Reopening Checklist – Financial Viability

checklist point 3

The financial viability of reopening your museum will be a determining factor in the decision to reopen. What will your revised operating (or business) model be? You might consider varying your opening hours and adapting the type and extent of what you offer visitors. You need to factor in staff costs in line with bringing people back from furlough, and the changing contributions you will be expected to make to furloughing costs that will be implemented over the summer.

To help assess costs create a revised budget. This might include, for example, increased staffing costs, site adaptations, increased cleaning costs, reduced visitor income, reduced commercial income, new grant income and an updated cashflow. Predicting visitor numbers will be hard, so you should model using a few possible scenarios.

If reopening does not look like a viable financial option at this stage, you may need to look at delaying reopening until it is.

Section 7 of the Guidelines includes more detail on elements to be considered for a new operating model.

Next – Step 4 – Plan
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