The Log Bank: A Pretty Cool Charity, shows up the limitations of small businesses

I stumbled across a charity called the Log Bank today, it's a pretty cool thing, but depressingly I think it shows the impossibility of setting up small scale rural businesses!

The Log Bank delivers seasoned fire wood to up to 50 households in Northumberland every week. They deliver in 6 to 8 week periods, and so this means they help somewhere between 4-500 households a week, assuming they do repeat deliveries.

They make their deliveries in 25KG bags (recycled, any old bags to keep costs down!)

It's run by volunteers, who use their own cars to make deliveries.

They get their wood from donation, mainly farmers and the volunteers do everything from collecting, sawing, storing, and bagging the wood in two barns, one in North and the other in South Northumberland.

I'm not sure how many bags of wood a year households are entitled to, but it goes to those in rural areas who are in fuel poverty, it is a thing, some households are not connected to gas heating systems after all and electric can be very expensive.

Not a viable business....?

I was wondering initially why this isn't a business, it would be quite nice work all in all.... so I guess if there was demand at the right price then someone would (excuse the pun) be doing it.

However I guess if you were selling 25KG bags of wood as a business then you'd have to buy the wood from farmers, you'd be less likely to get it for free, and you'd be paying for the storage, which these guys aren't as a charity, and, of course, wages, which you don't get with volunteer labour!

The maths...

You can get 25KG bags for around £1 a kilo.

So if you're dealing with 50 bags a week, that would be around £6K revenue a month, and just from that you can see that this wouldn't sustain a business once you factor in purchase costs, wages and everything else!

So it's a nice charity, perfectly pitched for that, but that's all it'll ever be, still it's a good thing!

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