When you’re running a small business, it makes sense to engage with the media. They help get your story out there and can give you valuable free coverage in well-read publications.
The last few years has seen the rise and rise of the blogger – a variation on the traditional journalist but they can still get your company name in front of significant audiences – often more targeted.
Because anyone can start a blog at zero cost, the quality of blogs and bloggers varies dramatically – from the good to the bad to the outright odd. AccManPro, written by Dennis Howlett, falls firmly in the latter category.
The purpose of this post is so that I have a page I can point people at in the future when I’m asked why I’ve not responded to the whatever oddness Dennis Howlett chooses to write about me or my company in the future. If you’re not already familiar with AccManPro and my history with Howlett then you’ll probably want to stop reading here or just skip to the last paragraph as it’ll just bore you silly!
Howlett and I have always had an odd relationship. I have to begrudgingly admit we’re similar in some ways – we both like to make a lot of noise and be contentious in order to get noticed.
Other “proper” journalists in the industry and other heads of SaaS accounting firms have asked why he seems to be so obsessed about me and my company and writes a disproportionate amount of negative comment about us. In part it goes back to when he stitched me up on Twitter earlier this year.
In the ensuing row he kept on professing his independence so when I pointed out I knew he owned 10% of FreeAgentCentral, a competitor, he wasn’t best pleased. Especially when it supposedly led to him divesting his shares (although when I last looked, he was still listed at Companies House as a shareholder (see update on this at bottom of the post – his partner now owns the shares))
The nonsensical attacks on me and KashFlow have continued since. The most recent being incredibly misinformed and disingenuous. It resulted in one of the top guys at Freshbooks telling him his post was “confoundingly misguided”
Then recently two things happened that suddenly explained exactly why Howlett behaves as he does.
Firstly, someone pointed me in the direction of this post on CrunchNotes by Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. I’ll quote the relevant extract (my bolding):
Recently Howlett asked me to write about a charity on TechCrunch. I Twittered about it (to hundreds of thousands of people) but never wrote about it on TechCrunch, it just wasn’t relevant. I guess that pissed Howlett off, because a few weeks later he was referring to me as a street hooker on Twitter. When I complained privately on Skype, his response was “I know - I do what I do as a ‘persona’ that people expect of me…gives me ‘ins’ to the ‘money.’”
Independent journalism at its finest. Don’t write about the charity he’s supporting and he goes after you with a stick, then says it’s all a persona to make money, and then writes a ridiculous legal opinion about something he knows nothing about
Scrolling down to the comments on that page shows other people with similar experiences of the man.
From Robert Scoble, a very well known tech blogger in the US:
You should see the kind of crap that Dennis writes about me. He’s the worst kind of “journalist” who does this crap just to make noise, which he thinks gets him deals. I don’t know where the idea started that you have to be an attack dog to appear journalistic. Totally agreed with your analysis of his writings and attitude. Keep it up Mike.
From Jeremiah Owyang of web-strategist.com:
Dennis tried to pick fights with me too, doing name calling, I just blocked him on Twitter over a year ago.
I’d like to have a civil relationship with him –if, and when he’s ready.
So Howlett attacks people via his blog as some sort of a way to get an “in to the money”? I know a number of software companies do pay him a sponsorship fee to be advertised on his blog and he never seems to give them anything like the level of negativity he fires in my direction. But surely it can’t be as simple and straight cut as that, can it?
Then the second thing happened. By some a coincidence of synchronicity, just as I finished reading the article above, Dennis Howlett sent me a private message via Twitter. Normally I would never repeat or publish any private messages I’ve received. But as Howlett has repeatedly shown he has no respect for discussions supposedly ”off the record” or my private messages I have no problem with publishing this:
If I hadn’t just read about his money-making strategy on CrunchBites then I’d have trouble believing what I was reading. He’d just written a totally ridiculous article about KashFlow which was promptly discredited by numerous commenters on his blog and by a senior industry figure and he’s now suggesting I pay him to help him better understand the issues? Has this guy really been attacking me and my business for years with the sole purpose of trying to get me to pay him as some sort of consultant? It would seem so.
