General Consultant Discussion

What Do Our Practices Look Like in 2 - 5 Years? Attached are the PowerPoint slides from my presentation.

@Businessofconsulting

Here's my .02 on the Sage 100 ERP practice: - 5-10% year over year decline possible - this means customers dropping maintenance and.or switching to another ERP. - This will be most pronounced for these types of Sage 100 ERP users: * GLAP * Job Cost * Manufacturing The above users have seen little material improvement to the product that they're paying recurring maintenance for. As additional functionality is required by those customers you will increasingly see them move off Sage 100. - Sage 100 upgrades become more of an ""autopilot"" once the customer is to 2013+ -- the concept that @GaryFeldman spoke about where our support ""comes with"" some type of service (in this case an annual upgrade) will become more prevalent. - Without a ""comes with"" support plan which includes upgrades - the upgrade cycle will be 18-36 months (another stat that I think came out in Gary's session) I think we need to be very careful about taking on any product that might be a ""onesie or twosie"" type sale. Those are usually more difficult to both make money at (no way to recover your learning curve) and to support (with only one or two customers you struggle to be an expert). Exceptions will apply however my strong advice would be to avoid any onesies or twosies type add-ons and instead partner with an experienced 90 Minds member.

When you say onesie, twosie it makes me also think of @PhilMcIntosh session on picking up another product. Over the past tow years Phil has been picking up a couple of new xTuple customers per year. For a small firm or lifestyle consultant he is building an expertise in an alternate product to what we all see as a slowly degrading platform with a publisher that is not putting huge quota's or certification requirements on the partner. I see larger consulting organizations looknig at products like SAP B1 and Accumatica as growth products. Accumatica currently has lowe partner requirements than SAP, but with SAP you can team with a Master VAR like I-BN and keep your costs and requirements to a minimum. I see fewer people moving to more established products like NAV which can still offer good sales potential due to the large number of well entrenched VARs like Clients First. Other alternative products like Netsuite and Epicor seem to have less attraction due to the direct sales channel conflict. Intacct is still picking up new VARs with the Taylor McDonald connections, but also seems much more of a financials play. I also agree with @WayneSchulz that more consultants are partnering at all levels of the partner spectrum. We all agree that we can not be all things to all people. More partners are focusing on adding value in the early phase of defining requirements (mentioned by @JerryNorman in the Value Pricing session) and then partnering with experts like @MoiraGoggin for SIA, @ShawnSlavin for HRMS or @PeterWolf for Sage CRM (all presenters at MOTM).