Goodman Jones – a winner

by admin on November 16, 2006

Last night Goodman Jones picked up an award at the annual AccountancyAge Awards event for Best Use of Internet: Practice. They beat off four other finalists including PwC. I’m delighted for the firm and especially Philip Woodgate who championed the site’s development. I’m also pleased for David Terrar whose team engineered the site using open source components. This helped keep costs to a fraction of the charges professional firms usually expect to pay.

It was a pleasure to meet with Larry Phillips and Raymond Morris, GJs senior partners who are genuine forward thinkers. Larry explained that developing the website was a significant undertaking requiring collaboration among all the partners. That was evident from the way the partners took care to ensure the site reflects what Goodman Jones stands for rather than adopting bland platitudes, marketing speak and cookie-cutter content.

Earlier in the day, I’d visited GJs offices in Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury, London to record conversations with some of their people. I’ll be producing these as podcasts in the coming days. The ‘victims’ were partner Peter Rogol, seasoned audit manager Amit Sharma and freshly qualified senior Gill Weekes. Each of these conversations runs for 10-15 minutes.

Each person brought a different perspective of life as a practitioner. I learned that Peter is a qualified mediator who assists warring parties in reaching compromise. While his work is usually reserved for legal disputes, he has mediated between client employers and staff. Peter and I discussed the compliance climate, its impact on clients and how he sees the future of accountants as advisors. Amit discussed the way IFRS compares with UK GAAP and Gill talked about the benefits of training in a relatively small firm as compared to the Big Four.

Disclosure: I was a guest of site sponsors Winweb and I provided content development services to David for the Goodman Jones site.

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  • http://www.cumulotax.co.uk Heatehr

    Dennis – I’m sitting here in my jimjams to see how GJ got on – see how sad you’ve made me?

    Congratulations Dennis and Phillip and the team.

    Heather

  • http://www.sme-blog.net/ Philip Woodgate

    Hi Dennis

    It was very much a team effort, but special thanks to David and yourself. A lot of the inspiration for new ideas comes from blogs and yours in particular. Direct and relevant they have become an essential read for me.

  • http://www.cumulotax.co.uk Heather

    I tried to send a comment this morning but obviously it was too early for my old computer.

    Sat in my jimjams I was keen to see whether GJ’s had done it – see how sad I’ve become Dennis?

    Very many congratulations to you (+ Phillip and team)

    Heather

  • http://www.kiteblue.net Jyoti Banerjee

    Hi Dennis, Glad we could catch up after all these years. Sounds like your recent hibernative posture is being upgraded into something rather more dangerous for the ozone layer. As I said on Philip’s blog, I hope you get out more.

    Of course, I marvel at the delicious insanity of the accountancy age awards where the top global practice award, out of four genuine possibles, goes to number six, and two-thirds of the enterprise software short-list features companies that are genuine no-namers, to name but two…

    Jyoti

  • http://teblog.typepad.com/ David Tebbutt

    You think there might be something in this SaaS lark then?

    Only kidding.

    Well done to all concerned.

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  • http://biztwozero.com David Terrar

    Cheers Dennis. There are a number of things about the GJ project that were really satisfying, most important of which was getting Philip and another practice in to blogging.

  • http://www.accmanpro.com Dennis Howlett

    Jyoti – another first – I only had 1 beer all evening courtesy of Gary Turner and still struggled to get a cab back to my hotel!

    Seriously though – yep – the software awards do have an odd look to them. They always do (speaking as a past judge on these things)

  • http://www.sme-blog.net/ Philip Woodgate

    The mid range software package is normally not much of a surprise e.g. Access Dimensions, Exchequer, Navision etc.. However, this year Hansa got the award and I wouldn’t put them down as one of the usual suspects.

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