I get a version of this call regularly.
Someone has set up a CIC. They registered it a few months ago, sometimes longer, on the advice of a friend who’d done it themselves, or after watching a few videos online, or after buying a course that promised to have them funded inside two months. It seemed straightforward. It was cheap to set up. They were excited.
Now they’ve had a rejection. Or two. Or they’ve applied to three funders and heard nothing back from any of them and they’re starting to wonder.
They ring me, and I ask them to send me their registration documents, and within ten minutes I can usually see exactly what happened.
The wrong structure. A board that isn’t independent. A name that shares three words with the director’s private business. A community interest statement so vague it could describe any organisation doing anything anywhere. A financial arrangement that looks, from the outside, like a mechanism for moving public money into a private enterprise.
None of it was malicious. All of it was avoidable. And most of it cannot be fixed without significant time, legal advice, and in some cases starting over.
Read more: Your mate was wrong. And now you’ve got a problem.Here is the advice that causes this. I want to name it clearly because it keeps circulating.
Set up a CIC. It’s easy. Get funding in eight weeks. Pay yourself from the grants.
Every part of that is either wrong or dangerously incomplete.
Setting up a CIC is not difficult, but setting it up correctly requires decisions that will follow you for years. The structure you choose at registration — shares or guarantee — is permanent. Company law does not allow conversion between the two. If you register as limited by shares because nobody told you it mattered, and you later discover that the major funders will not fund shares-based CICs, your options are to continue with a structure that closes off most grant funding, or to dissolve and restart at the cost of legal fees, new company numbers, and every contract and arrangement having to be rebuilt.
That is not an administrative inconvenience. That is months of your life and potentially thousands of pounds.
The funding timeline is the other one I want to address directly.
The National Lottery Community Fund takes twelve to fourteen weeks minimum to give you a decision. Not to fund you. To answer you. An eight-week promise is broken before they’ve opened the file.
Awards for All and Sport England can be accessible in your first year, but not if you apply for the maximum grant from a standing start with no track record and a community interest statement that reads like it was written in an afternoon. Modest, well-evidenced applications to the right programmes at an appropriate scale can succeed in year one. Applications that outstrip your organisational capacity, written from a template, do not.
Most other major funders want to see published accounts before they will consider you seriously. Published accounts require a completed financial year and a filing. Your first year of operation is not wasted waiting for that. It is the time you spend building the delivery record, community evidence, and sector relationships that will make you competitive when you do apply.
None of this takes eight weeks. The people selling you an eight-week timeline are selling you something that does not exist, with terms and conditions that make the failure yours when it doesn’t happen.
I have sat with people who followed that advice. Not hypothetically. The conversation usually starts with them showing me the course, the templates, the applications they submitted. Then I look at the registration documents. Then we work out together what is fixable and what isn’t.
Some of it is fixable. Wrong governance arrangements, a weak community interest statement, thin community evidence — these can be addressed with time and work. Two to three months of intensive preparation can turn an unfundable CIC into a competitive one, if the structural foundations are sound.
Some of it is not fixable without starting again. The wrong structure is not fixable. A name that permanently connects the CIC to a private business is not fixable without reregistering. Directors who share a home, a bank account, and a vote on public money, without independent directors to counterbalance them, is a governance problem that funders will keep identifying until it is resolved.
The people I have those conversations with are not foolish. They were given bad information by someone who either didn’t know better or didn’t care what happened to them afterwards.
Before you register a CIC, you need to know what you are actually deciding. Not the form-filling — that takes two to four working days once your documents are ready. The decisions behind the form. The ones that determine whether the CIC you register is fundable from day one or needs months of work before it can approach anyone serious.
I’ve written a guide that covers exactly those decisions.
Download: Before You Register Workbook – £55 The workbook that covers what to decide, why it matters, and what gets people into trouble before they file a single application. Written by someone who has the conversations afterwards.
If you’re not ready to buy a guide and you want to start with one question — the one that matters most before anything else — I’ve put together a short tool. Five questions that tell you whether a CIC is even the right structure for what you’re trying to do. It’s free.
Download: Is a CIC right for you? Five questions before you register
The Art of Stupidity 