Elite: Market Momentum

Elite: Market Momentum

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Provided by: Elite, a Thomson Reuters business

Listed in: Finance, Technology, feature articles, Payments

Now is a good time to be at Elite, a Thomson Reuters business that develops financial and office management software for professional service providers around the world. According to president and CEO Steve Buege, Elite's newest product, 3E, is gaining momentum and will carry this little company to new heights.

"Ours is a classic story: one man starts a company. He builds a team of knowledgeable people that guide the company to success, but eventually the processes are too informal and too much relies on the same three to five people and the company can't scale up to the next level," Buege said, explaining that's where Thomson Reuters comes in. The global technology giant acquired Elite in 2003 and rotated some of its existing management out over the next three years, putting Buege in place in 2006.

Close to 85% of Elite's customers are law firms. With 11 offices around the world, Elite serves all the major legal centers with three clients in Hong Kong; several top firms in India, Dubai, Spain, Switzerland, and Sydney; as well as leading firms in London and throughout the UK.

Enterprise, Elite's original software platform has a three-to-one market lead over the next closest competitor, and Buege said 68 of the top 100 firms in the US and 58 of the top 100 global law firms use it. The company also offers Pro Law, a similar software program that integrates more front-office management with simpler financial management systems best suited for smaller firms of between 10 and 50 fee earners.

3E is the next generation of Enterprise software, but Buege said it leapfrogs the older platform in flexibility and is inherently more global in scope. One example is 3E was written in Unicode, allowing it to easily operate in any language. Enterprise was written in English and was adapted on a client-by-client basis to include other languages.

"This product outshines the most sophisticated technology on the market where firms have multiple practice groups around the world, deal with multiple currencies, or integrate dozens of other systems," he said, adding that 60 of the roughly 80 clients running 3E live currently had never used an Elite product before and thus represent an increase in market share for the company.

"No one wants to be the first to sign on for a new ERP system; it's taken us three years to gain traction, but the product has more than proven itself and we can feel the momentum picking up," said Buege.

Expectations have risen

He attributes the company's growing success with 3E to a successful cultural transformation from small, entrepreneurial software firm to a global leader. According to Buege, his goal is to allow Elite to operate as a finely tuned machine no matter the circumstances, consistently delivering high-quality service. He always aims to lead by example, challenging everyone's suggestions with the question: does this make Elite a more disciplined, scalable business?

"We do nearly everything with that theme in mind" said Buege. "The old way got us to where we are today, but it isn't enough to get us to where we want to go. As I say to my team, expectations have risen. With the Thomson Reuters brand behind us now, our customers are looking for more from us."

Today, middle managers at Elite are empowered to take greater ownership of decisions. New hires don't suffer trial by fire. Instead, every process is documented and supported by a back-up plan.

Buege said it's easy to assume that people will immediately see the benefits of a more structured and efficient way of doing business, but that is rarely the case. For the teams at Elite, the fear was losing the close, personal relationships with customers the little company had enjoyed.

"I had to show that it wasn't about making Elite less personal," he said. "We wanted to preserve that part but automate and standardise our processes so the system does more of the work. That reduces the stress for everyone here and allows them to deliver an excellent product and the best service."

The best example of how this cultural change has succeeded, he said, is in Elite's new quality assurance and testing model. Previously, the company's testing procedures, like those for any small software company, were less rigorous. Instead, Elite put technicians in the office of the early adopters and fixed bugs on the spot.

For the launch of 3E, the company created automated test scripts to run whenever they changed any line of code. That ensured the changes they wanted to make were exactly right, and they didn't inadvertently break any other part of the program. Furthermore, the company gained permission to use real client data to flesh out glitches. As a result of these measures, 3E's first version was the equivalent of a third or fifth version of older Elite programs.

The next step for Buege and his team is to improve Elite's communication strategies. The company had been known as a quiet competitor, its press releases few and far between. Unfortunately, that strategy left room for rumors and misinformation, which Buege hopes to quiet with the combination of a formal newsletter and less-formal Web marketing platforms, like blogs.

"That's where information is being shared today, so we're working to find a balance between the sanitised press release and a blog that is lacking in authority. Few companies out there have found that balance, but Elite has come a long way in recent years, and this is just the next challenge for us," concluded Buege.