We offer a sampling of case studies here to illustrate our experience, processes, and client results.

While the case studies are consistent with today’s form for presenting them, we have taken the liberty of giving them an anecdotal style as well. We hope you enjoy reading them with the same pleasure we took in recounting them.

The broad range of our business operating, writing, valuation and consulting experience allows us to prescribe conventional business solutions when ever appropriate, and also to offer innovative solutions whenever unique situations require them.

Of course, none of the case studies should be taken as an indication of future results.

Client: The client was an international law firm representing a trust client with assets approaching $1 billion throughout four trusts, 21 for-profit operating entities, and a number of holding companies.

Client Situation: The law firm’s client required a meticulous compensation study to substantiate a proposed remuneration package for the trust advisor.

Approach: We drafted an organization chart showing all entities and positions, and then drafted some twenty position descriptions performed by the trust advisor. Next, we prepared a series of stand-alone compensation studies to identify separate, then total, market rate compensation values for the trust advisor’s many and complex duties.

Result: The client was able to provide the trust with analysis to support an adjustment to the trust advisor’s compensation approved by the parent board of directors, their lawyers, and their certified public accountants.

Client: The client was a merger and acquisition firm we had served in prior years.

Client Situation: The client had, as its client, a charitable organization with an executive director whose compensation had been set prior to its foundation formation by the foundation’s founder.

Although the compensation had been set previously, based on for-profit competitive influences (approaching the mid-six figures), the newly formed foundation status meant the compensation would be subject to special Internal Revenue Service scrutiny.

The client needed to know what compensation ranges it could support in defense of any potential self-dealing rules under IRC Section 4941 for private foundations.

Approach: We conducted a study to assist the board of directors in determining fair market compensation ranges, comparing the subject’s compensation with like counterparts, with like positions, in like organizations, and in like circumstances. We supported the survey with compensation data from nineteen like-organizations, and provided the board with a near 1,000 page “kit” for its use in determining fair market compensation then and in the future.

Result: Following review by the client’s attorneys, the board of directors had a clear basis upon which to base its compensation of its president.

Later, the report was used by an international law firm, and prevailed, in tax court.

Client: The client was a ​public charity founded by a world-renowned celebrity, former politician, and lucrative public speaker.

Client Situation: The board of directors needed a compensation study to support its action to grant the founder, who acted at the time as Chairman Emeritus and Senior advisor, a competitive market rate compensation that reflected his ebbing annual hours worked due to advancing age, his established name and international celebrity, and his influence over present and future contribution income to the organization.

Approach: We prepared a compensation study identifying and quantifying the market value of the aging founder’s contributions to the organization in various reduced roles anticipated by the board over the next ten years.

Result: The client had objective support to justify its intention of providing the founder with compensation throughout all his future roles with the organization.

Client: The client was a CPA representing a large subchapter S corporation.

Client Situation: The S corporation had recently undergone an IRS audit which challenged the reasonable compensation of its sole shareholder/employee. The IRS reclassified the shareholder/employee’s annual distributions, in part, from dividends to salary, which in turn triggered substantial payroll taxes and penalties. The CPA wanted on file a compensation study for use in the event a reasonable compensation issue ever arose again.

Approach: We conducted a compensation study to assist the board of directors in setting supportable reasonable compensation for its shareholder/employee.

Result: The board of directors has on file a compensation study from an independent consultant, together with recommendations on how to support and manage its compensation practices.

Client: The client was an enormously successful large, themed restaurant operation.

Client Situation: The organization’s officers were contemplating the purchase of the organization from its stockholders and needed guidance on a purchase offer. The officers maintained that they were underpaid, and that accordingly, an adjustment to the restaurants’ income statements adjusted EBITA supported a business valuation more favorable to the buyers.

Approach: We drafted an organization chart and position descriptions to compare with like organizations and like positions, and prepared a compensation study to demonstrate that the buyers were underpaid by market rate compensation standards and that, accordingly, a downward adjustment to income statements was appropriate.

Result: The client was able to establish an accurate business valuation with which to support an offer to purchase the organization from its stockholders. The client liked the compensation study so much it ordered an additional compensation study to include all its key personnel.

Client: The client occupied a special niche within the affiliate market industry, which in this case included internet marketing and software companies, custom computer programming companies, and advertising agencies.

Client Situation: Of the three founders, one founder waged a legal dispute over the annual compensation of the other two founders.

Approach: We drafted organization charts and position descriptions and conducted a compensation study of all three founders in their various roles in three separate organizations to determine their fair market rate compensation.

