Some things you do and some places you go grow in stature as time goes by. You liked them the first time and, when you remember them, you recall small details that increase your appreciation for them. That is the case of Islamorada Fish Company www.islamoradafishcompany.com where my family and I felt better treated than in the vast majority of Spanish restaurants.
Despite being affiliated with BassPro in January 1998 (whatever that means), Islamorada Fish Company has not lost the flavour of a family business. However, I would not stress the flavour of the food they serve. It was service in every conceivable way what struck me.
Islamorada Fish Company runs the cleanest and best-smelling fishmonger’s (pescadería) and a deli with a variety of salads ready to take away, including one made of spicy Japanese algae with sesame. Under a separate wooden veranda by the dock there is an open-air restaurant basically selling fried fish sandwiches. Well, the food was nothing to write home about. No need to try the alligator, the specialty of the region.
Then why do I strongly recommend this place? No sooner had we entered the restaurant than a smiling and super-friendly waiter greeted us “Hello, how are you? One high chair or two?”. For those not travelling with children, the latter (encrypted) question means “Your kids are welcome, we know they are noisy and untidy, we do not mind, just leave us a good tip”. The waiters serve some ice water (tap water, by the way) as soon as you take your seat. They deliver the menus immediately.
Unfortunately the algae salad I had seen at the shop was not available in the menu, not even upon request. Just a pity. So I settled for another salad and took one of the kids to the restroom, where I could find a shower no less! Islamorada Fish Company organises fishing excursions and (believe me) a shower for clients makes much sense. A shower is always good news when you are travelling with children who are not fully potty trained (esto significa niños que no controlan los esfínteres, por decirlo delicadamente).
Talking about fishermen, look at this:
If that is not full service, then what is it? Want some entertainment? They play a shark-feeding show at lunchtime for the patrons’ enjoyment. And last but not least, the waiter cancelled my second-best choice of a salad, she called the shop and I had my Japanese spicy algae salad waiting for me.
Lots of things to learn from the Florida hospitality.
Acabo de vivir un déjà-vu http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_vu Tengo encima de la mesa un contrato que perjudica horrorosamente al que, desde hoy, es mi cliente.
Se trata de un empresario (Antonio) que, a través de una sociedad, prestaba servicios sujetos y exentos de IVA, pongamos por caso que servicios educativos. Quería retirarse y otro empresario de su sector (Fermín, su amigo y colega) continuaría su actividad comprándole la base de datos de clientes y empleando a tres de sus cuatro trabajadores. Ambos empresarios son profesionales de éxito y nadie les cuestiona su habilidad mercantil. No obstante, en esta importante transacción comercial, Antonio y Fermín se han equivocado.
Cuando empezaron sus tratos para la compra del negocio, Fermín (comprador) se asesoró de un despacho mercantil y fiscal, que diseñó diversas alternativas para ejecutar la operación. Antonio, insisto en que cercano a la jubilación y deseoso de gastar lo menos posible, aduciendo razones de confianza recíproca, pidió a Fermín que llevaran adelante la operación sin abogados. Fermín, ávido también de ahorrar, accedió encantado. Gran fallo de Antonio: para entonces su contraparte ya había recibido cierto asesoramiento. Antonio se puso a sí mismo voluntariamente en una condición de desigualdad de armas.
Después de las que mi ahora cliente recuerda como amigables conversaciones, ambas partes acabaron firmando un contrato. Fermín, por no hacer una mínima due diligence, nunca llegó a saber que la base de datos carecía de las medidas de seguridad exigibles, que nunca se había pedido el consentimiento de los individuos para incorporarlos a la base de datos y que ésta nunca se había declarado a la Agencia de Protección de Datos www.agpd.es . El vendedor Antonio firmó el contrato pensando de buena fe que lo que vendía estaba en perfecto estado de revista. De hecho, la base de datos jamás le había dado problemas.
Ahora Fermín ha llamado indignado a Antonio para reclamarle porque uno de los clientes ha denunciado a la Agencia la cesión de sus datos, porque la cuarta empleada reclama por sucesión de empresa y porque Hacienda ha abierto una comprobación de IVA por esta operación, al haber solicitado la empresa compradora la devolución del IVA soportado.
