Firing Ferguson

Legendary Hollywood producer, agent, and ultimate insider, Jerry Weintraub, who handled the careers of such superstars as Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and Led Zeppelin, also counted folksy balladeer John Denver among his client roster.

Once during a concert tour in Europe, the moody Denver complained to Weintraub that every facet of the tour was unacceptable — from the hotels to the food to the concert venues — and demanded that Weintraub fly over and rectify the situation.

Once there, Weintraub assured Denver that he had taken care of everything.

“How?” Denver demanded.

“I fired Ferguson.”

“Who’s Ferguson?”

“He was the guy who arranged all this. I told him you were unhappy and I fired him.”

Later that night at dinner, Weintraub confided to Denver that he felt terrible about Ferguson. After all he had a wife and children and it was close to Christmas.

With a sudden pang of guilt, Denver asked if there was anything Weintraub could do to help Ferguson, to which Weintraub immediately responded that he would look for another spot in his organization in which to place him.

In case you haven’t guessed by now, there was no Ferguson  — Weintraub had simply invented him.

Now I’m not going out on too much of a limb here to opine that 99.999% of the CPAs in the U.S. ever have to deal with client fires near the scope of Weintraub’s, but they are there nonetheless.

But in an age when competition for clients is as fierce as anytime in recent memory and they’re demanding more face time and personal attention than ever, CPA firms have to be able to either respond both immediately and effectively, or watch idly as their client retention rates begin resembling the Matterhorn.

I once spoke with the managing partner of a CPA firm in the New York area who received a late night panicky call from a long-standing client who suddenly discovered that his administrator who was charged with payroll had forgotten to deduct FICA taxes for close to a year. The next day he cancelled his morning meetings, drove nearly 35 miles, and helped him craft a strategy to get him out of the danger zone.

Another managing partner canceled his vacation to hand-hold a sobbing client whose wife of nearly 30 years suddenly announced she wanted a divorce.

Sadly, one of the drawbacks to mobile technology is that it pares down the much-needed face time that clients today need and want. If smartphones were available back then, I doubt Jerry Weintraub would have tried to resolve Denver’s grousing with a string of texts or tweets.

But no matter how established your practice is or how long a client has been with you, if you can’t figuratively find a way to “fire Ferguson” when they’re unhappy or need help, the cold reality is in the long run, they will surely fire you.