If you tell someone that you are a college professor, you get asked, “What do you teach?” If you tell someone you are a management consultant, you get asked, “What do you do?” In my consulting practice I organize small companies as the person they call in to get rid of former best friends, spouses or family members from the operation. Specialty: getting Pops to retire early.
The wife was in tears as her husband told me that their $17M a year international wholesaling company was tearing their marriage apart. She had been working as a registered nurse until a thieving employee, who the couple had regarded as part of the family, was arrested and charged with embezzlement. Now the woman in tears revealed that the arrested party had been the company bookkeeper and that she, the tearful one, had left the nursing profession to take the embezzler's place. The marital problems began about the same time, two years earlier, and the discussion of divorce had begun.
The owner’s son would not look me in the eye as his father explained how everything had been running along just fine in his $8M a year filling station franchises, one at each end of the town. The son had closed his own profitable motor cycle repair business to come into the family company and try to get the operation back into the black from red hole that was swallowing the family alive. The son took me aside later and confessed that he didn’t know how much longer they could stay open that the banks were calling every day for loan payments. As to paying for consulting services to help save them, he didn’t know how the invoices could be paid.
The client’s wife and business partner in the $14M a year lumber company asked me if I was in law enforcement, as I walked through the office to step outside for a minute break. When I asked her why she thought that, she noted that I would ask a casual question each time we met and each time the questions seemed unrelated, but she was certain that they were related. Later, when the computer with the company books crashed, she retrieved a computer from home that had a copy of the books. Asked why she had been paying vendors from the client’s personal account, she mentioned the IRS lien on the business that had not been previously revealed.
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