As the keeper of the @VeraSage Twitter handle I get all the follow notifications sent to me. I was quite amused yesterday when I received this one.
Special thanks to fellow Senior Fellow Michelle Golden for the idea for the title of this post.
Last month, Ron Baker and I delivered a Firm of the Future Symposium to 40 members of the THRIVEal+CPA Network.
On the evening of Day One, Ron and I were honored to be guests on the first-ever live THRIVEcast.
Enjoy!
Dan Morris and I will be conducting the Sole Proprietor’s Retreat this December 9-10 for the California CPA Education Foundation. This 1.5 day program was designed as a way to give sole props the opportunity to have a retreat with their peers, since they don’t have partners.
It was a predecessor program to the Firm of the Future Symposium, but designed specifically for sole props and all the issues they face.
Ric Payne has agreed to offer a 12-month membership to the Principa Alliance, which provides access to its Practice System (a $1,295 value).
If anyone is interested, don’t hesitate to contact me, or Dan. We always limit the participation to 7-12 to make the group more intimate.
Also, if you could help spread the word that would be much appreciated.
Thanks to our senior fellow John Chisholm for sending along this article from the Brisbane Times.
Another example of how the billable hour creates a perverse incentive to do the wrong thing.
A recent cosmological discovery got me thinking once again about the what George Gilder and others term the materialist fallacy. From a Reuters report from last Thursday:
Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.
Materialists, including many of my Libertarian friends who favor a return to the gold standard, will have to conclude:
This is materialist wealth creation at its finest!
I am not sure why, but my brain was reminded of this classic Bugs and Daffy cartoon. Enjoy!
Hit tip to my friend and Sage partner Amjad Khan from AIM Insight.
As many of you know, I have been a huge fan of Mahan Khalsa’s Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play for almost a decade now.
Thanks to what must be a system glitch, you can buy the audio book of Let’s Get Real for $14 or listen to the exact same thing as a podcast for free. Great find!
For those interested the podcasts are available on iTunes by going to Podcasts>Business>Management & Marketing>FranklinCovey SPG.
This is both the best sales book about consulting and the best consulting book about sales.
ENJOY!
In the third DETalks, Matthem Burgess shares with us his journey that led him to found eLawyer.
The convergence of value pricing with true technology innovation has forced many to revisit the ‘traditional’ delivery of legal services.
In the estate planning space, many components of the process that have historically been fiercely guarded by lawyers can in reality be provided far more effectively by other advisers, particularly accountants, financial planners and risk advisers.
eLawyer is an innovative web based law firm developed by one of the largest Australian independent law firms and the only large law firm to have a dedicated and continuous estate planning focus for over 50 years.
In this DET, managing director Matthew Burgess provides a snapshot of the framework explaining why elawyer was developed.
VeraSage is thrilled to announce that our own G. Robert Newhart Non-Value-Added Fellow, Greg Kyte is teaming up with friend of VeraSage Jason Blumer of Blumer & Associates, CPAs, PC and THRIVEal, LLC.
They promise it will be “a podcast like no other.” The THRIVEcast begins in July 2011, brought to you by the innovative people of the CloudSolutions Alliance.
Jason and Greg will take you on a journey of learning more about our profession, with a twist of dysfunction and humor.
For more information click the poster below.
Bob Harper, friend of VeraSage, and owner of Portfolio, a UK-based marketing company for professional firms, recently published a fascinating report: GRF is killing the profession.
GRF stand for “Gross Recurring Fees,” and it has created a sense of complacency and entitlement in the profession, leading to a lack of innovation, dynamism, focus on value and customer service excellence, and other deleterious effects.
Nine consultants and thought leaders to the accounting profession contributed to this report, including: Bob Harper, Dennis Howlett, Mark Lee, Mark Lloydbottom, Michael McKerlie, Finola McManus, Steve Pipe, Paul Shrimpling, and yours truly.
If you lead or work in an accounting firm, you need to read this short report, and pay special attention to why GRF will no longer be the basis for valuing accounting firms.
Thanks to Bob for making this report available.
I’m pleased to announce the Maryland Association of CPAs is offering my third Second Life Webinar, which will be held Wednesday, May 25th at 12:30 - 2:30 pm Eastern Time. Registration begins at 11:30 pm.
You’ll have to be registered for Second Life, as well as the Maryland Association’s “CPA Island” on Second Life.
The Webinar’s content and registration information is here.
For how to register on Second Life, visit Maryland’s CPA Island Web site here, and click on “Where to Begin?” (Second Life Resources) in the upper right corner.
Last week while delivering a Sage Business Strategy Workshop, the group had a dialogue about Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Principle (aka BHAG). I shot a brief video about the conversation. (Sorry, about the sound sync problem. I am still working some of this technology out.)
I have a couple of questions for you:
Here is a better view of the diagram. (Au is the periodic table abbreviation for gold. MM is maintenance mode.)
“On the individual engagement, profitability does NOT matter. The only thing that matters is the profitability of the entire system.” - Ed Kless, February 22, 2011 on Patrick Lamb’s blog post entitled Pop Quiz on Profitability
“Profit is not determined on an hour by hour or matter by matter basis.” - Patrick Lamb, March 7, 2011 in his post, Do lawyers need to earn a profit on every matter?
With the exception of those who list Bankruptcy as their practice area, who I understand are required by the courts to track their time to the tenth of an hour, I submit that this is the list of smartest, but economically ignorant people in the United States.
Here is the “time is money” quote from the article - ”Harvey Miller, a bankruptcy partner at New York-based Weil, Gotshal & Manges, said his firm had an ‘artificial constraint’ limiting top partners’ hourly fee because "$1,000 an hour is a lot of money.”
Yeah, the “artificial constraint” is called the almighty billable hour! At least poor Harvey is a bankruptcy attorney, so maybe he knows better.
MAS 90 Guru, Wayne Schulz, told me about a cool customer service feedback mechanism that 37signals uses. 37signals are the creators of Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire, all web-based collaboration software solutions.
What they do is post, for all the world to see, the rating of there most recent 100 interactions with customers on a simple three point scale: great, just OK, and not so good. They tally the ratings and post them on a real time basis.
This is brilliant. It is simple, easy to understand, and I would think relatively easy to do.
How about doing them one better and posting it on your home page?
On January 27, 2011 I taught an 8-hour CPE course for the California CPA Education Foundation, inaguarating their new facility in San Mateo for in-house education events.
The course was: Pricing on Purpose: Creating and Capturing Value.
It was originally intended for CPAs who work in industry, but as it turned out, the overwhelming majority of attendees were practicing CPAs.
So we provided a copy of my latest book, Implementing Value Pricing, to all attendees. However, you don’t need the book to get value out of the program.
The course was Webcasted, and the Education Foundation has graciously made it available for free.
An excellent complement to this topic is another 8-hour Webcast we did last year, Measure What Matters to Customers, which discusses Key Predictive Indicators.
As always, we appreciate any and all feedback.
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