put on the floor, so those things... So, who would you recommend to be a keynote speaker? Would it be a Drupalist, or somebody who's had Drupal World, or... So, keynote could be actually about almost anything within... Yeah, I suppose it's a similar relation, but in my opinion it's a realist that I've been working with. His perspective, Horton, downstairs over at Pantheon, he runs Twin Cities. He's an excellent reference. He also did a talk a few months ago about finances, how he puts some things together. So, really, it's... Yeah, I think... I agree with that. The same exact thing, we added a different perspective, but everyone knows that... Don't need to reinvent the wheel. Yeah, you don't, you don't. And, you know, their experience can really help you guys shape what you want in the looking field. Because we have, like I said, we have two keynote speakers, especially in-hand, if you want to, and they're fighting for the spot at the moment. Well, you should have a backup for, you know, speakers that come into our presentations. Yeah, we always have a presentation for people. And so, if you join, you have one, and he counts it. But as you do, and he's going through some, you know, troubles and tribulations, and he's been working, and he's, you know, successful at it. So, he's got some good experience there, too, trying to build up his network. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly, exactly. Well, that is a good point, and that's one of the reasons I think it's very good to go to, at least, I have a woman in Scotland in November. Go to see her here.