Kate Strathmann: Building Business Partnerships - Cooperative or Collective? (Episode 245)

Productive Flourishing

If you’ve ever wanted to do interesting projects with friends and family but traditional business ownership models didn’t feel quite right, this episode is for you. Kate Strathman is an artist, writer, and rebellious spirit. As a multidisciplinary business owner, Kate taps into each of these traits to help others build equitable team structures and dream up alternative business models that may have never previously existed. In this episode, Kate talks about the definition of a collective and how it differs from a cooperative, how to know what purpose, structure, and operating model to use, and what to do when you know it’s time to shift. Kate also discusses how we can better create value for people through our business.

Key Takeaways:

[3:56] Kate talks about how someone with an art degree and a love of wandering around India ended up in bookkeeping and a finance consultancy.

[12:35] Kate defines a cooperative as a business that is owned by the people that benefit from it. There are different types of cooperatives. A worker co-op is a type of business where the employees directly own and control the business, generally on a democratic basis of one person/one vote.

[15:20] In a worker co-op, ownership derives from working in the company, rather than investing in capital.

[23:20] Pay and power are not the same things. Just because you have 50/50 ownership in the business, it might not necessarily mean you get paid the same.

[28:07] Kate talks about some of the conditions that skew us towards a co-op versus more of a standard partnership: the number of people, owner obsolescence, and creating a multi-generational structure.

[49:11] What is the line between resilience and interdependence?

[51:27] Kate’s challenge: think about one way the structure of your business could shift to benefit all the humans and communities it touches.

Mentioned in This Episode:

Productive Flourishing

Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done, by Charlie Gilkey

The Academy

Momentum App

Wanderwell Consulting

Kate Strathmann

Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential, by Greg Crabtree, with Beverly Blair Harzog

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