Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: future

  • Navigating the future of accounting and business with the cloud

    Navigating the future of accounting and business with the cloud

    Steph Hinds of Newcastle accounting firm Growthwise  is one of the new breed of business advisers using cloud and mobile technologies to change her profession.

    At the recent Sydney Xero Conference I had the opportunity to speak to her about some of the ways her business is changing.

    The interview with Steph as part of the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel covers how the accounting profession is changing, what industries are being the most affected and where she sees the growth opportunities for her businesses.

    Like many other professional services industries, the big change Steph sees is how accounting is moving from being based upon client transactions to requiring much deeper relationships with clients.

    “The transactional model has been commodified completely,” says Steph. ” I started as a trainee accountant and we had those big ledger books and I was coding things and I’d go through cheque butts to enter them into the system.”

    “Now all of that work is done for you.”

    Like Xero founder and CEO Rod Drury, Steph doesn’t see this change as being generation based with older accountants adopting technologies as quickly as their younger counterparts.

    However legacy systems do hobble existing businesses with both Xero and Growthwise finding 40% of their clients are new, startup businesses.

    “We’re finding a lot of new businesses are starting up now,” says Steph. “it is so easy to setup in business, we’ve advised a lot of accountants that rather than spending five hundred thousand dollars to buy into a practice, you can spend ten thousand dollars on licenses and a laptop and all of a sudden you’re really in business.”

    Changing the building industry

    Steph sees the opportunities being in retail, hospitality and trades where being are struggling with paperwork and need fast responses in a customer driven market. The building trades are one of the big areas Steph sees for growth.

    “Guys not having to drive to the office to get their instructions and their things for the day, not having to drop off timesheets, getting paid on the spot and billing on the spot.”

    “We see traditionally see trades, particularly in the building industry as having cashflow issues and people go bust,” says Steph. “I think this is a huge opportunity to change things.”

    Having information is at managers’ and proprietors’ fingertips is one of the benefits of cloud services and Steph also sees the app ecosystem, providing plugins like mobile job management are very powerful.

    “The big data angle, for benchmarking – we have real time access to our clients’ data and how they are doing against industry benchmarks and being able to help clients,” says Steph.

    Steph Hinds and Growthwise are examples of how the business world undergoing a dramatic change as the information and systems that were once only available to big business can now be accessed by anyone.

    The real digital divide lies between the business who are prepared to grab the opportunities and those who are happy doing things the way they’re done today.

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  • We’re all Luddites now – Wage deflation and falling living standards

    We’re all Luddites now – Wage deflation and falling living standards

    A post on today’s Macrobusiness describes how Australia’s General Motors workers being asked to take a pay cut is the harbinger for a general fall in the nation’s wages.

    This is coupled with a post by Paul Krugman in the New York Times sympathising with the Luddites as technology takes away many middle class jobs that were not so long ago thought to be the safe knowledge jobs of the future.

    Krugman points out that in the United States income inequality started accelerating in the year 2000, the stagnation of most Americans’ incomes started a decade or two before that.

    For the last few decades, expanding credit allowed the consumerist society to continue growing, but the crisis of 2008 marked the end of that that economic model. Although governments around the world have tried to keep it alive by pumping money into their economy.

    Now we have to face the reality that the Western world’s standard of living is falling for the first time in a century.

    For some this is going to be really tough – although one suspects those who will really complain are those least affected.

    What is clear is that many of our business and political leaders aren’t prepared to face this change. Dealing with that is going to be the biggest challenge of this decade.

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  • Australia’s economic rigor mortis

    Australia’s economic rigor mortis

    This is worth watching, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris and Australian Business Council chief Tony Shepherd spoke on Sunday with Alan Kohler on the ABC’s Inside Business.

    At 5.40 Andrew Liveris says Australia is suffering a state of economic rigor mortis – “we’ve lost the ability to innovate” – with no plans and a great complacency. It’s something all Aussies should reflect upon, although don’t expect these blokes to be any help.

     

     

     

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  • Journalism’s managerial challenge

    Journalism’s managerial challenge

    Yesterday I had lunch with a group of retirees who aren’t particularly connected to technology. It was a contrast to the previous three days spent with startup and media companies talking about social media and the internet.

    One thing that really seemed to disturb them was the idea that printed daily newspapers may not be around in a few years time.

    Which makes Elizabeth Knight’s Media Rivals Facing a Brave New World this weekend a timely read in the contrasting strategies of News Limited and Fairfax.

