THE 2010 FINANCIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE REPORT ON

REVIEW OF THE BUSINESS PLAN

COMMITTEE MEMBERSChair:James P. Howard, II, Long ReachVice-Chair:Alan Romack, Owen BrownEd Coleman, Long ReachRoger Hultgren, Harper's ChoiceRyan McCarthy, Wilde LakeDan Woodruff, Dorsey's SearchCOLUMBIA, MARYLANDAPRIL 12, 2010

The 2010 Financial Advisory CommitteeCynthia CoyleChair, Planning and Strategy CommitteeColumbia Association, Inc.10221 Wincopin CircleColumbia, Maryland 21044April 12, 2010Dear Ms. Coyle:Please accept the attached report from the 2010 Financial Advisory Committee on “Review of the Business Plan.”As always, members of the Financial Advisory Committee are available for future consultationregarding this report or other matters the Board of Directors or the Planning and StrategyCommittee may require. The other committee members and I sincerely appreciate theopportunity to have served the Columbia Association and residents of Columbia as members of the Financial Advisory Committee and on their behalf, I remain,Very respectfully,James P. Howard, IIChair, Financial Advisory Committee

Review of the Business Plan1

Introduction

The Columbia Association (CA) Board of Directors charged the Financial Advisory Committee(Committee) with reviewing and commenting on the “Business Plan: A Blueprint to the Futurefor the Columbia Association” (Plan). That Plan is a portion of CA’s “Proposed Fiscal Year 2011& Proposed Conditional Fiscal Year 2012 Progression Plan”.The Business Plan is found on pages 39 through 93 of the Progression Plan. The Committee’scomments are limited to those pages.

Recommendations

The Committee recommends that the proposed Business Plan (as distributed in the ProgressionPlan) be corrected and updated in the master copy and the online copy to correct factual,computational, grammatical, and word usage errors before any further distribution is made. Adetailed list of corrections that the Committee feels are necessary are in the body and AppendixIII of this report.The committee recommends that this document not leave the draft phase without a major restructuring of the document. As guidance for this restructuring, the Committee has thefollowing suggestions:

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Rewrite the Business Plan section utilizing the sample business plan outline found inAppendix I of this report;

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Extract the strategic goals out of the Business Plan and place them in a new strategic plan, following the outline suggested in Appendix II of this report.The Committee hopes that reconfiguring the current Business Plan into these separate documentswill provide two tight documents that can be tied to the budget documents in a more relevantmanner and communicate clearly the important message that these documents need to convey.The Committee urges the CA Board and management to ensure that the new documents are asreadable, concise, and communication-friendly as possible in order to reach all of CA’sstakeholders.Finally, the Committee suggests that future documents be subjected to a thorough review processto ensure factual accuracy and correct grammar and word usage in published materials.

General Comment

The Committee’s general comment on, and concern with, the Business Plan is that the Plan doesnot inform the reader of how the business operations of CA relate to its budget. In short, the Planlacks measurable objectives, and corresponding metrics that explain how progress towardachieving those objectives will be measured.