Planning for the Good times ahead March 7, 2010
Posted by Brian Coventry in Business Development, IT Strategy, Positioning.add a comment
History tells us that now is the best time for any law firm to prepare for the next economic boom, argues Brian Coventry.
For law firm managing partners and marketing managers attending the recent “M-Club” seminars in Brussels and Madrid, Brian Coventry had a surprisingly up-beat message. Mr Coventry, managing director of software solution provider APS – Billback, said that history tells us that all economic downturns are invariably followed by another period of sustained growth – typically lasting between seven to ten years. What’s more, recent stock market rises are providing an early indicator of possible good times ahead. “Stock markets always run ahead of the real economy,” he explained. “They are an indicator of what will happen in the next six to nine months.” more
Do the Maths in 2009 November 26, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Culture.add a comment
I received this email yesterday which made made me laugh but made you think at the same time. You can work out where I have edited certain references to minority groups so as not to get bombarded should they take offence – its a worry. Enjoy
1.Teaching Maths in 1970
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100..
His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.
What is his profit?
2. Teaching Maths In 1980
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is 80% of the price.
What is his profit?
3. Teaching Maths In 1990
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80.
How much was his profit?
4. Teaching Maths In 2000
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20..
Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
5. Teaching Maths In 2005
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and
inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the
preservation of our woodlands.
Your assignment: Discuss how the birds and squirrels might feel as the
logger cut down their homes just for a measly profit of £20.
6. Teaching Maths In 2009
A logger is arrested for trying to cut down a tree in case it may be
offensive to religious groups not consulted in the
felling licence.
He is also fined a £100 as his chainsaw is in breach of Health and Safety
legislation as it deemed too dangerous and could cut something.
He has used the chainsaw for over 20 years without incident however he
does not have the correct certificate of competence and is therefore
considered to be a recidivist and habitual criminal.
His DNA is sampled and his details circulated throughout all government
agencies. He protests and is taken to court and fined another £100
because he is such an easy target.
When he is released he returns to find an unkown group has cut down half his
wood to build a camp on his land. He tries to throw them off but is
arrested, prosecuted for harassing an ethnic minority, imprisoned and
fined a further £100.
While he is in jail the unknown group cut down the rest of his wood and sell it
on the black market for £100 cash. They also have a BBQ of
squirrel and pheasant and depart leaving behind several tonnes of rubbish
and asbestos sheeting.
On release, the logger is warned that failure to clear the fly tipped
rubbish immediately at his own cost is an offence. He complains and is
arrested for environmental pollution, breach of the peace and invoiced
£12,000 plus VAT for safe disposal costs by a regulated government
contractor.
Your assignment: How many times is the logger going to have to be
arrested and fined before he realises that he is never going to make £20
profit by hard work, gives up, signs onto the dole and lives off the
state for the rest of his life?
7. Teaching Maths In 2010
A logger doesn’t sell a lorry load of timber because he can’t get a loan
to buy a new lorry, as his bank has spent all his money and their money on
a derivative of securitised debt related to sub- prime mortgages in
Alabama and lost the lot with only some government money left to pay a
few million pound bonuses to their senior directors and the traders who
made the biggest losses.
The logger struggles to pay the £1,200 road tax on his old lorry.
However, as it was built in the 1970s, it no longer meets the emissions
regulations and he is forced to scrap it.
Some foreign loggers buy the lorry from the scrap merchant and put it
back on the road. They undercut everyone on price for haulage and send
their cash back home, while claiming unemployment for themselves and
their relatives.
If questioned they speak no English and it is easier to deport them at
the governments expense. Following their holiday back home they return to
the UK with different names and fresh girls and start again.
The logger protests, is accused of being a bigot and a racist and, as his
name is on the side of his old lorry, he is forced to pay £1,500
registration fees as a gang master.
The Government borrows more money to pay more to the bankers as bonuses
are not cheap. The politicians feel they are missing out and claim the
difference on expenses and allowances.
You do the maths.
9 I’s of Twitter July 31, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Twitter.Tags: Twitter
add a comment
Following on from my earlier post regarding setting up a Twitter account it also pays to do some reading on the strategy you will follow for its use. This article is a good one that outlines the 9 I’s of Twitter.
Twitter May 28, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Blogs and Wikis, Twitter.Tags: Twitter
1 comment so far
With businesses trying out Twitter as part of their steps into the sociobusiness environment I though I would post some steps for those clients and business partners who are interested in having a go.
Step 1 – create an account for your firm at Twitter. Try and come a decent name. For APS we have created apsconnections or @apsconnections as it becomes when it is accepted. Share the logon details of this account with members of your team who you think will be good at delivering key messages to the outside world. You can the start to follow APS by going to http://twitter.com/apsconnections.
Step 2 – Think about creating a second personal account. I have set up and account @briancoventry. You can see the posts I have made to this account on this blog to the left. The blog is automatically updated from my twitter account and therefore a good way of keeping you blog fresh. You can start to follow me by going to http://twitter.com/briancoventry.
