Emailing an Exit Strategy

The year was 1984.

I know what you’re thinking, and no — I’m not harkening back 28 years to regale you with some Orwellian reference.

It was the year that I had first witnessed someone using e-mail.

She was a data programmer for cosmetics giant Avon and often worked out of her apartment. One blazing summer day when I was glad to be in a home that had air conditioning (as mine did not), I had noticed she kept typing on what I seem to remember was a Commodore 64 and, shortly thereafter, giggling at her screen.

When I asked her what she was doing, she simply replied, “talking to my colleague at the office. He’s always sending me jokes.” I wondered at the time why she didn’t just call him.

Since my cutting-edge IT pedigree at the time consisted of hunting and pecking on the keyboard of  a 1970 Royal manual typewriter and remembering to double-space, you can imagine how difficult it was for someone with a non-existent background in technology to wrap my arms around the concept of sending communication electronically.

My email experience was replicated about six months later when my trio of electrical engineer cousins had wired their home to accommodate the entire inventory of in-house PCs and spent most of the day writing programs in COBOL and, of course, talking to each other.

Fast forward nearly three decades later, and according to statistics, roughly 295 billion emails are sent every day — translating to roughly 2.8 million per second.

Electronic communication is no small part of the reason the U.S. Post office posts billions in red ink every quarter. That and the fact it’s run by the government — but that’s fodder for a future blog.

So you can imagine my surprise when, last week, I called a practitioner in Connecticut to inquire about his succession needs. He said he was interested in “doing something,” but was not sure whether he wanted to pass the business on to his children or sell it when he signed off on his last 1040.

I told him I’d gladly send him some information and when I asked for his email address he bluntly informed me that “I don’t use email.” Now I know that the accounting profession traditionally lags behind other professional services in terms of adoption, but I was stunned to learn that an active practitioner with a viable client list opted to use snail mail as opposed to the vehicle used billions of times per day. I would also learn that he still used DOS, an acronym I had not heard in years.

If there was ever a practitioner that modernization completely bypassed, it was him. It was also apparent that it was well beyond time for him to begin thinking about a transition. So I put together a succession care package for him, attached two first class stamps, and drove to the post office — a routine I perform about as frequently as I use shampoo.

Now I realize that not everyone who doesn’t own an iPhone 5 should be worried or implementing an exit strategy, but you don’t have to be Tim Cook or Bill Gates to recognize that if you don’t keep abreast of technologies in your chosen profession, your competitors surely will.

Hopefully he’ll see the light once he reads the materials. On the bright side at least he has a phone to call me.