Will a reverse mortgage be your friend or foe?

Your nest egg is small. Your retirement income is limited. And you're sitting on a highly appreciated asset—your home. A reverse mortgage, which lets you convert some of that equity into cash, might just solve the problem.

Depending on your health and financial stability, however, it could also create new ones.

"Reverse mortgages can be an effective tool for retirees, but the problem is that the interest rates tend to be higher than for other home loans," said Grafton "Cap" Willey, managing director at CBIZ MHM tax accounting and consulting firm. "I've also seen people outlive their ability to take any more equity out of their home and then they're forced to make tough decisions."

Indeed, cash-strapped seniors who spend all their available equity and later fall behind on property taxes and homeowner's insurance, he said, must sell their home and downsize, go back to work if they're able, or face foreclosure.

A reverse mortgage—the federally insured version is called a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, or HECM—is a loan that enables homeowners age 62 and older to cash out a portion of the equity in their home.

The amount homeowners can borrow varies by lender but generally is based on age, home value and the interest rate at the time they close.

The National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association offers an online calculator that gives borrowers a better idea of how much they might be eligible to take out.

As the name implies, the mortgage payment stream under such loans is reversed. 

read more: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102688446

Brad Hughes opening US office for his consulting company, Matisse

VENTURA, Calif. (BRAIN) — Matisse Worldwide, a Taiwan-based industry consulting company founded by former Dorel executive Brad Hughes, is opening a new U.S. office and has released a list of Asian manufacturers that it will be representing here.
Hughes will be splitting time between Taiwan and Southern California and plans to eventually hire a full-time staffer in the U.S., as well. Matisse provides Asian brands with marketing, brand development, product design/development and product sourcing services, and now is also representing the following brands in the U.S:

• Alex Global Aerospace Technology: Forged alloy wheels; alloy and magnesium extrusions
• Absolute Black: Spiderless, Oval, CNC aluminum chainrings
• Carbon King Composites: Carbon fiber rims
• Cyclours: Bags and wallets made out of re-cycled bicycle inner tubes and tires
• Elite Tooling: Mold designer and manufacturer
• FatLab: Fat bike related parts including; ti frame, hubs, wheels and rims
• GW Mfg.: Hi-tech aluminum CNC parts
• Kampala Ind.: Gloves, garments and tanned leather
• KK: Aluminum hubs
• 'O' design: Graphic design, stickers and decals
• Sandman: Fat bike kits, rolling frames, forks, spare parts
• YS Sports: bicycle baskets, carriers, kickstands

source: http://www.bicycleretailer.com/international/2015/05/21/brad-hughes-opening-us-office-his-consulting-company-matisse#.VV83ckZJejM

Consultants recommend a change in plans for Bettendorf sports complex

Plans for an indoor sports complex in Bettendorf may have hit a road bump tonight as a feasibility study was released. Consultants say the current plan isn’t ideal.

Plans for the sports complex near I-80 and Middle Road may be changing, after market researched showed the idea may not work. The Bettendorf city council heard the recommendations from that feasibility study.  They include scaling the project back to a 136,000 square foot facility. It includes six basketball and volleyball courts, 40,000 square feet of turf and other space for parties and a climbing wall.

“It took out the water component. It took out the ice component. From an operational perspective there’s a huge overhead cost there and just to operate that sort of perspective we didn’t think it was necessarily the best approach,” said Jeff Reiter, Economic Development Director for Bettendorf.

The new plan cuts the price in half, from nearly $40 million down to $19 million. The consultants also recommended a new location.

“The challenge with I-80/middle road is right now its cornfields and it’s a lot of money to get the utilities out there,” said developer, Todd Raufeisen.

However, no one’s ready to give up on the plan, saying there’s a need in the Quad Cities.

“A sports complex is a sound concept. It’s a good idea. It does drive people from outside the area to our community. This could have a great potential impact on the quad cities as a region as a whole,” said Reiter.

see more: http://wqad.com/2015/05/18/consultants-recommend-a-change-in-plans-for-bettendorf-sports-complex/

Consulting Giant McKinsey Buys Itself a Top Design Firm

McKinsey & Company, the management consulting giant, is buying Lunar, the design consulting giant. The deal illustrates just how central design is to business today—and how design’s influence is growing beyond the tech industry into the corporate world at large.

On the surface, the acquisition announced today might seem unlikely. Lunar is a top design firm, known for its work with clients like Apple, HP, and SanDisk. McKinsey is, well, McKinsey—“the most well-known, most secretive, most high-priced, most prestigious, most consistently successful, most envied, most trusted, most disliked management consulting firm on earth,” as a Fortune profile once put it. But to those who’ve been paying attention, the deal is another example of a well-established trend: big companies paying big bucks for design expertise.

Lunar will keep its name and continue operating out of its offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Munich and Hong Kong. It will continue taking on new business. But it will also draw on its three decades of design experience to help McKinsey solve problems for its clients. According to Lunar President John Edson, this help could take many forms. It might be figuring out how to best execute a particular product—or how an incumbent player can integrate design into its long-term strategy.

McKinsey basically sells expertise to the world’s most important companies. Its clients, to name a very few, include Johnson & Johnson, Shell, and the governments of the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Taiwan. Its interest in Lunar is proof that the business world is increasingly seeing design as a necessary competency.

