Is The Traditional Professional Services Model Dying?
These days smart professional services firms are leveraging bundled products and automation, not so much people. It used to be just people. For many decades now, young graduate professionals have been taken into firms and paid lowish wages. They would be trained, well, to do the more repetitive and low level tasks and then the […]
We Are Living Through The Transition To Post Industrialism
Economists in the twentieth century, from communist through to fascist, and everything in between, almost exclusively relied on labour cost (per hour) as the main determinant of the price of goods and services. That link is now in the process of being broken by technology. The link to labour hours is still there, and to […]
Are You Ready To Let Go Of Timesheets?
Are you ready to let go of the edge of the pool? The traditional way of managing service firms, utilisation and charge-out rates, was fundamentally trying to achieve one goal, to ensure that the ratio of people costs to sales stayed at level that would allow the firm to grow safely and at the same […]
Should You Employ A Junior First?
A question I’m asked all the time is “how do I know when I should employ someone”. And that’s usually easy enough to estimate, once you’ve done it a few times, but you need to know what sort of position you want to create. I find though, a lot of people think first about […]
Charging By The Hour Is Like Flipping Burgers
Charging by the hour is hard work. And any time you stop work, the income stops too. It’s life on a treadmill. I think part the reason a lot of professionals instinctively want to charge by the hour is that they don’t want to overcharge anyone. They want to be fair. That’s because professionals […]
Maybe The Best Person For The Job Is More Than One Person
Hands up if you know how Hubspot works…. keep your hand up if you have the time to keep it humming along with the best marketing tactics and relevant content. It would be great to be able to employ a marketing manager right? Well, maybe not. Often a business owner’s first response to problems is […]
We’re Dogfooding It – And It’s Great
Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to test and promote the product. (Wikipedia). We have developed a great new product where we go into a business and do an evaluation of key performance and processes. This gives them critical […]
Why You Should Bootstrap For As Long As You Can
bootstrap ˈbuːtstrap/ verb gerund or present participle: bootstrapping 1. COMPUTING fuller form of boot1 (sense 2 of the verb). 2. start up (an Internet-based business or other enterprise) with minimal financial resources. I remember a friend at uni years ago saying “In America, you just go to Wall Street and get a bunch of money, in a month you […]