If it was that easy - we'd all do it..

Anyone who tells you what will happen in the next 3 years - or the next 3 months for that matter is lying. Fibbing. Disingenuous, at best.

No really - it needs saying - the more you search for certainty - the less you are going to find it. Maybe in some parts of the public sector you are able to decide what the plan is and simply make it happen, take a salary and go home. Actually I doubt that - even there. Everybody else has to live with uncertainty. People on the front line in business, actually get comfortable with risk - sometimes Big risk - really quite quickly. It's a beautiful thing.

Tough times for a forecaster then? Well, no, actually. At RBP we leave horoscopes to the credit rating teams. We deal in ’character’. Long term stickability; guts; chutzpah. It’s how it actually works. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. The 'spreadsheet jockeys' least of all, and even more so when they start guessing 9 months ahead of the period being forecast. Its just not real. My favourite definition of entrepreneurial spirit is the 'unreasonable conviction of the improbable'. It's what makes it fun.

Way back when I had the biggest corner office and the biggest whiteboard, I asked the US CEO how he managed over 34 P&Ls. ’Simple’, he said, ’only three are out of plan at any one time, and I know how they’ll react before I even have to place the call’. (He still placed the calls mind - and they were challenging to be on the other end of.)

All we do at RBP is replicate that. For the 87 teams that make up the UK’s legal practice, case and matter management supplier market, for example, we go to town on what they have done and could achieve. Some surprise us - usually positively - but we’re much more often right than wrong. Others will tell you the tech issues - we ’Do’ the numbers.

And No - this is not some Marxian dialectic where the predictability of the economics makes us all pawns in a futile rat race. Quite the reverse. Economics is like history - it can tell you what you stubbed your toe on in the dark last time - not what the flashing lights and alarms mean this time around. You'd be mad not to be better informed - but the wisdom still has to come from within. What we do know, is that over the long term, a company will display its financial 'character'. Some are brave, some are cautious, some paddle slowly on the fast river, some pick fights for the sake of picking them... It matters.

We also know the competitive intensity of the various market sectors and levels. We know some areas need tough guys, and some can coast (comparatively speaking), some need patience, some a good shake, and some are up to their proverbials in alligators. We know what a market share means - and we don’t do ’group think’.

We put it all together and see what this bunch of disparate, individualistic, committed, skint, overstretched, over worked, underestimated and visionary people could and should achieve. We know that there are no green fields. We know that there is no magical better mousetrap. With one bound Jack usually lands in deeper poo, rather than escaping to save the world.

Based on that brick built, micro assessment of each team - looking back to 1995 over 2 business cycles including 2 other dips or recessions - Dotcom fevers and Y2K distractions, .Net, ABSs, Web2...3 etc - we then take an experienced and informed view.

And we are delighted to be able to share it with you and the market overall. It is normally the preserve of global strategy teams, VC researchers, credit algorithm wonks and a handful of paranoid sales directors. Finally - at last - it is available for you and all your top team in an easily accessible format.

So we hope our new approach to business intelligence is refreshing. We aim to tell it like it is. We've been in charge of the P&L(s), we've had unreal targets imposed unfairly, we've had the wind on our back, we've screwed up, we've excelled - and we've built bought and sold companies in all the markets we cover.

If it was simply a matter of finding out what the market will do and pushing levers to get our chunk of it - frankly most of us would go home and find something much more fun to do. It's hard. Its challenging. We hope our approach to the market character and potential achievable is instructive.

When I needed it in the mahogany play pens, it didn't exist. Well, for the markets covered by RBP - it does now. Try the Legal IT Financial Fundamentals Report for size - it's different.

Flippin 'eck - Please Stop this Nonsense

A major player in the legal and professional services markets has announced the following guiding principles in their Annual Report - they were even voted on by their people - "customer focus, honesty and integrity, innovation, passion and service excellence".







Answers on a post card please if you can immediately spot which firm is boasting these guiding principles - surely it's obvious...you know the market well so they should be obvious...still strugging?...such a shining light must be blinding...oh come on...







But then again - to be conspicuously "customer focused" is no big deal - everyone says it, and frankly in my experience firms that have dominant market positions always claim this and confuse an inability to go anywhere else with a silence about doing so. If you flip each of these "qualities" to see who would do the opposite - you will see we are firmly in motherhood and apple pie territory.







"Honesty and integrity" are the sort of thing you only claim if you haven't got any. They are self evident - there is no greyness here - you are either pregnant with them or not - end of. If you have to claim it - you've lost it and simply demonstrate that you understand neither of them.







"Innovation" - well - in a tech business you assume this is cloud technology, simple and effective code, intuitive service, etc - but that's not what this lot are best known for. Perhaps they mean the financial innovation in taking very high profits each year from locked in clients - but even that's not new really, now is it.







"Passion and service excellence". Show me the firm which hates what it does and deliberately screws its clients at every opportunity - and then has the honesty to say we plan to keep doing this every year in their annual 200-page-spiral-bound-strategy-wonk " Action Plan", and these pious acclamations may just begin to have some meaning.







I despair. A simple strategic test is (1) flip the proposition to see if it really makes you look different from everyone else - if it doesn't - leave it out, and (2) define yourself in relevant ways - who would ever know this was not a doughnut factory in Wisconsin, and (3) know what you don't do...



- and start with "don't do bullsh1t".