Apple’s rise from floundering underdog to the most successful company in history set a powerful example. Now corporations are scrambling to bring designers into the fold. GE is building a massive team dedicated to user experience. IBM is hiring an army of designers, by some accounts the world’s largest. Others are expediting the process by absorbing entire design firms. Last year, CapitalOne bought UX pioneer AdaptivePath. Google picked up mechanical design firm Gecko. Facebook has swallowed up Hot Studio, Bolt Peters, and, most recently, Teehan+Lax.

see more: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/consulting-giant-mckinsey-bought-top-design-firm/

New IDC MarketScape Shows Digital Transformation Consulting and Systems Integration Services Vendors Must Have 3rd Platform Technology Expertise to Remain Relevant

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new MarketScape report profiling and positioning the leading providers in the worldwide market for digital transformation consulting and systems integration services. The study found that buyers indicated a variety of non-IT roles were the key sponsors for digital transformation implementation service projects 60% of the time.

    “When buyers were asked what characteristics were required for a digital transformation implementation services project to be successful, two characteristics were tied for first place: the 'ability to achieve desired business outcomes,' and the ability to 'deliver innovation that produces results'”

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation Consulting and Systems Integration Services 2015 Vendor Analysis (IDC #255870) evaluates the offerings and prospects of eight vendors' relative capabilities. The vendors included in the analysis are Accenture, Cognizant, CSC, EY, HCL, IBM, PwC and Tech Mahindra.

The IDC MarketScape methodology placed Accenture, IBM and PwC in the "Leaders" category.

"When buyers were asked what characteristics were required for a digital transformation implementation services project to be successful, two characteristics were tied for first place: the 'ability to achieve desired business outcomes,' and the ability to 'deliver innovation that produces results'," said Gard Little, Research Director, IT Consulting and Systems Integration Strategies at IDC.

"A successful digital transformation solution requires a seamless combination of business process and IT/people change that meets business needs with the correct implementation of 3rd Platform technologies. Therefore services vendors in the space must possess solid technical expertise across all aspects of the 3rd Platform technologies as well as equally sound business process and change management knowledge to stay relevant in the space," said Ali Zaidi, Senior Research Analyst, IT Consulting and Systems Integration Strategies at IDC.

About IDC MarketScape

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT (information and communications technology) suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of IT and telecommunications vendors can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective vendors.

For more information http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150508005583/en/IDC-MarketScape-Shows-Digital-Transformation-Consulting-Systems#.VVCp7ZNJejM. 

Solution-oriented consulting for enterprise

Consumer-grade solutions just don’t cut it in the enterprise world — and that’s why MarkLogic makes it such a priority, according to Tavo De Leon, senior director of Big Data Strategy & Solutions at Cognizant Technology Solutions. De Leon joined theCUBE during MarkLogic World 2015.

“The enterprise needs are really becoming the thing that’s the most important,” he said. “And we’re finding that there are some cases where people get things, products and projects to a certain state of readiness, and not having that enterprise capability prevents either functionality from going out, or the product or the process gets canceled.”

Keeping enterprise at the forefront of development

 

When working with large corporations, there is a lot at stake, so reliability, security and recovery become of utmost importance. Normally, IT departments have to engineer those solutions on their own or wait for an open source program to fill the gap, but MarkLogic keeps enterprise at the forefront of its development. That makes them the perfect partner for a consulting company like Cognizant.

“We’re really working with MarkLogic strategically on solutions,” De Leon said. “We’ve seen an entire large healthcare organization [that] is collapsing all of their silos into a MarkLogic cluster” — a non-trivial process when dealing with between 20 and 30 silos. “It’ll all have the same security, it’ll all have all the same rights, privileges, accesses, all the data will be together, and finally they’ll be able to do analytics across these datasets that have never been possible before.”

Staying competitive

 

With recent disruptions like changes in regulations and innovations in the market, this kind of integration and agility are crucial if companies are going to compete.

“It’s really vendors like MarkLogic that make that much easier to do,” De Leon concluded. “They’re solution-oriented, we’re solution oriented — it’s a good match.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of MarkLogic World 2015.

source: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/05/05/solution-oriented-consulting-for-enterprise-mlw15/

Write for Results

By Michael W. McLaughlin

It’s no secret that writing for publication, both online and offline, can be a potent and cost-effective marketing tool for consultants. After all, it only takes one good idea—seen at the right time—to motivate a potential client to call and ask for your help.

For many consultants, though, the promise of publishing never materializes. That’s too bad, because it doesn’t have to be that way. After more than seven years of publishing consulting newsletters and reading thousands of articles submitted by consultants, here are some of my thoughts on how you can get marketing mileage from a publishing strategy.

Once (or Twice) Is Not Enough

Open any book on services marketing (including mine), and you’re likely to find at least one chapter on the value of publishing articles, reports, and newsletters. For decades, most consulting firms have aimed to position themselves as ‘thought leaders’ as a central part of their marketing strategies. In a business of ideas, that emphasis is no surprise and is not likely to change any time soon.

So many consultants feel compelled to jump in and start writing. Sadly, they often report that their articles produce some industry visibility, but no solid leads to create new relationships with prospective clients.

To reap benefits for your practice from writing, you must make a commitment to publishing. Assuming that what you write is good, a couple of published articles may generate some buzz for you—and who doesn’t like those shiny reprints? But that’s not going to make you a thought leader and grab the attention of the clients you want.

If you plan to publish as a marketing tactic, dedicate 20 to 30 percent of your marketing efforts to publishing your ideas on a continuous basis.

Sometimes it might feel like you are sending your ideas into a void, but it takes effort and repeated exposure to realize results from publishing. A client may see your work many times before making contact with you, so you have to keep at it and be patient.

What Do Clients Want to Read?

With so many consultants writing articles, white papers, and special reports, it can be a challenge to zero in on a topic that will engage prospective clients and that hasn’t been written about a gazillion times before. Many articles on subjects like sales, leadership, teamwork, and managing change, for example, often offer little more than warmed-over advice.

see more: http://mindshareconsulting.com/write-for-results/