"We didn't notice the way it happened," says Ben Leonard, CPA, "but the fun had gone out of our practice." Mr. Leonard and his partner Peter Recchia, CPA, of Leonard and Co., have a practice with 13 employees in Elwood Park, Illinois.

"We were not communicating," says Recchia, "and were mostly fed up. It wasn't enjoyable, doing each other's jobs, sometimes things getting done twice. People got so they just wanted to work some reasonable hours."

Bonnie Gioffredi, Office Manager, remembers, "People wanted to do well, but things were so disorganized, I could feel my stomach crunching when I came in the office in the morning."

Demand for Improvement

"We had a client who started with Sterling, and his income doubled, then quadrupled. We spoke to Kevin Wilson, head of Sterling, directly, and what he said made sense to us. So we took the first step to get the management tools he had to offer.

The Sterling Difference

Leonard and Company put those tools to work and the atmosphere changed right along with profitability.

"Sterling brought us organization with a structure," says Leonard. "The partners and the staff know what they have to do, and they can look forward to getting things done; you know what your outcomes are going to be. The atmosphere in the office is totally different."

Peter Recchia found the Management by Statistics system particularly useful: "I can see how the staff are doing, and how the practice is going, without relying on someone's opinion. That's very important."

The figures tell the story. Leonard says in less than two years their income has gone from $425,000 to $650,000 and they now have 30% more business clients. From a situation where they had an enormous accounts payable and large debts, they are now completely debt free.

Not only are the staff better paid, they work to increase production for the whole office. "Where there was chaos before," says Gioffredi, "there is a lot more order. People have job descriptions and they can use them to tell how they are doing."

"There's something else I would say," concluded Mr. Recchia, looking over the changes Sterling has brought. "I've talked to other CPAs and sometimes they don't get the idea that they could double or triple their sales. But they could."