Vender y comprar una empresa en funcionamiento conlleva un proceso del que los protagonistas de nuestra historia se saltaron la mayor parte de las fases:
• fase preparatoria: due diligence, acuerdos de exclusividad, estructuración jurídica y fiscal de la operación; • fase de ejecución: negociación de los contratos, toma de posesión del negocio, cambios en los órganos de la sociedad; y • fase de seguimiento: ajustes al precio, responsabilidades por la correcta llevanza del negocio, litigios o arbitrajes. Me temo que Fermín y Antonio van a tener que vivir unos encuentros en esta “tercera fase”.
Hay empresarios (y no necesariamente PYMEs) que piensan que “el que más o el que menos, todos hemos comprado algo alguna vez”, y que vender tu propia empresa no puede ser tanto más difícil que comercializar tus productos o, por ejemplo, vender el piso de la playa. Pues no. A esta fiesta están invitados (o en ella se plantaron, como Mecano) multitud de terceros: la Agencia Tributaria, la Seguridad Social, los trabajadores, la Agencia de Protección de Datos, el Ayuntamiento, el Registro de la Propiedad y el Mercantil, la Agencia Española de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios … o la Autoridad Portuaria, según sean los casos.
Tenemos los abogados una reputación bien trabajada de complicar las cosas. Es verdad que complicamos un poco, no podemos evitarlo, pero ahorramos mucho más de lo que hacemos gastar. Un euro de abogacía preventiva son, por lo menos, cinco euros de abogacía curativa. ¿Acaso por no saber Antonio los riesgos que asumía, los riesgos eran menores? ¿No estaba mejor Fermín habiendo comprado la empresa entera, habiéndola fusionado con la suya y amortizando el fondo de comercio financiero?
Lo que hicieron Fermín y Antonio me recuerda a cuando te duele la cabeza y te tomas por tu cuenta un Gelocatil. En general, funciona, pero más te valía haber ido al médico. Al caso de nuestros protagonistas lo llamé un déjà-vu porque a los abogados nos pasa muchas veces que los clientes van firmando bajo su criterio documentos que ellos consideran fáciles o sin importancia y sólo nos consultan después. Y esto, como en la película, es un fallo en Matrix. Os pongo la escena de la película.
If a cobbler (zapatero) starts with three employees and ten years later the payroll increases up to 300, the cobbler will certainly hire a finance director, a head of human resources and a quality control manager. Lawyers are far cleverer than that: they can split these responsibilities among the most capable partners and still ask them to invoice 2,000 hours a year.
In this post I will deal with the huge variety of services and products that law firms need to purchase from independent advisors. I believe law firms ranging from medium-sized to multinational occupy a very promising niche in the market of specialised consultancy, so here is a good set of tips.
Conferences on good management of law firms are frequent.
At a smaller scale (for Spain is not that big), regional conferences are also organised on good management of law firms in which the most relevant firms express their views about talent retention, lawyers’ careers, internationalisation, partner’s compensation, training and education, the balance between personal and professional lives and other hot topics in our profession. If there is one thing lawyers love, it is talking to lawyers about other lawyers, naturally in terms of mild or severe criticism. An example for this is Recoletos Conferencias’ course on “Gestión Empresarial de Despachos de Abogados”.
Law firms pay all kinds of specialised courses to lawyers eager to learn, for instance negotiation techniques for thugs, balance sheet analysis for fools and time management for workaholics. Seriously speaking, I must recommend the brilliant course Legal Communication Skills at the Instituto de Empresa http://colegio.juridico.ie.edu/programas/WF_Programa.aspx?id=90351. I asked three of my partners to attend it and (once having been skillfully interrogated) they confessed to have found it not only fruitful but also enjoyable (!).
In terms of high-tech advice, apart from the obvious IT/IP investments -a must if you wish to be in line with your competitors-, law firms also need assistance in web page design. I am proud of ours www.rodesysala.com. Likewise, we all have marketing directors, business development departments, press relations officers and others of the like.
No kidding, I have seen some firms retain consultants for such odd things as coaching a partner-to-be so that he could raise his profile, designing the partners’ compensation scheme and telling the firm what to do so that people could leave work earlier. I liked the latter very much.
All in all, it is human resources where law firms must learn more (and more quickly) from specialists. Our profession is suffering from high lawyer turnover, which is very harmful to our core business, i.e. providing quality services to clients and charging fees. I noticed the concentration has changed from invoicing as much as possible to making employees happier (thus, invoicing more). Sorry for quoting myself in “The Happiness Committees in Law Firms” http://juridical.blogs.ie.edu/2008/01/the_happiness_committee_at_law.html.