Step 3 – Download a desktop client that will help you manage one or both accounts. I use Seesmic . This is good as it will also let you link your Twitter account to Facebook (suggest you only do this for your personal Twitter account).
Step 4 – Get an iPhone. You really get a sense of the power of the iPhone in how it can support you personally and the business when it comes to publishing key stories. If you have an iPhone go to the App Store on the phone and searcg for the app TwitterFon. There is a free version but I paid £2.49 for the pro version as it lets you manage multiple accounts. I know you can get applications for the Blackberry as well but have no details here. One of my readers may.
Good luck and send me a Tweet when you are up and running.
It is unwise to pay too much May 2, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Business Development, Culture.1 comment so far
“It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is it. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – It can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
– John Ruskin (1819 – 1900)
Tweet from the FourthEstate on the 29th May 2009 – Just heard of a law firm in Lancashire that based PMS purchase on fact a vendor dropped price from £100k to £49k: 1 year on still don’t work.
Who moved my cheese – revisted April 20, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Uncategorized.add a comment
Bobby Zuchman drew my attention back to this “BC – given the economic climate and all the changes, this video is more relevant than ever. Worth ten minutes to watch the video or read the book…”
Small Business Server 2008 April 20, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Infrastructure.add a comment
Small Business Server 2008 (SBS) is rightfully a great choice for many smaller accounting firms. SBS Premium Edition is all you need for a Practice IQ installation as it includes SQL Server Standard Edition. It also includes a 2nd Windows license to set up a “Line of Business” server to keep your business specific apps separate to the generic office/email apps running on the primary server.
After a couple of PracticeIQ installs on SBS we’ve encountered a few issues that have lead to the following recommendations:
• SQL Server (Database and Analysis Services) should be installed on the Line of Business (2nd) server.
• PracticeIQ website should be installed on the Line of Business (2nd) server.
Following these recommendations results in avoiding global IIS changes on the primary server and also results in a more performant system. It is possible to run PracticeIQ on the primary server but you need to make specific changes to IIS that affect all sites on the server. You can also run the database and analysis services on the primary server but Microsoft strongly recommends that you don’t.
Inbox Backwards April 14, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Collaboration, Email Management.2 comments
A few weeks back I sent an email to my team, I wanted to deal with two issues. First was to acknowledge that I was struggling with the amount of email I received on a daily basis and secondly to let them know that any email that had me in the cc box would be moved out automatically and reviewed at some point in the next week. If you don’t make use of Outlook rules then I stongly suggest trying a few to see what difference they can make.
I have created a number of rules over the years but the thing I noticed about my last effort was that having declared ‘email bankcruptcy’ (to a degree) the team have responded by not copying me in on as many conversations. The outcome has been a much reduced inbox and one that focuses more on inward email from clients and business partners.
Today I have gone one step further but in another direction, I have installed Xobni, which is the word “inbox” spelled backwards.
Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. It creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. It’s free to download with the knowledge that a premium version will follow at some stage down the line.
Xobni is a San Francisco, California based startup that is revolutionizing the way people manage email relationships. Xobni was started because they believe that people spend too much time searching for conversations, attachments, and other important information in their inbox. I agree.
At APS we use and market Worksite Document & Email Management from Autonomy. This is a great asset for storing a retrieving email and other electronic content but at the end of the day you still have an Inbox to worry about. The latest enhancements to Worksite are great in that we can see which emails within an Inbox have been filed in the DM system but as Xobni show there are other threads and connections that need dealing with within the the Inbox.
Every little bit helps – have a go 
I bet you look at this twice April 14, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Business Development, Presentations.1 comment so far
Shane Compton, Founder of APS, drew my attention to this as regards awareness in meetings. I’ll be on the look out in our next Global Management meeting in Auckland.
Blog & Email Discipline June 13, 2008
Posted by Brian Coventry in Blogs and Wikis, Email Management.add a comment
I had my monthly meeting with Caspar Craven & Mark Cunnah of Trovus today and was reminded that to get out of the the email swamp you need to use Blogs, Wikis and IM to greater effect.
With the pending roll out of Microsoft Communicator 2007 for APS in all geographies I feel confident we have one of the 3 implemented. Implementing an IM solution is very straight forward. We chose Microsoft beacuse it integrates with Exchange but a feature I quite like is the ability to save IM conversations into Outlook and from there into our Document Management system Worksite. Our IT team had some initial struggles but have managed to sort these out with the help of Microsoft. Rolling it out to the desktop is very easy so I recommend trailing this solution – you get a 180 day trial (I think).
As for the other Wikis I am looking forward to our next steps in relation to building Wiki based content and will keep you posted on our progress. Blogs – I’ll keep forcing myself to use this is as a mechanism to communicate conversations and experiences for our team and clients alike. Its all about discipline to avoid email where its not a necssary mechanism for communicating.
Brian Coventry
