CoDwell exists to allow members to pursue their passions and shared interests, and a lot of members will have passions that can be profitable if that is how they choose to pursue them. We want to help those people make that happen. However, we do not want member-run businesses to substantially degrade the ability for other members to use and enjoy everything CoDwell has to offer. When considering how to schedule or reserve time for high-demand unique facilities and amenities (the theater, specific shop tools, etc), businesses will be on the same level playing field with members who want to use those things for recreational or non-profit purposes. If a business outgrows the available space or facilities or time that this model can provide, it may be time for the members running that business to consider it successfully incubated and spawn a standalone operation elsewhere. There's a good chance we'll end up with a small pod that specializes in helping member-run businesses graduate from incubating at CoDwell to their own facilities and operations.
Despite not prioritizing business use of facilities, we recognize that the existence of businesses will increase demand for those facilities more than if everyone involved was only engaging in hobbies. To balance this, and to bring value into the community that can be used to further increase what is available to everyone, our plan is to ask member run businesses to give a small percentage of their revenue to CoDwell. This percentage would be affected by a few variables which might combine for a total range between 0% and 20%:
The expected amount of use of the facilities. People doing tech jobs from home hardly count as a member business. If all you need is internet, power, and a hot desk then we won't ask you for any extra money. If you need the entire welding shop for 4 hours a day, two classrooms every Friday night, and exclusive use of the communal errand-running vehicle for making deliveries multiple times a week, we'd probably be asking for a significant double digit percent of your revenue. Most things would fall somewhere between those extremes.
The profit model of the business. Some low-margin businesses would not be financially viable if giving any significant part of their gross revenue to a split, while some high-margin businesses might want the easier bookkeeping and less scrutiny of a gross revenue share. It is likely we would allow a choice of gross or net revenue, with different scales for each.
The number of members involved in the business. A business operated by a single member without benefiting or involving anyone else isn't really what the project is built to support, and would fall toward the higher high end of the scales described above. On the other hand, if someone manages to launch a business that employs every member of CoDwell, that would fundamentally change the nature of the community, probably for the better, almost certainly in a way that most of those members approve of, so we'd probably ask for nothing at all from such an endeavor outside of the arrangements already made with the participating members.
There are likely a few other distinguishing factors that we haven't brainstormed yet and will come up in practice when someone wants to do something exceptional.
The determination of all of these factors for a particular business would happen on a similar quarterly schedule to the pod planning schedule. If your business changes substantially over time, that could affect its relationship with CoDwell.
Many members will want to earn a living doing whatever it is they joined their pod to do. The members of the garden pod might want to grow and sell raw or prepared food. The members of the maker pod might want to build furniture or tools or electronic gadgets. We expect multiple pods will end up operating businesses that provide a living for some or all of the pod members.
Part of the operation of each pod will be presenting a plan to the community each quarter for how the pod will contribute to the ongoing operation and improvement of the property and community. Some pods will contribute physical accomplishments, some will contribute effort towards non-physical community goals, some will contribute financially, and some will contribute in other ways, while most will contribute in some combination of these. In addition to income for the pod members mentioned above, such a business could satisfy some of its obligations to the community financially.
How a pod-organized business benefits the community would be planned and negotiated on a case by case basis during the regular progress of the pod making its quarterly commitments to the organization. The precise numbers involved here will likely take at least a few quarters to figure out, and are also likely to shift over time as the overall community develops. A very rough guess at where this process might start is that a pod that only contributes to CoDwell financially, with no other pod-organized labor or efforts or accomplishments, may be expected to produce/generate/raise $500 per month per member. It is expected that most pods would provide most of their value contribution in other ways.
Pods will have more control over exclusive access to the facilities and amenities that they maintain and operate for the community. If the garden pod needs exclusive use of the wood shop shop to achieve their goals (profitable or otherwise), they would negotiate that time in the same way any other member would. If, however, they need exclusive use of part of the garden to achieve their goals, that would be entirely within their purview as described in their quarterly plan.