In 2010 I started a performing arts company in Geelong. I thought I was getting into theatre. What I was actually getting into was governance, insurance, rosters, cash flow, difficult conversations and the permanent management of an organisation whose entire workforce could walk out at any moment without consequence.
Fifteen years later, it's the single most useful education I've had — and almost none of it was about staging a musical.
01 / Volunteers can leaveAnd that changes everything.
This is the foundational fact of community organisations and it took me too long to properly absorb. In a workplace, people stay through a bad patch because they need the wage. In a volunteer organisation there is no such tether. Every single person is there because, this week, they still want to be.
Which means you cannot manage by authority. You manage by making the thing worth turning up to: clear roles, visible progress, being treated well, and knowing your contribution mattered. Every organisational failure I've seen in the volunteer sector traces back to someone forgetting that they were leading by consent.
Authority is borrowed in a volunteer organisation. You keep it only as long as people think you're using it well.— David Greenwood OAM
02 / Continuity beats brillianceThe lesson I'd tattoo on something.
The most valuable thing we ever did was not a production. It was being open, in the same place, at the same time, every week, for years.
Brilliance is episodic. Continuity is what lets a fifteen-year-old join at fifteen and still be there at twenty-two, running a crew. It's what lets a parent trust you. It's what turns a project into an institution.
And continuity is exactly what our funding systems are worst at supporting. Project grants fund the exciting new thing. Almost nothing funds the boring, essential, week-after-week operation that makes the exciting thing possible. If I could change one feature of how community organisations are funded, it would be that.
03 / Six things that transfer directlyTo council, or anywhere.
Figure 01 · Transferable lessons
What fifteen years actually taught me.
Fix the boring thing first
Insurance, tenure, records, cash flow. Every organisation that collapsed around us collapsed on an administrative failure, not a creative one. Glamour is optional; the boring layer is not.
Say the bad news early
A show that isn't selling, a budget that's blown, a decision that was wrong. Told early it's a manageable problem. Told late it's a crisis and a credibility loss. This applies to public office exactly.
Build the deputy before you need them
Every key role shadowed. It sounds like redundancy until someone gets sick two weeks before opening night, and then it's the only reason you survive.
People stay for people
Nobody has ever stayed with an organisation for its strategic plan. They stay because someone remembered their name, noticed they were struggling, or gave them something real to be responsible for.
Write it down
Decisions, dates, who agreed what. Not bureaucracy — memory. Almost every serious dispute I've mediated came down to two people sincerely remembering an agreement differently.
Be local, specifically
Not "supporting the community" in the abstract — this street, this school, this club, by name. Specific local commitment is the only kind anyone can actually verify.
04 / MoneyWhat running a small organisation teaches you about budgets.
Nothing focuses the mind like being personally responsible for whether a hundred contractors get paid. A few things I now believe firmly:
Figure 02 · Financial lessons
Four convictions I didn't start with.
| Lesson | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Cash flow kills more organisations than losses do | You can be profitable on paper and still fail to make a payment. Timing is not a detail; it's the whole thing. |
| Every new asset is a permanent operating cost | A donated building is not free. This is exactly the trap councils fall into with grant-funded facilities they then can't afford to run. |
| Audit yourself before anyone asks | We engage an independent auditor annually, by choice, above what's required at our size. It costs money and it has repeatedly been worth it — and it means there's never anything to be defensive about. |
| Deferred maintenance is borrowing | Not replacing worn equipment isn't a saving. It's a bigger bill later, plus a risk in the meantime. Same principle, same mistake, at council scale. |
05 / The awardsWhat they did and didn't mean.
CentreStage had a good run at the Geelong Business Excellence Awards, and I was later awarded an OAM. I'm genuinely proud of both, and I'd be dishonest if I pretended otherwise.
But the useful thing to say about recognition is what it actually rewarded. The awards that meant most were the workplace wellbeing ones, twice — because that recognised the least visible, most deliberate thing we did. Nobody buys a ticket because your rehearsal room is a psychologically safe place to be. It just happens to be why people stayed for a decade.
And an award is a description of the past. It is not an argument, and it certainly isn't a qualification. Anyone who leans on a medal instead of a case should be treated with suspicion — including me.
06 / Why I'm telling you thisThe honest connection.
I'm not going to pretend running a theatre company is the same as running a municipality. The scale, the statutory obligations and the consequences are all different orders of magnitude.
But there is real overlap, and it's the part I'd actually stake something on. Both are organisations that exist to serve people who didn't have to show up. Both live or die on whether the boring layer — records, money, maintenance, insurance, succession — is being handled properly. Both are damaged by leaders who announce the exciting thing and quietly defer the essential one.
Fifteen years of that taught me which mistakes are survivable and which aren't. That's the only claim I'd make for it.
If you're running a small organisation in this region and something on this page sounded familiar — the founder who can't step back, the treasurer role nobody will take, the insurance bill with no funding source — I'm happy to talk it through. I've made most of these mistakes already. Email david@centrestage.org.au.