Or there is the frustration of not being able to pay an artistic director what he deserves:
The most challenging roadblock has been the transition within the board. Continuing challenges include the need for funding to pay our staff competitively and to continue growing the organization. However, I still have some board members who are very conservative about how we should budget next year for staff artistic director salaries.
For some senior sages there is the continuing challenge of sustaining their organization’s cash flow:
Our first and most obvious challenge was the building, and the challenge of securing enough cash flow to ensure we would survive until we took control of it. We were month-to-month, and to book acts we had to be highly opportunistic. We hit a couple of rough spots, and turning the organization over to people who didn’t exhibit leadership at critical points set us back two and a-half years.
And there is the sad story that a senior sage leader shares about the closing of a major community theatre company due to crushing long-term debt:
Our major roadblock was $250K in long-term accumulated debt, and that became insurmountable when the economy went from “go-go” to deep recession. At the same time, many donations dried up and ticket sales fell off because many people stopped going to the theatre. We constantly had to play a balancing act of paying our bills with the revenue we had. And we had a plan for survival, but it just didn’t happen. We made a public appeal, but the deep pockets sat on the sidelines while hundreds of people who really cared about the theatre but didn’t have a lot of means gave their $20, $50 or $100.
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