The ERP Lifestyle Consultant

Lots of speculation over what has happened — and is happening — at ERP VAR Hightower Inc of Skokie IL.

It’s been almost a week since reports surfaced that employees were sent home with their belongings in a box and told to await further word. Everyone involved in the company – and what I presume are negotiations over what to do with customers and intellectual property – have been silent.

Unlike seasonal businesses such as landscapers and house painters – consulting is not usually one where you can lay off crews of employees for large gaps of time.

In the consulting world appearing to disband your business prior to having a deal for someone to take over servicing the customers doesn’t exactly put you in a power position for negotiating any potential sale or transfer.

I don’t expect the sounds of silence to continue much longer. Either Hightower is going to need to announce something or Sage likely will do it for them.

This report from Bob Scott last night indicates New York based Net@Work may have a deal for the customer base although nothing officially has been announced as of yet,

SWK handling HighTower client and reseller support effective today bit.ly/GPYOZi

— Brian W Dunn (@brianwdunn) March 23, 2012

UPDATE: March 23, 2012  9:00AM ET – Hightower’s Blog Site has been updated to indicate that “Effective today, Friday March 23, 2012, SWK will be handling all HighTower client support, as well as supporting resellers of HighTower enhancements“.

Are you a partner or consultant for Sage products? Join the private conversation on our partner Facebook group  or LinkedIn Group.

Hightower End Looming?

A consultant who claims that one of his employee’s received a phone call from Hightower Inc reached out to me to say he had been told the support case they have pending with Skokie IL ERP consultants Hightower Inc. may take a little while to be resolved.

According to one of my 90 Minds members who spoke to their Hightower representative:

We had an open support case with them and got a call from our rep that they were shutting down 

I have a message into Hightower executives. Calls  today (3/20/12) to their phone line listed on the web site have gone unanswered. Update: As of 2:28 pm ET 3/20/12 the phone message is indicating that Hightower is experiencing a serious data interruption to voice and email.

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I just noticed Microsoft will stream today’s Convergence 2012 keynote by COO Kevin Turner and Kirill Tatarinov, President, Microsoft Business Solutions. While the speeches will undoubtedly be more subdued than those of past (including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s classics) the overall content can give a good hint as to Microsoft’s ERP direction for 2012-2013.

Not able to attend Convergence this year? We want you to be a part of the Microsoft Dynamics community anyway! Beginning at 9:00am CT on Monday, March 19, we’ll webcast the Opening Keynote with Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer, and Kirill Tatarinov, President, Microsoft Business Solutions, both Microsoft Corp. Join us as our company visionaries share a vision of connected, forward-looking organizations and how Microsoft delivers on the promise of enabling people to do their best work, driving data to insight to action – anytime, anywhere — as they seek to make a difference in moving the business forward. The keynote will be webcast from the main page of the Convergence website.

The streaming keynote fun starts at 9am CT – at the Convergence 2012 Web Site

Perhaps the most shocking revelation today at the LinkedIn group meeting was not the change happening at Sage but the answer to the question Sage’s Tom Miller asked about who had attended Firm of the Future.

Only a few hands went up. And this was in a room of about 50 of arguably Sage’s most active partners.

For those who’ve not been, Firm of the Future is two days of instruction with Ron Baker of VeraSage and Ed Kless of Sage.  The course catalog describes the experience as:

This experience is dedicated to the possibility that a professional organization can be run more effectively when it becomes a knowledge firm rather than a service firm. Creating such an organization is hard work and not for everyone as it requires partners to think differently than they have in the past about what it is that they do.

The course is about shared knowledge you can use for building a business that bills for knowledge and results and not time. It’s about learning how to bill for value not hours. It’s about making more money. It works.

I attended the session back in May 2011. You can read my review.

Since the course I no longer bill hourly. The day I completed the course was the last time I have billed hourly.

If you are tired of the “race to the bottom line” that comes with billing hourly – you need this course. If you want to substantially increase your firm’s revenues – you need this course.

Link

A group of approximately 100 Sage partners (panelists pictured above left to right- Moira Goggin (Chismet Consulting – event co-organizer), Mary Abdian (Macabe Associates) , Doug Deane (DSD Business Systems) , John Hoyt (Hutchinson and Bloodgood), Bill Kizer (xKzero))  gathered today in Lake Forest California. The group was split about 50/50 with some consultants attending in person and others remotely (web ex) for an in-depth discussion of changes that have been rolled out to the Sage eco-system (margins, certifications, subscription pricing, partner compensation).

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Kudos to Bill Kizer for arranging a LinkedIn group meeting for Sage Parters, Alumni and Employees which at last count showed 100 people RSVPing they would attend.

Bill persevered in creating this meeting despite the software publisher suggesting a game of channel hide and seek instead.

Don’t you love social media?

The event happens Thursday March 15, 2012 and features a panel discussion with some top VARs, prizes, sharing, vendor presentations, networking.

There’s still time to register -UPDATE: Event has occurred. Read our wrap up of this networking event – Sage Consultant LinkedIn Summit.

Our LinkedIn forum devoted to the discussion of Sage ERP MAS90 and MAS200 is up to almost 2,000 members. The official count as of March 12, 2012. Based on the present growth we should cross the 2,000 mark approximately Mid-summer 2012.

MAS90 LinkedIn

A post on Summitdiary appears to directly describe the transformation journey underway at Sage North America in a way Sage partners will relate to.

Using the metaphor of a man and wife in a lengthy marriage, Peter Wolf argues that lack of communication rather than the bad marriage is what may be the ultimate downfall.

Sage North America have rolled out drastic changes over the last six months that materially affect their relationship with partners. Some partners have been shocked by the news and lack of advance communication.

It’s a timely story – which is likely to gather quite a few comments. Head over and add your 2 cents.

Have a read at the aptly titled  - Til Death Do Us Part?

Although a method to rate Sage partner performance has not fully been made public – here is my personal opinion of what the internal scorecard looks like.

It’s a simple two line checklist. Pick either #1 or #2. It will trump all other criteria.

1. Sells acceptable number of new user deals
2. Does not sell acceptable number of new user deals

In my opinion no other measurement matters.

Soldier on.

Are you one of the 845 million users of Facebook? If so then you may be interested in a new feature from Facebook called Interests.
Facebook Interest Lists are a new feature designed to help users follow the content of Pages and public figures in which they’re interested.

The service promises to deliver the top posts from each interest group (list) in the user’s newsfeed. By grouping together users into a list it’s possible to subscribe to the public feeds of all users on the list without having to go through and find and subscribe to people individually.

This is a very similar concept to Google+ Circles which also allow you to group people into circles (lists) and view their publicly available posts.

Here’s a sample for those interested in following public feeds of some Sage related people.