ResourceX just accepted an extraordinary investment.

We’ve partnered with Innosphere Ventures, whose CEO is a former city manager! Best of all, we’re plowing it all back into your PBB tools to bring about half a decade’s worth of features to life within the next two years. 

Three motivating forces drove me to make this decision, which I’ll get to in a moment... 

But in the end, it simply boils down to the fact that we at ResourceX have a vision for a far better world, and we have placed our bet on you, local government leaders, as the catalysts for change. Accepting investment allows us to bring more transformational technology to you faster, and we have a sense of urgency to get these tools (like budgeter and insights) in your hands as fast as possible!

We are passionate believers in the purpose of local government and its potential to lead the charge in tackling some of the world’s greatest challenges. We choose to work especially with local governments because you are uniquely tasked with the responsibility to work for the betterment of civilization.

As such, local governments are a vehicle to produce a better world. And our theory of change rests in part on a premise that if we can help you to unleash the best of government, then we have a great chance to make a tremendous difference in the world.

If there’s one common bond among all of the challenges we’re most interested in solving, it’s that we’re going to need resources available to fund the solutions. Our piece in the puzzle is solving the resource equation. Our solution is to help government get the resources it needs and prioritize those resources in order to tackle society’s grand challenges and create a better future.

Our secret is that there are far more opportunities for resources to be made available than most anybody believes – with some of our Level 2 Mastery Award Winners reallocating 10% of their budgets and more, that’s equivalent to creating readily available resources on par with “ARPA every year!” With more and more PBB implementers regularly demonstrating that massive resource reallocation is achievable, those resources can be prioritized to fund a better world – you’re proving it out! We want to see more of this!

Those of you in the PBB community have watched as communities like Pittsburgh PA, demonstrated how $41 million could be freed up and reallocated to tackle climate action. You’ve followed the stories of Washington County WI, who freed up 13% of its budget. You’ve seen Littleton CO and its application of the PBB Blueprint for Action and Ft. Saskatchewan Alberta’s programmatic reporting in the budget book. And from Columbia SC to Austin TX to Tacoma WA, thanks to Results for America’s commitment, “Budgeting for Equity” is now a known and achievable model. 

For all of the magnificence of these stories and their demonstration of PBB Mastery, we are committed to making them less extraordinary and more ordinary and repeatable. Our best bet to accelerate and ease replication, making it easier for all to achieve PBB Mastery, is to bake in the steps our clients take to achieve excellence directly into the OnlinePBB platform for all to follow.

However, with a Product Roadmap that included a rebuild of our current platform, a rebuild of fiscal health financial forecasting and scenario planning, program insights, full budget development capabilities, program mapping for regional partnerships, program-data mining for benchmarking and policy intelligence, machine-learning for revenue forecasting and more, well, the time it was going to take to build it all out was simply too long to justify given our sense of urgency for the mission. 

Therefore, practicing what all good Level 2 (resource maximization and optimization), Level 3 (fuel resources towards the results of tomorrow) and Level 4 (maximize partnerships for resource optimization) PBB Masters know how to do already...

• We are maximizing our resources by accepting a minority investment in ResourceX (while maintaining majority and operating control of the company, our purpose and shared destiny),
• We’re pouring the resources into product to accelerate your capabilities in PBB,
• And we’ve found the perfect partner in Innosphere Ventures (who have an amazing story, born out of partnership with the City of Ft Collins CO – Mastery at Level 4 by every measure) to accelerate impact.

Three motivating forces really made this decision obvious. 

21^st Century Budgeting 

First, without question, is the increasing commitment of the gold standards of excellence from GFOA and ICMA, as it pertains to accelerating the application of program-centric and priority-based budgeting. GFOA incorporated program and outcome reporting this year into the Distinguished Budget Award program (and has for so long been a partner and thought leader in helping the industry move forward, from Chris Morrill to Shayne Kavanagh, Katie Ludwig and Mike Mucha, among so many others). We’re proud to partner, collaborate and celebrate the direction of GFOA.

On top of this, ICMA has bolstered our efforts to bring budgeting into the 21^st Century, with the development of a credential rolling out in 2022 – the curriculum is built around the 4 Levels of PBB Mastery. With the combined force of ICMA and GFOA moving the industry forward, we absolutely couldn’t wait on the full creation and rollout of the program-centric budget development software that is unique and fundamental to institutionalizing PBB in your organization. This will include program-centric budget requests, personnel forecasting, capital budgeting, internal service funds and internal cost allocation, an upgraded fiscal health forecasting and scenario builder, and budget reports.

Insights to Action

Second is the acceleration of impact from program insights and the need to build an organized, repeatable path to action and execution. Just a few years ago, Duluth MN instigated the idea of “insights” (programmatic change recommendations following the PBB Blueprint) on their own, followed by Littleton CO. Salem OR, St Albert AB and Ann Arbor MI were among the first to foray into designating a future for every program with intention within the tools. Then Denver CO, Pittsburgh PA, Kansas City KS and so many others repeatedly and successfully followed the insights path to identifying massive and multi-million dollar opportunities for a given objective and following through to execution. Insights to Action is integral to PBB Mastery, and an Insights Manager (all the way through budget recommendation and adoption) must be built, with an anticipated rollout within 2022.

Program Mapping, and Unleashing the PBB Data-mine

Third, last but not least, and most likely for 2023, includes our Program Mapping platform to maximize regional partnership opportunities. Organizations who have participated in our approach to mapping come to identify the services they share in common (“match up”) with local governments, non-profits and private sector entities in their region. Service-sharing opportunities are then to be characterized in terms of partnership, merged/consolidated services, in-sourced regionally provided services, or out-sourced opportunities from the perspective of each participant.

And finally, these opportunities are further characterized and prioritized in terms of the magnitude of complexity in implementing a shared-service approach and the value of the opportunity if it were to be realized. Combine this with unleashing the power of the PBB data-mine – at last count with over 208 unique client priority-based budgets from our implementing organizations, 125,014 individual local government programs, each with cost (and revenue), service level, workforce, and key program attributes, $34.7 billion in program costs tracked at the service level – we’ve been working with the Wharton School of Business to begin to assess the opportunities which include: 

• Benchmarking: communities can begin to compare the services they offer with other PBB communities (“catalyst communities”) who have already implemented PBB.
• Policy Intelligence: City leaders (administration, elected officials, department heads, etc) from participating organizations may examine policy-related trends for any particular service: do other communities charge a fee? Do they contract or provide regionally?
• Partnership Opportunities: Organizations who participate can discover opportunities to partner, regionalize, in-source (for revenue) and strategically out-source to reinvest resources 

Accepting investment is a huge deal! As you can imagine, there were so many considerations to take into account – truth be told, this has been an investment that is three years in the making. We’ve taken the time to get it right.

Think about it: the height of Level 4 PBB Mastery is to realize that you are not alone as a local government, that you have partners who also have resources, and that by harnessing resources beyond your organization and prioritizing and aligning our collective resources towards results we share in common, we can pursue regional resource alignment and build a far better future together.

This is how we see the investment. We bring these resources to you, to build transformational technology for you, to achieve results we share in common for the communities and residents we all serve.