So in summary, if I’ve sent you this link to explain why I’m not bothering to respond to one of his future attacks, it’s as simple as this: he appears to deliberately write uninformed, misleading articles about me or KashFlow in a bid to get me to give him money. I have no intention of giving him any money, so he continues to write it. Engaging with him is a pointless exercise so from now on I’ll be following the example of the more experienced people cited above and just ignore him.
Update. As of 1/10/2009 it appears his shares in a FreeAgentCentral have been transferred to his partner that he lives with. A blatant contradiction of his comments that he has “no shareholdings either directly or indirectly (via trusts etc) nor management positions in any of the companies that I either write about or which sponsor this website”
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This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
It’s not nice to put a photo of Dr. Harold Shipman on this blog! You could have used his real photo.
[...] it has generated a flood of comments, some positive, some negative. It also seems to have exposed another side of blogging.One of the exciting parts about watching SaaS companies gain critical mass, is seeing the business [...]
Talk about burning bridges… Well, I guess its a bridge you don’t really want to cross in any case. Nicely written though. I did think his writings/ attitude a little odd. Is that really a photo of the convicted serial killer used as his profile pic?
NO – that’s not Harold Shipman. And while I’m not going to get caught in the crossfire here, I have to say that comment is unkind and tasteless and I think it should not have been published.
M
There was a girl at school I really liked but she didn’t seem to like me. So I insulted her to get her attention. She got upset and perhaps unsuprisingly we never did get together. Since then I’ve learned a lot about girls. And some 30 years too late I would like to apologise formally to Emma Daff.
I wonder when you’ll get your apology Duane…
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Oh my. I only ever read his blog once. I thought it was OTT and clearly he had an agenda he was pursuing.
What an odd fellow.
@Duane – when you first put this post up I resisted the urge to comment, because I didn’t want to get in the middle of the ongoing “spat” between you and Dennis. However, now that I see that SaaSlover (who I guess is one of your colleagues or supporters) is pointing people back to this post from his/her related comments elsewhere, I feel I have to respond.
You know that I disagree with the way you’ve handled the particular issue Dennis raised about Kashflow security and permissions right from the start, and I think this post is a continuation of the wrong tactics. You can categorize Dennis’s AccMan blog in many ways, but odd really isn’t one of them. Dennis’s strap line says it all “never knowingly under opinionated”. He’s a real character (and we need more of them in our industry) with what he describes himself as “strong opinions, weakly held” – he’s always prepared to listen to other views. The reason his blog has such a high readership and great conversations is because his opinion is respected, he has real world accounting experience to call on from both running a business and being a partner in practice, his analysis is comprehensive, and he can be both entertaining and controversial. You’ve rather disingenuously implied he’s not a real journalist. Dennis was a respected journalist in this field for 10 years before he started writing a blog. As bloggers go, he is old school. He’ll only publish any facts he’s uncovered once he’s got corroboration, unlike some who will print any controversial, uncorroborated gossip just to drive traffic. He always allows debate and negative comments on his site, and regularly allows guest posts of an opposing position, just like he did in this case here. Dennis knows that I disagree with some of his approach on name calling and language where he crosses a line, but that’s a separate issue to the facts and opinion – you should be arguing on the merits of your case rather than worrying about that. Looking to the comments here, you saying nothing to the rather odious people who compared his picture to Harold Shipman does you no credit at all.
The bottom line though, is that disengaging is definitely the wrong tactic. Anyone doing due diligence on Kashflow will come across all of this and wonder why you’ve taken your bat home rather than argued your corner, or asked for a guest post on AccMan to state your case.
A bit of disclosure for your readers – I’m one of the sponsors of Dennis’s blog. We’ve work together on various projects, and I count him as a good friend.
Hi David,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. “SaaSlover” isn’t me or one of my colleagues. I wouldn’t know if it’s one of my supporters.
I don’t doubt that Dennis knows what he’s talking about on accounting matters. But his posts show he hasn’t a clue about security or APIs. His most recent post proves that again as he seems to be under the impression that if a third-party integrates in to an application via an API then *all* of data users enter into the original app flow through the third parties system. Whether he’s a proper journalist or not is subjective.
