From Greg's Head

I was recently asked, how can Houston continue to attract top tech companies and talent to the city. Interesting question. I see two things that have to happen.

First, we need to continue the branding and awareness of the Houston tech community to those outside of the Houston and Texas regions.  I know it sounds old fashioned, but folks outside of the Texas region still consider Houston a two dimensional city.  Energy and Space Exploration.  While both of those are very important to Houston, the growth in the high tech, health care research and delivery, educational research, telecommunications and manufacturing will continue to outpace our baseline industries. 

We see it every day, but those not as familiar to our community do not.  That’s one of the reasons why PKF Texas created the Fast Tech 50 Awards program and brought that to the Houston Business Journal.  We wanted to start the ball rolling on branding and awareness of the city as a source of great success in the tech sector.  We are fully committed to making this sector a success for our city.  One of the areas that the Houston Technology Center, HBJ, and our firm supports is the Rice Business Plan Competition.  Its success and the information the participants receive during the competition has reached around the world.  We had several plans from outside the U.S. this year.  The Rice event has turned out to be so successful that Fortune Small Business decided to drop their own competition and endorse the Rice event.  Also, working with the Greater Houston Partnership, Walter Ulrich, our President of the HTC was able to get Houston’s visibility changed with some national rankings recently with a national publication as well. 

Second, we have to create jobs and fight for talented tech personnel to relocate to our city.  This is no longer a fight for economic survival on a local, or regional basis.  I recently had the opportunity to review some economic strategic planning from another region and they indicated they were fighting for business from communities their size in the domestic U.S.  They couldn’t be further from the truth to be successful.  In my opinion, we are fighting to secure talent to our community locally, from the global community.  I can assure you Houston through organizations like the Greater Houston Partnership, and the HTC see things on a global basis and we want to compete globally for all kinds of business opportunities.  Given our baseline business in Energy, this gives us a leg up on the acceptance of Houston as a global city and not just a city in Texas.  Our cost of living and the baseline for salaries for tech personnel are very favorable to both companies and individuals alike.  And our existing talent pool is just outstanding, some of the success stories we have in the tech sector would rival any region in the US and beyond. 

How would you respond to that question? Are we doing enough to attract the tech community to Houston?

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I see several trends evolving within the accounting profession.  First is the final stages of paperless automation within the back office and field work.  This started several years ago, but the vendors have finally caught up to the demands of the profession.  That includes paperless filing, document management and practice workflow solutions within the office, paperless audits and tax returns, and paperless activities within the back office. 

Second is the increasing demand of mobile computing.  Now mobile computing goes to the virtual office, but it’s much, much more than that.  It’s the finalization of reaching this version of the “wired” or “fully connected” professional within firms.  Our clients increasingly expect us to be available at a moment’s notice to meet their needs.  Only through Windows Mobile solutions are we going to be fully connected.

Third is good IT governance and practices especially with regard to security management, confidentiality of client data, business continuity and disaster recovery.

And lastly, business intelligencewith the applications and technologies used for gathering, providing access and visibility to, and analyzing data to help business owners and manager make informed business decisions.  Our Dynamics NAV practice is getting additional requests for solutions in this area.

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Note: Running Fridays in FromGregsHead.com, is a continuing series of tips brought to you by Greg Price. These run Saturday mornings during the BusinessMaker’s Radio Show on KPRC 950AM. Audio files can be found on the Entrepreneur's Playbook page of the PKF Texas website.

There have been several high profile cases of fraud in the news in recent years. How do you take the steps to reduce the opportunity for fraud in your organization?

The most common methods of discovering fraud were tips and by accident, followed closely by internal audits, investigations, and internal controls. Tips from employees, vendors, and customers made up over one-third of the discoveries.

The most effective method of reducing fraud in your organization is by creating a culture of integrity and high ethics among employees at all levels. This is initiated by the senior executives/owners setting the tone at the top. Create the expectation that fraud will not be tolerated. Develop a code of ethics and conduct that employees are required to sign and adhere to.

Review your antifraud processes and internal controls and develop a strong oversight process. These two activities go hand-in-hand in sending a strong message to potential perpetrators that you are doing everything you can to reduce the opportunity for them to commit fraud upon your company.

