Business – The Key to Facilitating Our Members’ Success
A few weeks ago we posted a blog about the Resources department of our team, specifically focussing on our members and their personal development. Today, we want to shift this focus on how we use the entrepreneurial and future value of our team to ensure all are members are endless opportunities to further develop themselves!
Within the Resources Department, we distinguish on 2 different groups of resources: People (human & intellectual) and Capital (material & financial). Both resources form the base of the existence of our team.
In the first Resources related post in this build thread we focussed on the people side of our team, and what the growth path is for team members within our team. With this post we want to focus more on the capital side of our team and give you an unique perspective on how we approach the part of FRC commonly known as ‘business’.
Business Philosophy
Team Rembrandts has a quite unique approach to ‘business’. We aren’t part of a school and thus don’t get any funding through a parent organisation.
Instead, we as Team Rembrandts are our own entity, we are registered as a non-profit, but in practice more so function like an association. Aside from a symbolic contribution fee to all our members (in the form of one team polo), we are completely funded by a local partner network.
We believe that as a team, we can truly make a difference and help our members grow and develop themselves in the world of STEAM. To make this dream a reality we have grown a large network of partners over the years. Notice how we deliberately say partners and not sponsors. We find it important that the longevity of our team is ensured. For this reason we don’t want to have to knock on all our partners’ doors every year to ask for money. We believe in two way long term partnerships, where we as a team get financial or material support from our partners, and in return we provide them with brand awareness, online promotion and most importantly, new employees that have invaluable experience and great potential. More on this later.
Our partnerships do not rely on contracts and constant negotiations, but more so on mutual trust we have gained over the years. Many of our partners have been with us since our founding and to this day, we are still doing the utmost we can to ensure our partnerships will last for years to come.
Partner Network
As explained above, Team Rembrandts’ yearly spendings are completely covered by partnering companies and organizations. When it comes to partnerships, we have two different styles we like to go for, financial and in-kind partners.
Our financial partners form the basis of our team. Within the team we have two types of financial partners, key partners and sustainable partners. Our two key partners MTA and AAE have been with the team since our founding and form the financial backbone of the team, always giving us a guarantee that whatever may happen we will always be able to at least go to competition. Aside from our two key partners, we generally have 8 sustainable partners who supply us with the necessary financial aid and to stay competitive and be able to grow each year.
For us, our life would naturally be the easiest if every partner gave us financial support, however we know that for a company it often is much easier and much more beneficial to give in-kind support. For this reason we aim to get as many of our materials and resources in the form of in-kind partnerships instead of having to pay for them ourselves. This allows us to keep our costs to a minimum while also building very valuable relationships with our in-kind suppliers.
Manufacturing
As just mentioned above, we aim to get as many of our materials and resources as possible from in-kind partners. The same can partially be said for manufacturing capabilities. Team Rembrandts is very fortunate to have our very own shop of roughly 300m² (roughly 3230 sq.ft.). At our shop we were able to set up just short of a full field, machining area, as well as office spaces. Within our machining area we have our own 3D printers, a CNC router, a lathe and some other pieces of equipment in addition to many handheld power tools.
For us, this is more than enough for the day to day machining tasks during the year, allowing us to keep the required floor space and maintenance costs low. However, during build season we of course need more manufacturing capability and often desire to machine more complex parts, as well as a larger quantity of parts. This is where our in-kind partners again come into play. Instead of having full 5-axis CNC machines, large scale laser cutters and water jets, and expensive 3D printers with carbon fibre capabilities, we outsource these manufacturing processes to our partners. In this way we are able to keep our costs low, while maintaining the manufacturing capabilities.
The Next Step
So, what is our next step, and how do we want to ensure the future growth of our team? To be honest, that is a question that we do not fully know the answer to ourselves either, it’s something that team-wide we are looking into and making plans for. Naturally this doesn’t mean that in the short term we are completely clueless.
One might think that the obvious next step is to further expand our partner network. Grow in number of partners and thus in amount of resources. While we of course want to keep growing in resources over the years, we do not necessarily want to keep expanding our partner network. Currently we have built invaluable relationships with our partners through constant communication and an approach personal to each partner. Through this we are able to offer each partner unique value and opportunities that other student teams and non-profits aren’t able to. If we were to increase the number of partners, we might not be able to maintain this personal touch and thus lose our selling point.
Team wide we are currently busy with finding out what our next big step is, what truly is the goal on our horizon? Whatever this big step may be, from a business perspective we want to make sure that capital won’t be the limiting factor for the rest of the team. We will continue to involve our partners in all our future plans and also consult them for advice. Thus ensuring our ambitions stay aligned with those of our partners and eventually together transforming the youth of today into the leaders of tomorrow!
Written by:
Joris - Lead Business Development