12-11-10 Eclipse Legal Shine a Light on Succession
Am I the only one who thinks the pages in the various appointments sections for senior management roles in companies are a ruse for the gullible and needy? (Answer usually “yep”.) No manager worth their salt ever got a job worth having from an advert. At best someone pointed it out and said you/he/she should apply. Adverts are not about finding management talent – they may be for routine entry level roles - but at £100k+ forget it. Why on earth would you want to work for a firm you don’t know, run by people who clearly don’t have enough friends or contacts to enable them to fill key jobs, and demonstrably can’t bring on the talent in their own business? Worse – is the job real, or are they just going through some HR protocol; the real catch 22 is – if they have defined a role they can’t fulfil can they define roles at all?
A business succeeds by good people wanting to work for it. It excels by the people in that business taking responsibility for the careers and development of those people. It has been best described by someone as “being a relentless architect of human potential” – that’s all any manager/director is. The number of directors who take this developmental approach are sadly few and far between. And yes – it gets harder at some key growth points; but it also pays back in spades in others. Eclipse Legal has proudly shown that they know what they’re about and promoted a raft of staff from manager to director. It says that they know how to design jobs for how they do business. It says they know how to bring on staff. It says they don’t allow familiarity to breed contempt. It says that they have confidence in staying one of the fastest growing independents in the legal tech sector currently. So well done Delores, Mick and Tracy – and even better done to Steve and Russell.
http://www.eclipselegal.co.uk/frames/news/eclipse-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=358
11-11-10 FWBS and Thomson Reuters are Both Growing
When big groups like Thomson Reuters say Q3-10 was the first positive growth quarter since Q2-09 it is an accumulation of results and averages across a wide 31bn+ empire which may mean many things. According to the IMF, TR’s market capitalisation is bigger than many African countries’ GDP; Kenya, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain for example – twice the size of Uganda, so we should pay attention.
But frankly – it’s a bit like hearing on the news that the wheat crop in the Ukraine has failed, while watching your neighbour plant several new roses lovingly chosen for their garden. To a futures trader, one matters; for us, smelling the roses is more relevant.
So for FWBS to have begun to reap the rewards of painstakingly tending their garden at last is important. Reseller arrangements with Legato’s Indigo are now simplified, Matter Centre is marching on and their international sales through Aderant appear to now justify regular trips to Oz too.
An RBP profile of FWBS will shortly be availble on-line.
5-11-10 ICSA Software – Secretaries Shouldn’t Look this Good
Mad men? Just what are they doing – don’t they know there’s a recession on? A sound business level indicator should come from those firms which reflect core commercial activity levels, such as company secretarial services. ICSA Software are bucking the trend, however, and results for 09 showed growth – just when everyone else was seeing growth drop from +2% in Q3 to -2% or worse. The small amount of growth did come from US services more than the UK, but there is much more going on with the ICSA than this.
IRIS and others have piled into UK company secretarial services in recent years – and it appears to have not made an iota of difference to their Blueprint brand. ICSA Software have in fact been busy expanding their range of services significantly – and it’s paying off. Indeed ICSA are now closer to the registry services and burgeoning outsourcing markets for plan management and shareholder communication services, and they are increasingly less dependent on their Institute parent. As an indication of how robust a niche position in case and matter management, they demonstrate it well. Institutes are typically poor parents to commercial enterprises and ICSA Software is almost the exception that proves the rule. This year they should also become more reliant on overseas revenues than the UK for the first time – a sea change - but a welcome one for a team happy to be exceptional.
An RBP profile of ICSA Software will shortly be available on-line. Profiles are in powerpoint and summarise performance since 1995 to date with independent projections of potential performance to 2015.
2-11-10 Flo's Machine is Doing Well
Is it better to go "best of breed" or one stop shop? Is it better to have "tweaked generic" (bespoke) or off the shelf? Flosuite are a Scottish development team, doing rather well in the rarefied atmosphere of practice and matter management tools for global and large practices where hitherto only Elite and Aderant have feared to tread.
They have followed the developer route of deploying a quick and effective use of .Net and SOA tools and techniques on bespoke projects and then rolling out generic tools based on them.
That the big teams are unable to keep up with the latest tricks emanating from Microsoft is no surprise. Big company internal teams excel at some things - usually procurement dragons dens, and office politics - but while they are spectators on the cutting edge development insights Gold, etc partnership allows, seeing it is one thing - having your mortgage depend on it is quite another.
Flosuite's recent success suggests that development teams within the magic circle are stretched. And who can blame them when keeping up with 3G, 4G, iPads, Blackberry Torch/Curve..., etc.
In common with many, 2009 was lumpy for Flosuite, but they appear to have sustained an overall position which would be the envy of most new entrants to the market. No-one would have bet that a pitch to the magic circle and their friends on a pure play software based practice management would fly - but then not many Wood...
A profile for Flosuite will shortly be avvailable from RBP online.
No comments:
Post a Comment