By midmorning on this day Burgess was smoking Parliament filters and exhorting his managers like a coach before the big game. Down to his white shirtsleeves, he was wearing a paisley tie and black, chalk-striped trousers. Though short and portly, he carries himself with the authority of a physically imposing man. What's most distinctive is his voice, gravelly and rapid-fire. (Once, during a legal proceeding, a stenographer had to plead for him to slow down his testimony, saying, "Mr. Burgess, this court reporter is not superhuman.")
With two weeks to go before Christmas, Burgess was worried that his employees would slack off too soon in the run-up to the holiday. "Hi, Dan," he barked into the phone. "We get any sales?"
"Yeah, about 12," a voice answered over the speakerphone.
Burgess grimaced. "This isn't Christmas week," he said gruffly.
On a wall to Burgess's left were two large whiteboards that registered the rhythms of the firm's business. Burgess is the company's "driver," some of his top executives are fond of saying. He doesn't manage week by week or day by day but hour by hour. To see Burgess in action with the whiteboards is to understand what the executives mean and how IPA maintains its rapid sales growth. The boards show hourly quotas for each phase of IPA's sales and marketing operations, a highly evolved, uncompromisingly disciplined machine. That morning, people hurrying into Burgess's office every few minutes wrote numbers on the boards, monitoring actual results as the machine delivered them from all across the country.
The IPA operating model has four basic steps -- telemarketing, field sales, survey analysis, and consulting services -- and works like this: In two six-hour shifts a day telemarketers dial numbers in targeted areas, tout the consulting firm to business owners, and set appointments for 350 field salespeople. A field rep shows up at the prospective client's business soon afterward. During a two-hour presentation the rep solicits a signed agreement providing for a visit by a survey analyst, the cost of which varies, although it's commonly $750. Though the title implies something different, the survey analyst isn't so much a consultant as another salesperson. The analyst spends two or three days diagnosing the company's problems and produces an oral summary, but his or her mission is to sell IPA's consulting services. The analysts' compensation, beyond per diem expenses, consists entirely of commissions based on the number of eventually collectible consulting hours that the analysts sell.
Once an analyst secures a go-ahead, IPA draws on its corps of 325 consultants (who total less than a fifth of its 1,635 employees). Both the survey analysts and the consultants live throughout the United States and Canada and typically are on the road from late Sunday through Friday evening. The consultants, who must each have at least a college degree and 10 years of business experience, perform the actual consulting services. IPA aims to have its consultants at a client's door the day after the analyst leaves -- in keeping with IPA's policy of avoiding even a 24-hour lapse during which a client might have a change of heart. According to IPA, it served 6,114 consulting clients last year, almost twice the figure for 1997, with the average job requiring about 92 hours and costing $18,000 plus expenses.
As IPA has prospered, so has Burgess. Just how much was manifest in his testimony last October in an Illinois libel trial involving a claim against George S. May International Co., where Burgess had worked before he started IPA, in 1991. Burgess's annual salary at IPA was about $1 million, he told the court. He itemized his net worth: estimated value of IPA, $100 million; securities, $9 million; bank certificates of deposit, $6 million; a 20-room house in North Barrington, Ill., which he bought last year for $1.5 million (it has a swimming pool and a waterfall); and life insurance worth a "few million dollars." Seeming almost giddy, he continued, "And I have cash on a daily basis, probably a million and a half or two million. If you add all that together, even excluding things like my wife's jewelry -- I have a young wife and jewelry being expensive -- it's about $120 million."
Back in Burgess's office that day, the lucrative IPA machine was producing the latest numbers. A clean-cut young man with a clipboard wrote "201" on one of the whiteboards, noting how many appointments the telemarketers had made so far that morning. The number missed the quota by 198. Burgess looked agitated. If he was the ultimate driver, each stage of IPA's operations was driving the next one. That week IPA's survey analysts were expected to contract 12,500 hours of consulting work. To maintain the tempo, the telemarketers had to call 40,000 business owners, scheduling 8,500 appointments for the field representatives, who were supposed to provide 358 leads for the survey analysts, who were to book 148 go-aheads for the consultants.
Burgess was on the phone to Rich Lubicz, the telemarketing director. "What the hell are you doing?" he shouted. "You want to take the day off, take the day off. Then you won't have the money to buy a Jaguar." Burgess turned to me. "If you weren't here," he said with a mischievous smile, "I'd be yelling louder."
John Burgess manages not week by week or day by day but hour by hour. The whiteboards in his office tell all.
When IPA sales representatives first solicited their business, Doug Hassell and Kim Hudlow knew nothing about John Burgess or his company. If they had checked out IPA's Web site, which they didn't do, they would have seen a code of ethics and scores of complimentary letters from unnamed IPA clients -- but only an obscure mention of Burgess as the owner. Hassell and Hudlow acted prudently; they asked for references. IPA's salespeople, however, replied that it's IPA's policy -- as is traditional in the management-consulting industry -- to keep clients' names confidential. Hassell and Hudlow signed on with IPA anyway.
