"I'm John Burgess. I'm Here to Help You"

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Two days after the party I drove from Chicago 30 miles northwest to IPA's headquarters, in sprawling Buffalo Grove, Ill. Seemingly thrown up the night before on somebody's cornfield, the company's red-brick-and-glass headquarters is but one of many low-slung, glossy new office buildings in the area. Burgess greeted me in his spacious office, which he calls Grand Central Station, and told me he had been at his desk since 5:30 a.m. He works long hours, and his schedule defines the company's work ethic -- employees arrive and leave in the dark "like vampires," in the words of Dan Drugan, IPA's sales chief.

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."

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