Sage bans KashFlow from GEW party: joins the Kill Kenny Klub

Tim McOwan, CTO KashFlow tweeted that:

Blimey, this week’s a right old Accounting Software Companies Shooting Themselves In The Foot Fest, innit?

He was referring to Intuit having shot itself in both foot and head as outlined by me this week but also a phone call that Duane Jackson, CEO of KashFlow took earlier in the day:

I blogged last week about the two events I’ll be attending for Global Entrepreneurship Week. I received a phone call today from the organisers telling me it “wouldn’t be appropriate” for me to attend the GEW Party this evening as “it’s a private Sage event”.

That is walking into very dangerous territory. Raising the hackles of a person with a reputation for not pulling punches AND a blog is a really, really bad idea. As someone who has been tossed out of media events for asking the ‘wrong’ question and been banned from attending conferences by some vendors for relentlessly exposing inconvenient truths, I know how this can be a shock the first time around. You get used to it. It is almost always the reaction of a company that feels bruised but incapable of coming up with a satisfactory response to tough questions. In this case, Duane has good reason to be miffed:

I think part of the reasoning behind it goes back to the event I attended on Tuesday, The Pitch. Doug Richard gave a great talk and took some questions – I asked him an innocuous question which he answered. And then after answering he asked me how KashFlow was going.

In my response I mentioned another SaaS company he is involved in which led to Doug saying something about there being a big enough market for both KashFlow and his firm to take on Sage.

So it wasn’t Duane who said anything particularly damning but rather that one of the sponsors was given a black eye in an exchange that involved KashFlow. Questions for both Sage and Sift Media, the gig organizers:

1. Why hasn’t Doug Richard been tossed from the event? It was he who made what might vaguely be considered the offending remark. Oh hang on, he’s one of those with whom attendees get to rub shoulders. I guess it would be a bit embarrassing to withdraw his invitation.
2. Did the event organizers even bother to get some facts straight before caving in?
3. How does Sage get to determine who turns up and who doesn’t when they’re charging an entrance fee and where I see there are many other event partners? Maybe it’s like one of those raves where only the favoured few know what’s really going on.
4. If this is indeed a private party then how did Duane get his name on the VIP list in the first place if Sage would not have wished him to be there?

Sage is demonstrating the kind of childish behavior I have seen time and again from vendors that believe they have market entitlement. It’s pathetic. The event organizers are caving in because to do otherwise is running the risk of not getting future sponsorship. That’s what happens to failed media organizations living off their history and not their value. But there is an upside.

Sage gets to join a new club I am opening called the Kill Kenny Klub. South Park fans will know that at the end of almost every episode in the first five seasons, poor Kenny gets killed, only to re-appear in the next episode. The modern day equivalent is turning up on these pages having done something suitably clueless, shooting yourself in the foot/head and then get to do it all over again.