Terry Grindlay, CPA, is proud of his statistics. His one-owner practice produces half a million dollars worth of accounting a year, 250% above the national average and he is still expanding. At the end of 1995, however, five years after he had split up a partnership and formed his own firm, he had hit a plateau.

"We had experienced extremely good growth - 25-30% a year for five years in a row, but in 1995 sales were flat. Also, of the eight people who work with me, two were having realization problems - the amount of time they were taking on a job was too much for what we were being paid.

"I had heard about Sterling and I was talking with them about my situation when the name of another accountant, one who I knew well, came up. He has a similar practice to mine; we have the same kind of marketing ideas and we both have planning practices where we help corporate clients avoid tax surprises, defer taxes, and lower their tax rates.

"Anyway, that sold me. I got the Sterling training and in December of 1995 arranged for a Sterling consultant to come to my office for what they call a SPEEDO."

The result?
"That tax season I worked 20% less hours and billed more!" says Grindlay. "Part of this was due just to the communication system the Sterling consultant helped us put in. The number of interruptions I got in a day went down from 50-60 to about 20, which is reasonable during tax season. "On the statistics, we had kept these before but not graphically. Now the staff had to put their stat graphs up on a board every week and our poor producers, the ones who couldn't change, who refused to change, they couldn't face doing this every week. They left."

"I would have preferred to get them to produce, but they left on their own. With the new system, the good producers flourished."

"Also," says Grindlay, "the new people we have gotten on are outstanding. That in itself has been extremely valuable. Sterling has given me the tools to select remarkably good personnel.

"There is a lot in the Sterling system that an accountant might work out for himself, but it would take him a long, long time. And then, would he implement it?

"Something I knew - I have an MBA and so on - but never did, had to do with data base marketing - direct mail - of which we did a lot. But our consultant pointed out that we should increase our data base, which we did, going for quantity in our promotion, then increasing the quality and viability. And the results were very good."

"Now one thing I really enjoy is meeting other accountants who are clients of Sterling, and just talking about ways they have been applying the management technology.

"We were doing a lot of things right, even before 1995," says Grindlay, "What Sterling did for us was to get us back on the expansion track."