Board Meeting 19 January.......and a new puppy

As I trailed last week, we had our monthly board meeting last Friday. One of the things we can improve on is communications (actually that is true for every organisation I know!) and so we are now producing a regular board newsletter. Here is the latest one:

January 2018 Board Update

The main items to note are

1. The stakeholders meeting will be on 24 February, 2pm at Bishops Lydeard Village Hall. We intend this session to be focussed around the new business plan and we will try and make it interactive in some way! So please mark your diaries now and come along.
2. We have now approved a budget for 2018. This has been through a very thorough line by line review with the heads of departments and the head of finance. This budget shows a clear surplus for 2018, though as in any business, achieving it will be challenging. The next steps are to look at refreshing and updating our financial reporting and forecasting systems so that we can track performance carefully and be in a position to take corrective action early, if needed.
3. We were joined for part of our meeting by Paul Whitehouse and Chris Austin, chairmen of the WSRA and WSSRT. These two organisations are our biggest shareholders and wished to discuss our plans for the budget and the management of the railway.

Our main work over the next couple of weeks is now focussed on the business planning, though it is now only two weeks until trains start again. I am already booking my seat on the first train out of BL on 10 Feb - and I will have my new whippet puppy with me too (though he's growing up very quickly).