In my days in practice, as well as my duties as marketing partner, I was ultimately responsible for two major decisions we made.
The first came about when I ended up being the ‘casting vote’ (we were then a 5-partner firm) over which IT system to change to for our PMS and client accounting. We’d short-listed two, and there was little to choose between them. I based my decision on the balance sheets of the 2 companies – they appeared similar, but one was writing off a lot of expenditure the other capitalised. Three years after we made our choice, the other one was out of business.
The second was when I was setting up our IT division: we were about 10 partners by then, so the decision was largely in my hands. We knew our clients were going to computerise their accounting and this would impact very severely on our business unless we controlled it: so we decided to get up a business to supply software etc to them. There were a number of great system in the market, but many were just too small to be viable. The choice boiled down to the then market leaders – SAGE or Pegasus?. The reason I plumped for SAGE was simply that their marketing was so much more professional.
We ended up being the largest SAGE dealer in the South West and SAGE was my first client after I retired from practice.
The real point here is that being the best choice is about a lot more than just being the best product.
To subscribe to the Law Management and Marketing newsletter, click here.