Moving the goal posts

Welcome back and belated Happy New Year.

Here’s hoping you all enjoyed your holiday and now you have a month or so to not only prepare for another filing season, but digest all the new tax law changes so you can explain in layman’s terms to your clients what it means for them.

Believe it or not, in the midst of all this we still have a number of M&A deals awaiting closure. It sounds grossly counter-intuitive but just prior to tax season is sometimes the best time of the year to facilitate a merger. If you’re a seller firm it’s the one time of the year you see virtually all your clients in person and when you need all the resources you can muster.

Hence, it’s often a perfect time to set the wheels in motion for an efficient transition.

Unless of course you decide to move the proverbial goal posts.

And what I mean by that is to suddenly begin expanding your list of “must haves” prior to entertaining any merger meetings or discussions.

Case in point.

Recently we took on a sole practitioner in the New York area generating just over $1 million in billings and looking to reduce his workload. OK, sounded easy enough. We have plenty of buyer clients who would at least look at that opportunity so we began the traditional process of writing up a practice summary sheet and sending it out to see who bites.

So after the selection process the meetings commenced. The first sign of trouble was when he balked at one potential successor’s office view. Suddenly he demanded to have a scenic panorama. After meeting another potential suitor, he complained that their offices were not within walking distance to his commuter railroad. That was a deal-breaker according to him. I said this is the first I’m hearing about it. To which he responded, “You should know my parameters.”

I quickly responded “not if you don’t tell me.”

Finally, after a third meeting, he said that the offices of that particular practice had only one conference room and he needed more than that to meet all the clients that come in personally. I asked him how he could be in two rooms at one time, but apparently the question and practicality eluded him.

I told him in no uncertain terms that after tax season we would have a “wake up and face north” discussion about what was realistic and what is not. And if he continued to upgrade his demands on the spur of the moment, he is free to look elsewhere for counsel.

At the very least, he’ll have three grueling months to think about it.