Result: The founders used the resulting studies to support a legal agreement that ended the dispute.

Client: The client owned and operated numerous constant-output mines that led its industry in the production of various aggregate products nationwide for the swimming pool and other industries.

Client Situation: The client needed to value a non-competition agreement for its president and chief executive officer in order to protect against an anticipated employment offer to the president by a large competitor.

Approach: Using accepted non-compensation value methods based on specific economic reality tests and other factors, we conducted an analysis to determine the value of a noncompetition agreement supported by detailed economic loss findings over a three year period.

Result: The client used our report to quantify and support its subsequent negotiations with its president.

Client: The client was a sole individual co-trustee for a revocable trust.

Client Situation: The client, through her attorney, needed documentation to make a request to the trust for entitlement to reasonable trustee compensation.

Approach: We reviewed trust instruments and court orders, then, after profiling the trust, drafted position descriptions for both the sole individual co-trustee and the corporate co-trustee, and applied the usual surveys and processes for reasonable compensation to each separately and consolidated, across numerous activities.

Result: The attorney of the client used our forty page compensation study to support a request to the trust for reasonable trustee compensation for the sole individual co-trustee.

We offer a sampling of case studies here to illustrate our experience, processes, and client results.

While the case studies are consistent with today’s form for presenting them, we have taken the liberty of giving them an anecdotal style as well. We hope you enjoy reading them with the same pleasure we took in recounting them.

The broad range of our business operating, writing, valuation and consulting experience allows us to prescribe conventional business solutions when ever appropriate, and also to offer innovative solutions whenever unique situations require them.

Of course, none of the case studies should be taken as an indication of future results.

Client: ​The client was a Florida-based investment banking and advisory firm. It, in turn, had as its client a global investment banking, securities, and investment management firm headquartered on Wall Street.

Client Situation: The Wall Street firm needed a local firm to develop a full set of eleven policies and procedures manuals to guide its client, a local foundation-in-formation operating a large land conservancy.

Our Approach: We worked in collaboration with the client’s advisory staff consultants and the foundation-in-formation’s personnel to identify the scope and details of the project, in time developing eleven policies and procedures manuals whose centerpiece was a wide-ranging ranch operations best practices manual guiding everything from detailed horticultural practices and land conservation best practices to invasive animals, fish, and plants management practices.

Result: The result was a series of manuals that allow the (now fully formed) foundation to focus directly and efficiently on its important mission to bring best practices to its land conservation duties for the purpose of charitable, scientific, and educational purposes.

Both the client and the client of the client told us repeatedly throughout the process that they knew of no other consultants within their span of experience who could have crafted the work with such vision and precision.

Client: The client was a successful franchisor with more than 250 franchisees with collective annual sales of (then) $300 million.

Client Situation: The client’s franchisee manuals were becoming old and stale. While roving a national franchisor event, the client happened upon a set of franchisee manuals we had written for another franchisor in a different industry. The client liked the manuals, and engaged us to review and refresh its manuals.

Our Approach: We acquainted ourselves with the client’s industry, then, edited and, in part, rewrote its Production Manual for Franchisees.

Our approach included bringing the manual’s language and style into conformance with other manuals in its system, and improving the clarity and organization of subject matter while adding whole new sections.

Sections included an industry overview, working with customers, emergency job sequencing, estimating and bidding, technical services, forms, dispute management, information management systems, and highly-regulated and sensitive environmental compliance issues.

Result: The client heightened its relationship and credibility with its franchisees when it reintroduced the manual, and strengthened the franchisees’ sense of service and support from the franchisor.

Three years later, the client again turned to us to consolidate its technical manuals series into one comprehensive Technical Manual for Franchisees.

We approached the manual as we had the first, enhancing comprehension for the average franchisee user while matching the language, tone and style of other manuals in the series. Second, we reorganized the material to better suit its intended application (for franchisees) rather than its former use as exhaustive preparation for trade group certification testing.

The client again introduced the manual to wide acclaim from its franchisees, further enhancing technical comprehension and a uniformity of procedures while solidifying the franchisor/franchisee relationship ever important to franchisee retention.

Client: The client was a start-up franchisor developing a franchise in an industry never before franchised.

Its industry was undergoing a roll-up, in which major companies nationally were being bought and rolled into a billion dollar company, and the client believed that a franchise might be a less expensive way to participate in the trend.

Client Situation: The client needed a franchisee operating manual capable of not only attracting and securing franchisees, but prescribing the industry’s best practices and tricks of the trade in an easy-to-follow format.

