General Consultant Discussion

How many of you have attended a Firm of the Future Symposium? Was it helpful i.e., have you successfully transitioned? If not, why not, and why aren't you collaborating on Ed Kless's Yammer site??

Yes I've attended. Worth the money. Everything we do is fixed fee billing. Nothing hourly. Worth every penny in my opinion. Ed added me to the Yammer group and I was the only one there - not a sole to converse with so I dropped it from my Yammer. I think it's a great idea but honestly I have enough going on with groups to not have to worry about trying to help fire another one up.

LOL - I totally understand, Wayne. Thanks for the input on the symposium.

WRT to FOTF = Just Do It. Too many people make excuses for why they can't. It's all BS. You just start - as you make mistakes change your approach. Maybe @JohnShaver will help us with a FOTF group here unless the Yammer group is going to get started.

I was really wondering why others who are still working on this aren't on it to ask questions, etc. I think I'm the only who has asked a question and I know I'm not alone in this! And while John and Ed are wonderful resources, I was hoping to collaborate with others in the process.

Absolutely worth attending even if you are not yet ready to make the full jump to Ed's Firm of the Future model. We are still transitioning (hard to to turn a ship that is cruising at high speeds, just ask Sage), but I always come away with some concrete ideas from Ed's sessions to introduce into the mix.

I went to half of the one Wayne went to. It was worth the effort. I haven't made the transition yet. Internal issues to work through and will get there. Why only half? My kid needed me to do something so I had to leave early. I didn't know the Yammer group was up and operating.

Yes, it is. I'll see that you get info on it.

@MikeFitzgerald Sage is cruising at high speed? I liken them to a super tanker that is firing on half the pistons and no one is at the helm full time and they are approaching a coral reef................

The best way I found to do it is just jump in, make mistakes, correct, keep correcting. Sooner or later you'll start to get the hang of it. I find that it's impractical to quote every single little project. So I made up a pricing menu. This is for repetitive routine things like creating a report, imports, re-install workstations. I'm personally not comfortable sizing up each request to see what the value is to the customer. Some portion of that seems opportunistic. One argument I had against FOTF was that it was too expensive to quote each small project. So I made a change and devised a pricing menu and that works well for me. The things that I typically quote as a project are upgrades or more complex type of projects. I also find that it's far easier to build in one or two change requests to each quote than to expect that customers will openly greet your request for a change. I find most customers don't really know fully what they want (and yeah it's our job to help but many companies are so disfunctional that short of reading minds you have little hope of capturing all the info).

Before we get momentum going with the current Yammer group, Ed and I need to work out a few issues. The main one being that this external network is a child network of Sage's internal employee-only group. Basically, Sage owns the current FOTF Yammer group and can do with it whatever they want without us having any say in the matter. What we need to do is create a completely new group that doesn't have any connection with Sage's Yammer group. Being a child group of Sage severely limits what we can do with this group. For example, only Ed can invite new members because he is the only Sage employee in the group. Also, we cannot add streams or sub-groups to categorize conversation topics (like we do in 90Minds Socialcast). And if Sage decided to do away with their Yammer group, this network would cease to exist. The ultimate goal is to open a group up to many more professionals than just Sage partners. We'd like to invite VeraSage folks (from the VeraSage & Friends Facebook group), THRIVEal (a great group of CPAs who are making the transition to FOTF) and any CPAs, technology consultants or attorneys that would like to join. So, for now, let's hold up on adding a bunch of folks to the FOTF Yammer group.

I know when we were talking with Yammer and Socialcast there was a great deal of negotiating room for licenses. I believe what you want is a paid Yammer and then do something similar to what 90 Minds does and charge a per named user license fee to each person who wants to participate. That also helps to ensure that people who join are committed to participating. And, yes you are right on with the Yammer ownership issues. Getting the info out of that Yammer would be a hassle.

Wayne, that's exactly how we are planning on setting it up. I stole from the best!

@WayneSchulz makes the best point about being a FoF - it creates a culture of self-evaulation. Too many resellers are in a rut right now and there are a lot of massive changes coming along. If we aren't constantly re-evaluating, we are risking our futures. Just my 2 cents.