In conclusion, lawyers frequently make the mistake to try to arrange everything by themselves. While it is true that there are many things no-one can do better than us. You can just doublecheck this statement with the nearest attorney at hand ;-). I believe, though, for many other tasks we should rather stick to what we know and let the cobbler stick to his last (que, por cierto, significa “zapatero a tus zapatos”).
Entre clase y clase de aeróbic http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic a veces me pregunto qué tipo de contrato es el que me une a mi gimnasio. No consigo encajarlo en el Código Civil.
Tengo claro que el contrato es bilateral, sinalagmático, de tracto sucesivo y oneroso. Para algunos clientes (si el gimnasio es de postín, llamados “socios”) se trata de un servicio onerosísimo no por el peso que desplazan sino por las poquísimas veces que se desplazan al gimnasio.
Pensando en si es contrato de obra o de servicio (sin duda algo de arrendamiento de espacio sí que tiene), me doy cuenta de que no te prometen resultados. Sí te aseguran actividad. Es grande la tentanción de considerarlo contrato de arrendamiento de servicios, decir que se rige por la libertad de pactos y quitarse el problema de encima. Ahora bien, si te miras el contrato escrito, nada suele contar sobre las obligaciones esenciales de cada parte.
No creo que el gimnasio “cumpla” sólo con poner los medios, es decir, simplemente con tener las instalaciones abiertas. Tiene que impartir las clases que están programadas y poner a disposición unos monitores y toda la parafernalia de instrumentos de tortura que pagamos por usar. En ese sentido, me encaja más el contrato de obra. Si tienes un entrenador personal www.entrenadorespersonales.com , ya claramente me decanto por el contrato de obra: o te cuentan los abdominales o no han cumplido su trabajo.
Al acompañar la indefinición anterior con las prohibiciones ya clásicas en todos los gimnasios “las taquillas deben desalojarse al final del día”, “no usar las máquinas cardio más de veinte minutos” y “prohibido hablar CON el móvil durante la clase” (nótese la preposición), nos queda un contrato mixto e innominado en virtud del cual pagamos para que nos hagan sufrir a cambio de una vaga expectativa de mejorar.
Ánimo y a seguir llenando la sala como siempre ocurre cada mes de febrero. No seáis como los Toros de Guisando que tan oportunamente cita Forges.
… it depends on the dictionary where you choose to look it up:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/crisis?view=uk • noun (pl. crises) 1 a time of intense difficulty or danger. 2 the turning point of a disease, when it becomes clear whether the patient will recover or not.
1. Cambio brusco en el curso de una enfermedad, ya sea para mejorarse, ya para agravarse el paciente. 2. Mutación importante en el desarrollo de otros procesos, ya de orden físico, ya históricos o espirituales. 3. Situación de un asunto o proceso cuando está en duda la continuación, modificación o cese. 4. Momento decisivo de un negocio grave y de consecuencias importantes. 5. Juicio que se hace de algo después de haberlo examinado cuidadosamente. 6. Escasez, carestía. 7. Situación dificultosa o complicada.
When I look around all I see are people fighting to form a family, to enjoy their existing family or to prevent it from falling apart. Singles search for their other halves at all kinds of places, including the Internet. Dating agencies flourish (check out http://www.itsjustlunch.com/ for busy professionals) and of course if is not just about sex. People continue to get marry (and remarry!); just try and find an available church on short notice! In Spain men may marry men and women may marry women, thus publishing their non-official families. Others families simply live together without the official paperwork.
Unless they are just giving the politically correct answers, nobody recognises to be disinterested in their family, be it a happy or a miserable one. Family matters are raised at all times. Many candidates do not hesitate to assert that “their spouse and children go first, although their work is also important”. When I was interviewing for my first job in 1993, I wouldn’t have dreamt of confessing to something close to that.
People do no matter what to have children. Couples (and singles) undergo sophisticated fertility treatments, burdensome bureaucratic procedures and/or painful surgery to be able to hold a kid in their arms. Never have parents ever been so aware of their offsprings’ education, health and friends … or at least never have they ever said to be so deeply concerned.