Approach: We drafted a full set of franchisee manuals governing all aspects of operation, containing all the usual elements found in franchisee manuals, plus technical sections germane to the subject industry.

Result: The franchisor launched the franchise, and later sold it to the nation’s largest industry operator.

In the meantime, the manuals helped establish the franchisor as a credibly authority in an heretofore un-franchised industry, and attracted franchisees from inside and outside the industry.

The franchisor now has 200 franchisees located in thirty states with collective sales of approximately $250 million, all governed and guided by the uniform policies and procedures established by our manuals.

Client: The client was among the largest of its kind nonprofit membership organization and producer of sports events in the nation, managing two college football bowl games, a large-city December holiday parade, a half-marathon runners’ event, stadium operations and ticketing, sponsorship sales, skybox and skybox event sales, and frequent hospitality membership events for its (then) 1,000 members, among others, including charitable giving, throughout the year.

Client Situation: The client’s board of directors was dismayed that the very expensive purchase of a scoreboard had escaped its attention, temporarily jeopardizing the company’s cash position and also committing it to a large funding commitment in the future. It wanted to prevent the possibility of any kind of surprise recurrence. The company was also experiencing a turnover of personnel greater than it believed desirable.

Approach: We were engaged to work with the client’s chief financial officer, and members of its audit committee and finance committee, to develop a full set of policies and procedures manuals for each of its departments, including the accounting department.

We began with an organization manual, which included a formal statement of organizational policy, organizational charts, and a complete complement of position descriptions. Next, we created manuals either by function or department. They included office administration, accounting, sports and other events operations, marketing and sales of properties, marketing and sales of ticketing, marketing and sales of communications. Two smaller manuals, hospitality management, and sports teams scouting, completed the project.

Result: The board of directors was confident that a check and balance system was now in place to prevent a recurrence like that of the scoreboard purchase, and the staff gained an understanding of how all of its departments connect and interrelate in the business of managing sports events.

The manuals also contributed to a faster orientation and a more precise understanding of operations for new personnel, essential because a missed deadline or late coordinative effort in the sports events business can result in an unrecoverable disaster.

Our procedures manuals help guide this $275 million operation.

Client: ​The client was a (then) $2 million medical device start-up company.

Client Situation: The client had spent two years developing its products and services, and was ready to launch initial operations in one of the three national target markets it had targeted.

Approach: The client turned to us to develop a set of policies and procedures manuals to guide initial operations in the field. We experimented with various existing medical doctor office procedures to find the right operating model, then, designed a series of flow charts with accompanying narratives to identify key employee roles and to guide initial operations. Later, we developed a full set of operating manuals, using our franchise manuals as a model.

Result: The initial medical channel launch used our physician office operations manual to manage smoothly and efficiently the approximately four hundred sequential steps in the patient flow process.

Client: The client was a general aviation fixed base operator at an executive airport in a large city, and an authorized service, repair, and warranty facility for a major aircraft manufacturer.

Client Situation: The client’s maintenance service facility was slow and in need of reorganization. Management wanted to ensure its practices reflected the efficiency and safety of industry best practices.

Approach: We acquainted ourselves with the client’s industry, then, working with the client’s operations manager and his staff of airframe and power plant technicians, drafted detailed position descriptions tied to an organization chart, and with that as a basis for assigning responsibility and reporting relationships, drafted separate policy manuals for its workplace, its office administration, and, finally, its shop operations. Each incoming aircraft was traced by its repair order through the entire service process, from the moment of receipt of the aircraft to its documented return to the customer, using narratives and easy-to-reference, step-by-step flow charts and narratives throughout.

Result: Management has confidence its repetitive maintenance processes are uniform, efficient, safe, in conformance with regulatory requirements, and a reflection of industry best practices.

Client: ​The client was a former nonprofit client for whom we wrote a full set of manuals.

Client Situation: The client had engaged for many years a contractor whose owner was retiring, and it wished to convert the entire contractor’s operation to in-house in an asset sale, including its employees.

Approach: We provided the client with an organization chart to include the contractor’s personnel, position descriptions, wage and salary compensation studies, and offers of employment documentation helpful to the president and his attorneys in adopting the contractor’s organization.

Result: The conversion was orderly, and the client now has the contractor’s former operation fully converted to an in-house operation with happy and productive employees.

Client: The client is a private foundation for whom we wrote a series of eleven manuals a decade and a half before.

