Mark Lee recently launched a scathing attack on generic emails sent out by professionals. Why am I not surprised? I’ve been saying much the same about template driven websites. Firms feel they must have something but rarely go to the trouble of making their efforts unique or interesting. Here’s one crappy example. Here’s one that’s much better. (check the blog content)
Then Mark followed it up by talking about the impending demise of ‘halfway house‘ firms. Once again – I agree but want to amplify. Mark’s thesis centres around differentiation. That’s a good starting point but his argument appears to assume that all other things i.e. the underpinning services, remain the same. I disagree because this is a marketing driven idea that doesn’t come with a real sense of change.
If the belly aching I regularly hear from firms is anything to go by, then they are missing the point of what’s going on around them. In an earlier post I implored readers to catch Simon Wardley’s excellent talk about innovation and commoditization. If the SaaS/cloud world has taught us anything it should be that disruption has a value to customers. Check out the recent annual report from Xero to see what I mean. 22,000 paying punters can’t all be wrong. There are plenty of other examples but perhaps the most poignant fact is that four out of six of the shortlisted Software Satisfaction Awards candidates are SaaS and that Sage/Intuit don’t figure. Of the other two, one claims 35,000 users over 25 years. Xero (shortlisted) has been going how long? OK – so Xero has a monster marketing budget but it would be nowhere if the service wasn’t up to snuff. Kashflow (shortlisted) has ambitions to reach 10,000 paying customers by this year end. It has almost zero marketing budget unless you count in CEO Duane Jackson’s compensation.
The point in all this is that (most of) the SaaS providers are doing something different. They’ve taken plain boring old accounting and turned it into something that customers rave about. It is beyond marketing or ease of use but real differentiation. My colleague Phil Wainewright would likely say that SaaS/cloud gives us the opportunity to transform our businesses. Like Phil though, I see precious few examples of that happening. Except at the VSB (very small business) level. Phil says:
The company (M62) is quite literally a business that would not be possible on its current scale without the cloud. This is what business transformation is really about — not incremental improvements in performance, but being able to do things that simply were not possible before the cloud existed.
I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve said but it is worth repeating. When disruption like SaaS comes along, it represents an opportunity. From a professional standpoint it should mean that firms can further commoditize what they do by using accounting dashboards that show them the status of their clients’ activity. It is a short step to seeing how this might be integrated into fees, billing, customer satisfaction measurement and the like. From there we go full circle to Simon’s notion of creative destruction and a renewal to innovate.
Understanding how this happens is not difficult. Recognizing the speed at which it is occurring is something else. Which reminds me: ever thought what’s the last thing a bug sees as it splats onto your windscreen on the 70 MPH limit motorway? It’s ass. And that’s roughly the speed at which things are occurring today. It took accounting software around 20 years to become mainstream. SaaS/cloud has compressed that timeline by at least a factor of four. Doing something about it is even harder. If I was back in practice I’d be screaming at my software supplier to help me commoditize as fast as possible. Why?
If FreeAgent can impute my (rough) tax liability as an integral part of its accounting offering then what I once thought of as value add (i.e. crunching the tax numbers) has pretty much blown up. I don’t just need a new tune to hum, I need a whole fricking symphony. That’s why I titled this post: change the world or go home. Because if you don’t then you might just see your ass coming at you. And just for the record – I didn’t think that phrase up. My art supplier Hugh MacLeod did – in 2006. And yes – I have THAT T-shirt.
I hope this inspires a few people, not least Gary Turner…