Of course, not all is good news. Gender-driven violence and child abuse have unfortunately never been so frequent, at least in Spain. Married couples continue to separate and divorce. Children are left to their own devices in the company of His Majesty the Violent Videogame. Does that evidence a widespread family crisis? I believe not, or at least not more than it evidences a modern society in crisis.
The society is changing at an incredibly quick pace. Only in that sense do I adhere to the cliché that society (and for that matter, family) is in crisis, although not in the worrying Oxford sense. Families and societies evolve, which is exactly what keeps them alive.
Words in an e-mail never mean what they seem at face value. An attentive reader can hardly find one without an undelying flow of suppressed feelings, a hidden power statement, a slight criticism disguised as praise words … or even worse things. Let’s pay our eternal tribute of gratitude to those literature teachers who compeled us to write critical reviews of texts (tantos años haciendo esos comentarios de texto que odiábamos, ¿os acordáis?). Every minute of comentario de texto training is paying now.
Now, if you wish to manicure your ability for nasty e-mails you can’t miss the most brilliant, witty, hilarious book I have come across lately. It is simply entitled “E”, which you will learn on the first pages stands for “e-mail”.
Matt Beaumont http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Beaumont wrote this book completely in the form of e-mails exchanged between the crazy, lazy, overly ambitious, sex-obsessed and (to be quite honest) pretty realistic characters in a company surely heading towards bankruptcy. Being a former copywriter himself, Matt Beaumont chose to set this hilarious tale of corporate intrigue in an ad agency. Secretaries do what they can to abuse temps. Bosses do not hesitate to badmouth their superiors while unfairly firing people to cover up their own mistakes. Consultants just try to do as little as possible and travel the world on the company’s account.
Matt Beaumont writes the e-mails in a subtle way where the characters are subtle, in a harsh way where they are harsh. There is even one art director who can barely write and he just grunts (in writing!).
Stop working on boring spreadsheets and indulge a bit with some random pages http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0452281881/ref=sib_aps_sup?ie=UTF8&p=random Do break your piggy bank and fight winter blues at a negligible $12 in Amazon, even lower if you buy the book second hand. You will burst into tears with laughter, provided that you are in the right mood to see your own human weaknessess reflected in those of the computer-handicapped boss, the bitchy secretary, the dull PA or the very-much-in-need-of-sex average office inhabitant. If, after the Three Wise Men’s visit you are broke, you can always read for free at http://maktoob-business.maktoobblog.com/48000/Drugged_by_e%3F
By the way, “ta” is short for “thanks”. My pleasure :)
The camera records whatever happens in front of your car while you drive. Sorry, I wrote “you drive” but I meant “someone drives” your car. Again my apologies, I wrote “your car” while there is no certainty that it was actually your car rather than any other car.
Serious as the drawbacks above may seem, some other things strike me even more. For obvious marketing reasons, the device is supposed to work only in your favour, purportedly protecting you from evil law enforcement officers. According to the advertising agency, those wicked beings will certainly use against you whatever you say in the stressful post-accident theatre while they overlook to note down the weather conditions and other events which may set you free from liability. Therefore, the ad implies that you have to protect yourself from those who draw their salaries from your taxes (i.e. the police and the courts).
Furthermore, the camera will also record everything you did wrong. Is by any chance 100% of what you do lawful and responsible when you are at the steering wheel (or elsewhere, for that matter)? What if you are driving and one of those “scary” law enforcement officers stops you and finds out that yesterday you parked in a tow-away zone (en español, una zona donde aparcas y se lo lleva la grúa)? Will it also record that you are (for instance) an emergency doctor and just managed to save someone’s life? Perhaps if you are doing something illegal, you should also record the reasons why, in case the tape ends up in the traffic authorities’ hands.
Finally, the toy does not record either what happens in your surroundings. Another ad which comes to my mind now is one I always found rather irresponsible where a monkey pointed a crossbow (en español, una ballesta) at a driver. He had to speed up for his life and reasonably disregarded each and all of the speed limits. I would have, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNoj3F9kn18
If you want to read more (this time in Spanish) about having your life recorded on video, click here. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/espionaje/aceptado/elpepusoceps/20080113elpepspor_14/Tes/ Although I tend to disagree with Javier Marías more often than not, this time he made a good point. The willingness to keep your life away from a video camera does not involve that you need to hide something wrong. Sometimes you do things the Big Brother does not (or should not) care about.
