Background
The Rockfield Centre is a community owned arts centre in Oban that is dedicated to accommodating four key themes: arts and culture, history and heritage, community wellbeing and enterprise and education. Owned an operated by Oban Communities Trust, The Rockfield Centre was acquired by the trust in May 2015, and following significant funding and capital works, finally opened in 2021 as a community hub for the town.
The Problem
A recent financial crisis at The Rockfield Centre had triggered a cascade of organisational failures. An entirely new board had recently been appointed and quickly came to realise that they were staring down the barrel of two interconnected issues: that the Centre faced imminent closure, and there was no one on the board with understanding of how the organisation had come to reach this point.
Alongside lacking institutional knowledge, the board also found that no one had business planning experience, meaning they were unable to diagnose the problems or develop solutions that could help solve them.
Meanwhile, their ongoing operations were actively damaging community relationships. In particular, their café had caused a great deal of consternation among local hospitality businesses, who felt the organisation was competing directly with them both for staff and for custom. A huge side effect of this was that they were slowly being isolated from potential local support networks right at the very point where they were most needed by the Centre.
With only months of funding left, the board needed to simultaneously learn about their organisation, fix fundamental structural issues, rebuild stakeholder confidence, find a way to reintegrate themselves into the local business community, and develop a business model that was completely sustainable. All whilst keeping the doors open.
When taken together, The Rockfield Centre – a significant local asset in Oban that the community had invested in for close to a decade – was at risk of being lost entirely.
The Solution
Trustees approached Just Enterprise in late 2023 after acknowledging that they needed help if they were going to transform from an inwardly-focused, financially unstable organisation into a strategically-minded community-integrated social enterprise.
Right away, Business Adviser Jo Stanley worked closely with them to look at their business plan. With no one in the business with knowledge on how to do this, it was clear that this was the logical first step.
Jo began with immediate crisis intervention, implementing structured recovery meetings with risk registers and action accountability systems. This provided crucial continuity during the board transition and helped establish control over the deteriorating situation.
A series of recovery meetings brough Jo up to speed with other organisational matters, and she then deployed her expertise to help guide the Centre through their support. After undertaking scenario planning with them, Jo arranged weekly check-ins with the board, ensuring that they remained on course with the new business plan and were effectively planning for every outcome.
The business planning work was comprehensive, involving detailed financial modelling of multiple scenarios, which included whether to keep the café open, close it entirely, or move to a self-service model. Jo helped them identify profitable ways to operate that would align with their community mission.
Details on how to build strategic relationships within the business community were also included in the business plan and this called for the development of collaborative rather than competitive approaches to their operations.
A key part of the solution involved strategic workforce restructuring, helping them shift from hospitality roles that competed with local businesses to administrative and events roles where there was genuine local need.
The weekly check-ins also proved key in building capacity within the organisation, allowing Jo to transfer knowledge to the more inexperienced board members, so that they would be comfortable steering the organisation long after support had ended.
Jo also helped facilitate a World Café event that created a space for the local business community to interact directly with the organisation, its employees and its board members. Additionally, Jo coordinated a strategic funder meeting that brought all key stakeholders around the table to present their recovery plan and secure ongoing support.
This wasn’t a quick fix – the support continued for 18 months, providing sustained expertise and guidance throughout the complex transformation process.
The Outcome
The intervention delivered concrete results: the Centre created 4 net new jobs despite initial necessary redundancies, successfully re-employed former staff in sustainable roles, and secured a 2-year resilience plan with funder support. Most critically, they moved from having just “4-5 months of money maximum” to financial stability.
The Centre avoided closure entirely – as trustee Stacey Felgate noted: “I suspect that Rockfield wouldn’t still have its doors open if we hadn’t had the support.”
The Rockfield Centre has now shifted to a strategic planning mindset following the support. They now have a clear path forward and have improved relationships with the third sector and local business communities.
The transformation preserved a significant community asset representing 10 years of community investment, maintained vital cultural and wellbeing services in a rural location, and protected Oban’s broader cultural ecosystem.
The creation of a risk register has also allowed them to take a more objective view on what risks the business could face in future. They have successfully transitioned from crisis-reactive to strategic long-term thinking, moving from organisational isolation to genuine community integration.