Today I had a go at a possible budget. Since this is really very coarse and will need a lot of tweaking, I am leaving it on a spreadsheet for the moment, rather than copying it onto a HTML table on the platform. Look at formulas to decode the numbers: I hypothesized a monthly full-time equivalent cost for each person, then hypothesized a committment (for example: 20% of time, i.e. one day a week) and multiplied that percentage commitment by the FTE equivalent cost and by the number of months involved (for the core team I have 3.5 months, the whole duration of the project. Non-core people (researchers) are paid by deliverable, i.e. lumpsums.
Bad news:
- as we anticipated, we are not able to pay ourselves full market rates. As a first stab, I hypothesized 6000 US$ a month as a FTE – which is less than my normal rate.
- also, there is no budget to reward the time (> 100 hours) that I invested to make this tender happen. In the budget I assign symbolically an extra thousand dollars to myself, but that's really not a reward. In the (near) future, we will need to figure out how to reward dealmaking properly.
Good news:
- we do set aside about 17000 US$. This is the margin: it means having a little money to reinvest in the company.
Other considerations:
- in the first stab, I am considering the same monthly rate for all of us. Equality hath its advantages; on the other hand, we have different levels of seniority among us. We do need to make a decision about how to deal with this. I would love to hear your opinions.
- speaking of equality, the monthly rates for country managers are way lower than ours. This is based on some research that puts salaries in these countries well below US$ 1,000 a month (even in high-paying sectors like banking). Not sure how to deal with this.