I stand by my decision to disengage with him. So much of what he writes, especially about myself and KashFlow, is full of factual errors and quotes out of context. That’s what I and plenty of others find odd. He either deliberately writes opinionated posts on subjects he knows nothing about or he has an unhealthy obsession with me – either way, ”odd” sums it up. Responding to his posts and pointing out everything he’s wrong about or misleading people would be a full time and pointless job. Hence my decision to take the path chosen by Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others and just ignore the man.
It seems I’m not alone based on the emails I get from other vendors distancing themselves from him as fast as possible.
As for people doing due diligence on KashFlow – I’m sure anyone reading his posts will see them for what they are.
With regards to the comments above where people say he looks like a serial killer – I’m sure he can take it. He dishes out much worse to others.
Thanks again for taking the time to post
Duane, I can fully relate to your experience.
I and Crunch.co.uk was on the receiving end of one of his malicious attacks in July.
One of our marketing freelancers (now working on other projects and not on crunch.co.uk) made a mistake by answering a basic accountancy question in a blog. It was a simple mistake to make as he was incredibly new to the world of Accountancy. Unfortunately he failed to check his answer with any of our Accountants or Tax Specialists.
Dennis picked up on this and called our office specifically asking for this freelancer. Unknown to us, until later, he recorded this phone conversation without this freelancers knowledge. As our lawyers pointed out this is illegal. To confirm again this freelancer was NOT in our Accountancy team or any of our Tax Specialists and the freelancer made this clear.
He then created a blog post that was entitled ‘Health Warning
- Crunch gives bad advice’. Unbelievably to aid his intent, he tweeted this, making specific reference that our very own Brighton Community should be beware of Crunch.
On replying to an article on the Cloud Ave site that had
picked up on his article and written ‘Crunch gets it all so right and at the same time so wrong’, we answered his comments fairly stating that the freelancer was not any of our Accountants and we certainly didn’t give bad advice to our customers.
He then uploaded the illegal phone recording of his conversation with our marketing freelancer on his site. I’m sure this has since been removed.
I can only say that I, my board and lawyers were flabbergasted by his actions. He is, or now his partner is, a shareholder of FreeAgent Central.
In all my career in setting up http://www.pure360.com and the 2 years of hard effort put into building http://www.crunch.co.uk, I have never experienced such an assault from an individual who has an invested interest in seeing a direct competitor put out of business. If any of you think this man is a professional journalist, please think again.
Any further assault on Crunch’s good name and we’ll take legal action against this man and all that he is connected with.
Hey everyone,
I think it’s worth clarifying a few things here:
In the very early stages of FreeAgent Central, we were involved with Dennis who provided a small amount of consultancy in return for a small shareholding in the company. Fairly quickly it was understood by both parties that this wasn’t going to work out (call it a difference in philosophy) and Dennis’ involvement with the company stopped, while he retained his shares. This was over 2 years ago and since that time Dennis has played no part in the running or business of FreeAgent.
At the point at which he made his divestment announcement, Dennis instructed us to transfer his shares to his partner Judith. We’ve always been entirely transparent about that transaction to anyone who asked, and the fact that it does not yet appear on the public record at Companies House is because it won’t until our next Annual Return in February 2010. Whether or not the current situation is in keeping with the wording of his divestment announcement is for Dennis to justify, not us.
I can appreciate Duane and Daren both feel aggrieved by recent events, but I want to make it clear that these are nothing to do with FreeAgent. We have no connection with Dennis’ comments and they are not necessarily representative of our own views. We have never asked Dennis to take any particular line on any given story.
Most importantly of all, we have no interest in mudslinging any of our competitors. We don’t need to, and we’re firmly of the opinion that online accounting companies should be sticking together while the market grows.
Anyway, I hope that clarifies our position on the matter, and hope we can all move beyond this and go back to the important business of building great services that our users love.
Ed
Ed Molyneux
Founder and CEO
FreeAgent Central Ltd
Hi Ed,
Thanks for clarifying. For my part I’ve never thought there was any malicious intent direct from you guys and have only felt sympathy for you for being saddled with the association which it looks like, with hindsight, you’d rather never have had.
Onwards and upwards! (and see you tomorrow!)
Duane