Community Furniture Stores
Creating a business roadmap and action plan.
In a nutshell…
We supported Becci Blues at Community Furniture Stores by creating an action plan to optimise their business processes.
Community Furniture Stores is a charity that gives new homes to pre-loved furniture. The charity provides free or affordable furniture, appliances, and IT equipment.
They have a passion for preserving the environment through reducing waste by reusing whatever and whenever they can. They’re not just committed to making a positive environmental impact they are also committed to making positive social changes with initiatives such as offering work opportunities to those who are unemployed or from disadvantaged backgrounds.
They have 3 sites across the UK that work closely with local councils to provide furniture to people when moving into unfurnished social housing.
“Their commitment to social and environmental impact meant that we had to work with them!”- Optimo
We connected with Becci at Community Furniture Stores in August 2022. They knew they had inefficiencies that they needed to iron out but couldn’t put their finger on where to start. We ran some discovery activities to understand where they were experiencing problems, including reviewing what they were doing now.
“Optimo undertook a comprehensive review of all of our business processes looking at what was working and what was less than optimal!”- Becci Blues
The review consisted of interviews with their Chief Executive and the Operations Manager to help define the problems before we carried out a process and documentation review.
On completion of the review, we wrote a report with recommendations based on what we knew was important to CFS. The recommendations considered the strategies the business had and any other key information that could be impacted by what we were recommending, these were;
- Identification and prioritisation of the organisational objectives and KPIs
- Streamlining of administrative processes
- Optimisation of their digital infrastructure
“We still have lots of work to do to get our processes where they need to be but the project has allowed us to identify which areas to prioritise which has been fantastic. It has given us a clear action plan on how to tackle the problem which is fantastic.” –Becci Blues
After wrapping up our consultation, and leaving time for them to action our recommendations, we were glad to reach back out to Community Furniture Stores to ask how they had been getting on since we left them. We were pleased to learn that our work has given CFS the platform from which to inform the Trustees and provide the technical insight to guarantee the resources needed to create long-term changes.
“The report has given us clarity and focus which is so vital when you are facing such a wide-ranging and broad set of systems challenges. It has allowed us to identify clear next steps and gain buy-in from the board.”- Becci Blue
Next, CFS are going to look further into the areas identified, using our recommendations as a starting point from which to prioritise their next steps.
“Easy and collaborative. You were always keen to get to the real info, and really understand our systems and processes. In addition, you were really flexible and thoughtful around scheduling and sharing the info so it could land when there was headspace to process it. Danielle was fab and really went above and beyond in helping us with this project.”
– Becci Blues