Client Situation: The client had expanded its mission and operations dramatically and needed major adjustments to bridge gaps in its current manuals’ set, plus the addition of three new manuals to address new areas of operation.

Approach: We are currently in the process of updating the present manuals and drafting new ones. Note that a project of this complexity requires, usually, twelve to eighteen months for completion, even given the intimacy of our prior knowledge of its operating details.

Result: The Foundation is poised to manage its $500 million dollar assets to the best advantage of its charitable mission.

Upon completion, the client will have a full set of manuals detailing every facet of its organization, administration, and operation. The Risk Management manual will likely lower insurance costs. The Organization Manual will guide the president and the board of directors in plotting the personnel needed for the future; the Wage and Salary manual will enhance employee retention and assure fair compensation in the workplace; the Personnel Manual will ensure regulatory compliance and a consistency of administration; the Accounting Manual will ensure its financial propriety; the Office Administration Manual will preserve its records; the Risk Management Manual will assist the president in identifying threats to the viability of the foundation; the Security Manual will protect its assets; the Safety Manual will keep its employees from harm; the Hazardous Materials manual will keep it in regulatory compliance; the Operations Management Manual will assure best practices in the field; the Events Management Manual and the Educational Programs Manual will each bring high standards of event quality and visitor safety.

This is a new service the market has asked to provide.

We offer a sampling of case studies here to illustrate our experience, processes, and client results.

While the case studies are consistent with today’s form for presenting them, we have taken the liberty of giving them an anecdotal style as well. We hope you enjoy reading them with the same pleasure we took in recounting them.

The broad range of our business operating, writing, valuation and consulting experience allows us to prescribe conventional business solutions when ever appropriate, and also to offer innovative solutions whenever unique situations require them.

Of course, none of the case studies should be taken as an indication of future results.

Client: The client was a small private foundation represented by a concerned law firm.

Client Situation: The law firm wanted a set of organization documents to help the inexperienced president manage the foundation with the principles of good governance.

Our Approach: Over several interviews with the attorney and the foundation president together, we drafted an organization chart, position descriptions, general grant making policies and procedures, and general investment policies and procedures.

Result: The fledgling and somewhat confused president now has, in one place for easy reference, all the documentation she may require in order to operate the foundation and to maximize its mission.

We offer a sampling of case studies here to illustrate our experience, processes, and client results.

While the case studies are consistent with today’s form for presenting them, we have taken the liberty of giving them an anecdotal style as well. We hope you enjoy reading them with the same pleasure we took in recounting them.

The broad range of our business operating, writing, valuation and consulting experience allows us to prescribe conventional business solutions when ever appropriate, and also to offer innovative solutions whenever unique situations require them.

This business experience is particularly helpful in our compensation study and policies and procedures manual engagements.

Of course, none of the case studies should be taken as an indication of future results.

Client: ​The client was a developer, manufacturer, and distributor nationwide of a wide variety of superior chemical coatings designed to prohibit or control mold, mildew, and algae for building contractors and owners.

Client Situation: The client had an opportunity to sell its products through a 300-store building materials and services supplier to contractors nationally. The catch was that the supplier required the client to begin serving its builder customers in all stores immediately and at once, rather than in stages.

Our Approach: The client engaged us to monetize the impact of beginning service in all 300 stores at the same time.

We designed various financial models for the project, each with extensive “what-if” features, so the client could estimate the risk of the opportunity to its core business, and also so the client could attract equity or debt financing. The client also needed a reliable indicator of his need for debt and equity capital, in what proportions, and in what months. What-if features included the client purchasing an existing contractor in each of the supplier’s markets, and over eighty other what-if features, all easily manipulated, and all tied to a single income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.

Result: The client used the models, first, as an indication it could accept the risk, and second, in presentations to potential funders of the project. The economic downturn beginning in 2007 caused the client to forego this otherwise attractive opportunity.

Client: ​The client managed a highly successful chain of 26 wholesale specialty building supply stores in the Southeast. The stores had a consistently excellent balance sheet, and profit and other performance benchmarks at the top of its industry.

Client Situation: The company’s principal stockholders verbally promised the client a share of capital stock in recognition of the client’s continuing excellent performance. The stock was not forthcoming and, if not received by a predetermined date, the client wanted to either buy out the existing stockholders or, free of a noncompetition agreement, open competing stores.

Our Approach: We were engaged, first, to conduct a valuation of the fair market value of the existing business (a series of six corporations) to guide the client’s purchase offer, and second, to model the client’s contingency plan to open an initial 13-store operation.