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As you know, I make several presentations a year to many different audiences. I just read a great article on Accountingweb from Jack Downton, an entrepreneur in the U.K. about making a good presentation.

I wanted to share the article with you because no matter how many you do there’s always room to tweak your style. We all have to make presentations, whether it is to a room of 200 or 2. It’s always good to see what others are doing, to stay relevant and fresh.

Highlights take into account include:

• PowerPoint – how it dramatically reduces your impact
• What does your audience need to hear?
• It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it

I’m definitely going to be using some of the tips in my next presentation. What have you found to be successful when making presentations? Do you incorporate music or video? Have you found a tried and true way to engage the audience?

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Over the weekend Microsoft dropped its bid to take over Yahoo!. This is an interesting development in what initially appeared to be an inevitable take-over.

This brings up a few questions:

• Who can compete with Google?
• What does this mean for Microsoft in terms of the next step to compete in Web 2.0?
• Where does Yahoo! go from here? They’ve been playing second fiddle to Google for quite some time.

CNN/Fortune has an interesting article that speculates about the above questions.

What are your thoughts? What do you see as the next steps for these companies? What can companies do to make a dent in Google’s seeming invincibility?

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It’s not often you get a chance to hear one of the country’s foremost experts in information technology. Earlier this week we (myself and several colleagues at PKF Texas) were treated to one of the best, “A Conversation with Michael Dell”, founder, Chairman and CEO of Dell – and a native son of Houston.

On April 30^th, Dell was the guest speaker on a panel for the Houston Forum. Also on the panel, Walter Ulrich, CEO of the Houston Technology Center, Leonard Rejcek, President and CEO of Manhattan Construction Co., moderated the session.

Dell took questions from Walter, Leonard, and the audience. 

Some of the most interesting points I took from the presentation include:

• 1 billion people are currently on the internet
• 500,000 new users log on every day
• Use of the internet is expected to double in the next five years creating opportunities for
  • Mobile
  • Online
  • Bandwidth

He also commented on his company, Dell, giving valuable insight into one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs:

           

• 10 years ago Dell’s revenues were $6 billion and they are currently at $61 billion
• In the past year (before he took over again as CEO) they experienced an annual growth rate of -11% and this year they are currently at a +21% growth rate
• Dell stresses keeping things simple for his people and customers alike
• He encourages conversation with your customers
• Dell (the company) recently launched www.dell.com/earth to address the company’s green initiatives
• Dell’s key target markets are outside the U.S. He refers to them as BRIC +10. BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China. The +10 is several other countries where the technology sector is booming or has the potential to grow exponentially in the next few years.

A few other thoughts I noted about the technology growth:

• China currently has several of the worlds most visited websites
• Due to the fact that the internet does not have borders, social networks, collaboration are pushing content all over the world.

Great stuff, and I was glad I was able to hear him speak. If you get the chance to see one of his presentations, I would highly recommend it.

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Note: Running Fridays in FromGregsHead.com, is a continuing series of tips brought to you by Greg Price. These run Saturday mornings during the BusinessMaker’s Radio Show on KPRC 950AM. Audio files can be found on the Entrepreneur's Playbook page of the PKF Texas website.

Ask any four people in an organization about their budgeting process and you are likely to get four different answers. Some of those answers would include: “We did it last year,” “its part of the manager’s bonus calculation,” “We are trying to control expenses,” “It shows us our cash flow.” Truly successful organizations know that budgeting is one of the significant foundations for developing a high performing organization.

See if this sounds like your company:  Round 1 of the budget process starts with departmental levels submitting their guesses for obtaining next year’s financial results. Senior management usually knows what they want these numbers to be, but they don’t share it with the first line department heads.   The first round is usually returned with changes. Now armed with better financial information the departmental manager can guess at the numbers their superiors want and budget for it. Then the departmental budgets are consolidated and submitted further up the line for a second round of guessing.   

The problem with this process is that we now have a numbers guessing game going on, instead of a business plan. And we have given the departmental managers a way out of their estimates since the estimates weren’t theirs anyway.

Budgeting should be part of a performance management process. Budgets need to be linked to corporate strategies. How well is your budget and corporate strategy linked?

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