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Finance Committee Meeting: April 29, 2010

MEETING MINUTES HISTORIC ARCHIVE

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Year

 





Mad River Glen Cooperative

Finance Committee Conference Call

April 29, 2010

Telephone Conference began at 8:10 am

 

Attending: Deb Steines, Andy Dulik, Gary Lange, Jim Elkind, Jamey Wimble, Jed Kalkstein, Leigh Michl & Roy Liu.

 

 

Absent: Lars Bruns, Jeff Paduch, Andrew Snow, Eric Schoenholz, George Lesure, Ken Frey.

 

Schedule and Agenda Review : Roy Liu reviewed the agenda for the call –

1. Update to FC members regarding latest cash flow #’s incorporating March actual results, which have negatively impacted the actual cash balances versus what was presented to FC members back in March.

 

2. Re-opening of discussion of CapEx recommended spending levels, based on the negative variance of actual versus forecast cash balances.

 

1) Financial Review

Jamey Wimble reviewed variance from last FC meeting in mid-March: At the end of February, financials indicated that the Coop was looking at $200k op inc. for the fiscal year. Coming out of March, actual results were really off relative to other years; Tele-Fest was a bust, and the rest of March came in really low due to almost no incremental snow fall.

 

Total negative swing in cash relative to the March FC call is roughly $40k, although, for context as of April, cash position is $200k better than one year ago.

 

2) Discussion of CapEx budget

Jamey previously circulated the CapEx budget spreadsheet, with the line items prioritized by importance as determined by Jamey and his management team. Jamey is proposing a new capex plan with a total spend of $85.5k versus original proposal of $110k. Largest cuts were Lift 2 Platform at $17k (which Jamey’s team has determined an alternative fix), and several smaller line items.

 

Jim Elkind opened the discussion, asking whether it made sense to recommend this CapEx number to the board, or recommend a portion of it now, and waiting to see how April/May come in. Leigh Michl asked a further question as to whether any analysis had been done to understand cost/benefit trade-offs by delaying CapEx spend, i.e., did deferring certain projects now save some cash in the near-term, but result in having to spend significantly more in the future. Jed Kalkstein mentioned that there have been some attempts to do this, but not in a formalized way. Jamey indicated that there was nothing in the current CapEx budget where the co-op would be incurring this risk. There was also discussion around cash budget versus GAAP. Jed noted that Jamey’s team had made good progress in moving to keeping budgets within fiscal years, as opposed to allocating cash received from pre-sales, essentially taking cash from the future fiscal year into this year’s capex allocation.

 

With regard to the e-commerce project, Jamey indicated that a minimum of $4k is required to be spent to be in PCI compliance. The additional spend would be improvements in the system that Jamey believes would be able to increase overall efficiencies of the operations, e.g., by having a “direct transfer” of the credit card swipe to the processor, transaction fees are reduced by 0.25%.

 

After review and discussion, Gary Lange motioned to approve Jamey’s recommendation for the revised CapEx budget. Jed and Deb motioned that it should be done with Jamey’s discretion on whether to further hold back any of the $85.5k allocation. Recommendation was unanimously passed.

 

Closing: Roy closed the call. The meeting was closed at 8:45am.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

Roy Liu

Treasurer and Chairperson of the MRG Finance Committee