Following completion of two valuations, we worked with the client to model a (then) $14 million first-year launch of a new business that identified the amount of equity capital the launch would require, and in what months, and the amount of debt capital the business might likely expect to request from its local commercial banks. We then introduced him and the model to a number of interested local bankers.

Result: The stockholders of the company made good on their promise, and the client did not have to use either the valuation or the start-up model.

Client: The client was a licensed ship’s captain with a master mariner’s license and an entrepreneurial dream.​

Client Situation: The client received an attractive sale offer from the operator of a 110’ ship providing dinner and other cruises to tourists and contracted bus tour groups numbering approximately 50,000 passengers annually.

Our Approach: We were engaged to, first, conduct a valuation of the fair market value of the existing business, and, second, to project the client’s future operations under various purchasing and operating scenarios, all suitable for presentation to banks and potential investors. The ship had a surprising number of profit centers, including not only ticketing, but bar, restaurant, and concession sales as well. And, because the ship’s value perverted the excess earning valuation approach, the weighting of the remaining valuation methods required a deft touch.

Result: The client used the valuation, in tandem with a 5-year projection of financial statements, to assemble a combination of seller and bank loans.

The purchase was consummated, and the client now approaches his tenth years of successful operation in the cruise line’s twenty-five years of overall operation.

Client: ​The client was a consultant to a large specialty contractor with (then) annual sales of $25 million.

Client Situation: Because the client’s industry has a low revenue to employee ratio, it wanted to improve its production efficiency and quality of service by reanalyzing and reconfiguring, if possible, its 350-member workforce.

Our Approach: We worked with the client, and the client’s end-user client, to develop an organization chart as the company then operated, and a projected organization chart stepped in stages to accommodate recommended changes that could yield the desired efficiencies. Next, we worked with the client and the end-user client’s immediate managers to redefine and develop new position descriptions and new reporting relationships, by profit center, and by department.

Result: The client used the redeveloped organization chart and position description to revamp its operations.

Client: The client was a distributor of commercial specialty building materials in three strategically located warehouse locations around its State. ​

Client Situation: The client was approaching middle age, and longed for a working partner. He had located an ideal candidate, and was ​discussing a sale of fifty percent of the capital stock of the company.

Our Approach: We conducted a valuation of the fair market value of the company, and applied its value conclusion to the particular terms of the client’s purchase agreement with the prospective buyer.

Result: The client used the valuation documents to underpin a purchase agreement agreeable to both parties. As a result, the purchase was effected, and the client now enjoys the safety and security of what has turned out to be a satisfying partnership.

Client: ​The client was a large local CPA firm.​

Client Situation: The client had lost his partner a few years prior to our engagement, and wanted to benchmark his firm to the collective experience of the accounting profession. The client had known us many years, and admired how we operated. Would we spend some administrative time with his practice and implement any best practice areas we identified as wanting?

Our Approach: We entered the practice as an acting firm administrator, and spent six months fine tuning an excellent practice.

Result: The client enjoyed our presence and, as a result, later took on a tax partner to bolster his firm’s strong auditing and accounting practice.

Client: The client was a five-profit-center specialty contractor operating from three cities on the east coast.​

Client Situation: The client engaged a president to operate the company while he began a partial retirement. The financial statements began to take a suspicious appearance over several years, and the client wanted an objective assessment of the company’s true condition.

Our Approach: We entered the business site to find the president hostile. We took action through the client to remove him, then, over the next several days, conducted a review of operations, sales, personnel, and reconstructed and made a cursory audit of the company’s books. After adjusting the balance sheet for material breaches in generally accepted accounting principles, and after projecting an income statement based upon our field findings and an abbreviated survey of key clients, we realized the business approached bankruptcy, corroborated by its z-score and other classic indicators. We asked the owner to contact his lawyer and personal accountants, and accompanied him on a visit of them and a recommended bankruptcy attorney.

Result: The client found he had lacked the personal drive to launch a turnaround effort, and instead declared a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. His only lament is that he hadn’t taken action sooner to learn of the president’s treachery and to close the business. It was as Ernest Hemingway described of a man going broke: “gradually, and then suddenly.”

Client: ​The client was a small dental office with two practicing dentists.

Client Situation: The dental practice was a second-generation practice in a major city in the Northeast. The city had been declining in population since the 1960’s, with the result that the practice’s patient attrition continuously exceeded its new-patient growth. The client wanted to know if the gradually declining practice was capable of providing them with a particular standard of living for the next twenty years before their planned retirement, and, if not, it wanted to plot the precise time in the future when the practice would fail to do so. Further, if there was a point in time when the practice would fail to deliver, what might it be worth and how might it sell the practice to a neighboring competitor.

