Sorry if it sounded like I was lecturing - it was a hard day, yesterday!!
When I set up my group with some friends of long-standing, we learned the lessons of the previous group (one day the story will be told......) and amended the basic structure to suit ourselves.
There are some particular lessons we found, though.
1) When you and long-standing friends start out togethr, it is like a marriage. We all go in optimistically and fail to allow for little problems.
For example, because we know each other well, we failed to nail the issue of currency tightly enough. Similarly, the issue of accidental damage and who pays.
2) I found a much better approach is to keep the rules fairly short, but have a couple of Annexes to the Rules - a sort of Flying Order section.
In that we nominate the servicing arrangements, the roles and responsibilities and 'officers', the cost structure, the airfield we operate from, check pilots etc, and, more crucially, who we go to for arbitration of disputes (we've chosen the local school's CFI).
So the rules stay stable, and the Annexes are discussed each year at our fairly informal AGMs, usually held at a nice local restaurant.
Whatever you do, and how you do it, the very best of luck
