A football club is a small company run by people with day jobs

From the stands, a grassroots football club looks like a hobby.

From the inside, it looks like a small company.

A small company where nobody is paid to run it.

Think about what a club actually does. It has members. It collects fees. It manages payments, kit, schedules, registrations, families who change their bank details halfway through the season. It has income and expenses and someone who has to make them match.

Any business with that list would have an office and at least one person doing admin full time.

A club has a volunteer. After work. On a laptop that's also the family computer.

The client nobody designs for

We started working on payments for clubs in 2020, and this year we've kept building in that direction. What I want to write about isn't the software. It's what clubs have taught me about who the client really is.

When you sell to a business, you sell to someone whose job is the business. Their time is paid for. If your software takes an hour to learn, that hour is part of their working day.

When you sell to a club, you sell to someone whose job is something else. The hour it takes to learn your software is stolen from their evening, their weekend or their kids. Often the same kids who play in the club.

Volunteers don't have spare time. They have time they've decided to give away. Every minute your software wastes is a minute they don't get back.

What that changes

A few things I believe now, and didn't before.

First: the money matters more than it looks. Clubs don't usually think of themselves as businesses, but fees are the thing that keeps them alive. And collecting them is the most thankless job in the club. Nobody joined a football club to chase payments.

Second: the person who suffers isn't always the person who decides. The board decides. The volunteer who handles the money suffers. If you build for the board, you'll build reports. If you build for the volunteer, you'll build something that saves them evenings. I suspect the second one is what actually gets used.

Third: rotation is a feature of the client, not a bug. Volunteers leave. Boards change. Whoever knows how things work this season might not be there next season. Software for clubs has to survive the person who set it up.

Why I like them as clients

None of this makes clubs easy. They're cautious with money, and they should be. Every euro is a family's euro.

But I recognise something in them. A small organisation, run by people who do it because they care, with no investors and nobody coming to save them. Patient money, in its purest form: membership fees, paid month after month, by people who just want their kids to play.

That looks a lot like the kind of company I want to run.

From the stands, it's a hobby.

From the back office, it's a small business that never gets to clock off.

P.S. If you're the volunteer who handles your club's fees: thank you. Nobody else will say it, so I will.