Our Approach: Because the client’s books and records were sketchy, we drafted a chart of accounts suitable for benchmarking to the dental profession and, using tax returns, created a five-year historic income statement. Next, we benchmarked its performance using information from the profession’s trade association, and, after making certain future operational assumptions, cast a five-year budgetary projection for both the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. We then cast a five-year personal budgetary projection for both dentists, in effect a measuring the standard of living required by each dentist, and personal financial statements. We also prepared a timeline indentifying the practice’s sale value at various points in time, and plotted the best times for the dentists to consider a sale, and subsequent employment with a national dental practice competitor.

Result: We determined that the practice could, given the historical trends we identified and the future trends we projected, provide both dentists with the particular standard of living each was enjoying presently. The practice is likely to suffer attrition, but the practice would survive the attrition long enough for them to retire.

Client: The client was a trademarked processor and distributor of food specialties with 10,000 retail customers. ​

Client Situation: The client’s thirty-year-old operation was beginning to lose money at a time when its founder was stepping down to accommodate the installation of the founder’s son.

Our Approach: We were engaged to examine the company and to identify and correct the reasons for its declining profit performance.

We noted that the company’s single profit center did not allow for pricing unique to its four different operations. We redesigned the chart of accounts to break out the company’s single profit center into three separate profit centers, each requiring separate pricing in order to produce a profit. The client had been applying the same pricing to all its consolidated activities, which resulted in losses. Next, we used the new chart to identify profits and losses by profit center in the prior thirty-six months, and, with new pricing guidelines, to project profits under the new pricing for the next thirty-six months.

Result: The company’s president, an accomplished businessman with over forty years of experience who, by his own admission, lived, breathed, thought, and dreamed the business constantly, laughed out loud and took great pleasure and satisfaction in learning something new about his business, something that had never before occurred to him.

The new chart exposed two profit centers that needed re-pricing, and one profit center that justified the further favor of increased marketing.

The client made a number of related asset redeployment decisions and profit center adjustments, and is now entering its fiftieth year of business, currently under the son’s watchful eye.

Client: The client was a large architectural firm of considerable regional prestige.​

Client Situation: The client had hired a new accounting department manager who had won its permission to install a new architectural-based accounting software.

The manager had lost her way on the installation, and, lost accounting control. As a result, otherwise current accounts receivable was approaching an average aging of 120 days. Further, billings in the past 90 or more days, including progress billings, had either not been completed, or had been completed and not mailed, or had been completed incorrectly. The same was true for accounts payable, including payroll tax and other tax issues.

The company had exhausted its credit line limits and the ability of the partners to fund further cash contributions, and loyal and valued vendors were howling.

Three of the partners were spending all of their time engaged in putting out daily fires, rather than practicing revenue-producing architecture.

Our Approach: We first analyzed the situation, then, negotiated the orderly extinguishment of duties from the department manager. Next, we installed a temporary chief financial officer and three of our best accounting professional affiliates, and divided the work into two phases: the first phase involved reconciling contract files in the order of their size, simultaneously reconciling accounts receivable, accounts payable, bank accounts, and payroll accounts, among others; the second phase involved the orderly installation and control of the new accounting system, and the recruiting of a CPA accounting department manager to perform to a redefined position description.

Result: With extensive telephone work, coupled with the fast application of forensic accounting techniques, control was eventually gained over contracts administration, accounts receivable and payable, and, finally, cash. With order restored, we next assisted the client with recruiting a capable CPA accounting department manager. Following an excellent recruiting result, the new manager was able to complete the process of restoring full accounting order throughout the company, and the partners and its vendors returned to a merciful normalcy.

Client: ​The client was a premier specialty home and building supply operation with retail showrooms and a commercial installation arm.​

Client Situation: The client was approaching an age where he wanted to sell the business and retire. He and his wife wanted to know if his personal holdings following sale would permit the level of retirement living they sought. Their holdings not quite characterized them as approaching a high net worth, and was insufficient to qualify them for any particular wealth management services.

Our Approach: We conducted a valuation of the fair market value of the business, then, added the estimated net proceeds to a draft of the owner’s personal financial statement. Next, we spread a household budget of projected revenue and expenses over a ten-year period.

Result: Using our projections as a guide, the owner sold the business and successfully retired with the comforting knowledge that, as long as he was a good steward of his assets, his security and comfort in retirement was reasonably assured.