    From Knight’s report it’s hard not think News Corp CEO Robert Thomson is deluded;

    ”Print is still a particularly powerful medium … 43 per cent of Wall Street Journal readers are millionaires.”

    Old millionaires. Like the people I had lunch with yesterday.

    The problem Thomson has if this is indeed the strategy of the New News Corporation then he’s locked into a dying, declining market.

    A bright spot for both News and Fairfax are the digital properties that evolved out of their old classified and display newspaper advertising, specifically the real estate sites Domain and realestate.com.au.

    These sites don’t involve substantive news reporting or journalism beyond regurgitated realtor media releases, although if you take the attitude that newspapers were really only advertising channels with some news to attract an audience then this is a natural development.

    For journalists, and those who want to be informed about the world around them, that view is a problem as it doesn’t answer the question of how do you pay for news.

    With earnings expected to be 30% lower this year compared to 2012, this is something concentrating the minds of Fairfax’s management given they don’t have the profitable Pay-TV revenues of News.

    The problem for the legacy news operations is that the focus is on cost cutting while denying the reality that expensive printed newspapers are dying in both readership and advertising revenue.

    Desperately hanging onto the daily printed newspaper model threatens to consume resources needed make both Fairfax and News successful online.

    Which makes the venues of the investor events that Knight describes a interesting counterpoint to the ruthless cost cutting going on at both News and Fairfax.

    Sydney’s Mint and the Four Seasons Hotel are lovely venues and no doubt the executives and analysts enjoyed some nice canapes and drinks after their briefings.

    But genuinely cost conscious management would have put their status to one side and held the meeting at their own premises and, if the analysts were nice, offered them a cup of tea and a biscuit, just like shareholders get.

    At time when fast, responsive and small management is needed to make fast decisions in rapidly changing markets it seems the companies most threatened by change are those with the most inflexible, and entitled, managements.

    It may well be that Fairfax or News discover the magic formula that makes digital media profitable, but it’s not going to happen while they deny the realities of today’s market places and a radically changing economy.

    Not that this will worry the older executives of over-managed businesses who will spend their sunny days of retirement enjoying nice lunches and wondering what happened to the days of the printed newspaper.

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  • Enniskillen and the G8’s Potemkin Village

    Enniskillen and the G8’s Potemkin Village

    In the middle of this month the G8 group of world leaders will meet in Northern Ireland when the UK takes their turn to host the annual conference.

    With the leaders of eight of the world’s biggest economies – which includes Canada but not China – coming to visit the Northern Irish government is anxious to present a prosperous face to the world, including allocating £233,000 to give Enniskillen’s town centre a ‘facelift’.

    It seems a good chunk of the facelift money has been spent on creating fake shops in the distressed town’s centre.

    In a little over two weeks they and other leaders will gather for a G8 summit at a golf resort in Enniskillen. And as the date approaches the cleanup is moving into high gear. It includes new coats of paint on houses, tidying up lawns, and putting up fake storefronts on shuttered businesses.

    For the visiting dignitaries, their advisors and the media caravans that follow them, Enniskillen’s shops will be looking prosperous when the reality is very different.

    “The County of Fermanagh has suffered terribly as a result of the credit crisis and the resulting recession,” says Dan Keenan of the Irish Times.

    Fermanagh County’s efforts to present a brave, if false, face to the world is symptomatic of the Western world’s refusal to accept the consumer based economy that drove the Corporatist model of government over the past fifty years is over.

    Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signalled the end of the Soviet experiment, the global financial crisis of 2008 marked the end for the big spending, big debt era which had driven the Western economies through the last half of the Twentieth Century.

    Unlike the Soviets, we refused to accept the game is up and have kept a failing economic philosophy alive with massive borrowing and money printing. In this respect, we’re dumber the Russian communist leaders who accepted the reality of the world they found themselves confronting in 1989.

    All of which will probably amuse Russian President Vladimir Putin as his motorcade speeds past the repainted shopfronts of Enniskillen and no doubt he’ll be thinking of the face Russia will present next year when they host the G8 Summit.

    Perhaps its time for the G8 leaders to invite the People’s Republic of China to join their privileged club – at present Japan is the only non-‘white’ nation.

    If the G8 decide to let the Chinese join, there’s the South China Mall that would be a perfect counterpoint to the Potemkin Village of Enniskillen and the world’s great leaders can continue to believe that the business rules of the 1980s still hold true today.

    Yesterday’s men are still pursuing yesterday’s dreams, dressing up Enniskillen may cater to their fantasies but it won’t help today’s economy.

    Picture of a propped up facade courtesy of Ingolfson through Wikipedia Commons.

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