FAQ

10000Hours has been formed with the specific purpose of purchasing the majority shareholding in St.Mirren Football Club Ltd. There is a 52% majority shareholding in the club which was put up for sale just over 2 years ago by a selling consortium of current board members and shareholders.

The selling consortium have indicated a selling price of £2m would secure the shares so that is the figure we are aiming to reach if possible.

Loans are being used, yes. We have been working with many funding bodies over the course of the last 2 years and now have agreements from a few carefully selected organisations who have agreed to lend us a significant portion of the required amount we need. All of this money is in the form of loans with favourable repayment terms. There is no grant funding involved in the revised model.

The original intention of 10000Hours was to secure the majority of the required funding from external bodies. Unfortunately one of those organisations eventually rejected our funding application. This meant that we did not have enough funding to make a good enough offer for the shares and so we are now looking for local community organisations, companies and St.Mirren supporters to join a co-operative based organisation that will look to bridge this funding gap and allow us to make a new bid for the controlling interest.

The minimum monthly commitment, regardless of whether you are joining as a company, community organisation or an individual has been set at £10 per month. You may however prefer to make a one off capital payment instead, the choice is entirely up to you and what you feel you can afford and are willing to commit to the project. Obviously the more commitment we get the earlier we get to the figure we feel we need to reach before we can make an offer.

Under 16s can join the Co-operative for free.

Every single person, community group or organisation who joins 10000Hours will receive a membership which entitles them to 1 vote. The co-operative operates on a 1 member, 1 vote system regardless of how much is invested. There will be a board of 10000Hours and any member may stand for election to that board at any time.

The 10000Hours board will also, by virtue of the controlling interest in the football club, be able to appoint directors onto the board of the football club itself.

It is important that the football board are left to manage the day to day operations of the football club, but they will be given a steer from the 10000Hours members board who in turn will be acting on behalf of the individual, corporate and community members that make up 10000Hours and whose financial commitment has made all of this possible.

No. All of the borrowing being made to finance the purchase has been made against the 10000Hours company. There is NO debt attributed to St.Mirren Football Club. This is a very important point as we feel that any private organisation, person or group of people could potentially purchase the club and use the club or its revenues to finance the arrangement.

Whilst it is unlikely that another bidder would be able to secure debt against, for example, St.Mirren Park, they would be able to pay themselves a salary directly, or trade with themselves out of the club if they so wished and use that in turn to pay off the debt they had incurred that allowed them to purchase the club.

10000Hours will not pay ANY salary to ANY directors of the football club.

No. Directors will not receive a salary for performing either role. We are looking for people who are willing to donate their time, energy and passion for St.Mirren Football Club to help drive the club forward.

We have worked very hard on our numbers and passed all due diligence tests put in place by our funders so we have confidence that if we have sufficient levels of interest within the local community then we can meet our obligations and hopefully surpass them easily once the group grows in number. We have received around 900 pledges of support in our original recruitment campaign, and we have completed direct debits in place for around 600 of those individuals to date.

Once the entire debt and interest has been paid off by 10000Hours the members will each receive an equity stake in the 10000Hours organisation that is equal to the financial outlay they have invested in the organisation. With no debt to service 10000Hours will be generating pure profit and it will be up to the members of the co-operative to decide how that money should be spent or invested. Regardless of their equity stake in the organisation each member will continue to have 1 equal voting right each.

It is happening NOW ! We already have a significant amount of funding approved and we already have terrific positive interest in the supporter base for the bid. The rejection by the single funder from our original application has caused us to review our financial model and we now need more support from the local community and within the St.Mirren support to make this happen. We are learning valuable lessons all the time and won't be making rash promises about timescales or deadlines for the bid. Suffice to say we are in a competitive situation so time is of the essence and we do want to proceed with the co-operative bid as quickly as we can.

Very much so. It is our belief that the community have a huge role to play in the success of the football club. St.Mirren has a magnificent asset in it's state of the art new stadium and we want to enable the local community to make maximum use of that asset. This will generate strong bonds between the local population and the club, hopefully resulting in some new fans, whilst maximising the revenue the club can realise by improving the utilisation of it's existing assets.

It is still our intention that should we be successful in securing control of the club that we will fit out the vacant void in the main stand as a supporters bar. This would be open on matchday to ALL supporters, regardless of whether they were co-operative members or not. Similarly the venue would be available for private hire throughout the week, again generating additional revenue for both St.Mirren FC and 10000Hours.

Kibble and others will still be involved in doing this as previously described.

Yes. If the deal goes through the organisation that owns the shares will still be a CIC. What we have changed is one item within the CIC to make it a Co-operative.

In the previous senario the corporate benefits were precisely defined.

However it should be noted that at no time was the CIC offering something to the coorporate that would in anyway have taken money away from the club.

This is one of the great dilemmas of this issue.

Motherwell who are undergoing a similar (ish) sort of process have decided to offer %age discounts on Club goods for becoming a member of their trust.

However we have not put a specific package together that involves %age discounts. The main reason for this is that most if not all fans and potential CIC members want as much money put on the pitch as possible and if we start giving discounts of Club matters for either CIC membership or even for just being a shareholder of the Club then all it does is just take money that most fans are willing to pay, out of the club.

It is worth looking at the "Well Society" offering and please do then post your thoughts on the above issue.