Hassell, 60, a former New York City fireman, owns a growing auto-body shop in West Babylon, on Long Island's south shore. A 28-year-old registered nurse, Kim Hudlow runs a commercial roofing business in Panama City Beach, Fla., with her husband. They were two of the IPA clients who had complained to Inc., clients whose views of the company's methods differ sharply from what Burgess describes.
Neither Hassell nor Hudlow remembers being called by an IPA telemarketer. Their first contact had been instead with a field rep who had apparently stopped by to see them at random. A prospective client who says no to a field rep (Hassell and Hudlow said yes) may receive a follow-up call anyway from a salesperson at IPA headquarters. Those making the calls have instructions to offer a reduced fee, as low as $300, for the survey analysis, says Marion G. Townson, who worked at IPA for two years and left the company unhappily in March 1998. "I would say, 'We just happen to have an analyst in the area. A project fell through; we can reduce your price," explains Townson. "There was rarely anyone in the area."
Both Hassell and Hudlow say they were pleased with their survey analysts. Hassell says that his analyst, Bruce Davis, impressed him as "excellent" and "down-to-earth." Davis's counterpart on Hudlow's job, Vinay Bharadwa, quickly crunched the financial data of her 11-employee Centennial Roofing Corp., Hudlow says, and cranked out a detailed breakdown of overhead costs. "He just totally knocked us off our feet. He was very knowledgeable," she recalls.
Hassell says that in Davis he found a particularly sympathetic ear. Hassell's 37-year-old daughter, Kimberly, had died unexpectedly in June. Davis's own daughter had died at the age of 18, he told the grieving Hassell. (IPA may sometimes take a client's peculiar personal circumstances into account in deploying its analysts, I've learned, although Burgess denies that it did so in Hassell's case.) Having an analyst whose bereavement matched his own was important to Hassell. "We kind of bonded," he recalls.
The analysts recommended 108 hours of work for Hassell Auto Body and 117 for Centennial Roofing, at $195 an hour.
IPA states that it will accept a client only if it identifies a problem that the consulting company can fix. ("No recommendation will be made for consulting services unless I am able to substantiate a three-to-one return for every dollar invested," reads a talking point in the analyst's standard sales pitch.) Still, three former IPA analysts have told me that their supervisors at IPA headquarters exerted intense pressure on them to sign clients. James R. "Randy" Long of Douglasville, Ga., who worked as an IPA analyst in 1995, put it this way: "They thought you should make a sale on every call, and they'd really ride you if you didn't."
Not every job runs the full course prescribed in a client's contract; a clause allows a client to terminate a project at the end of any day. Hudlow, for example, hired IPA for 117 hours, seeking better management tools for herself and her husband, David, and an improved incentive plan for the workers at their company, which the couple had taken over from David's father in March 1999. She halted the project after 10 hours because she soured on two consultants who were simply "regurgitating" back to her a lot of the information she had given to them, she says. She refused to pay IPA's bill of almost $5,700, including expenses.
After she complained to the Chicago office of the Better Business Bureau, IPA quickly agreed to write off its charge. "Our business analyst, Mr. Bharadwa," IPA's in-house lawyer, Georgia Shields, wrote in a follow-up letter to the Better Business Bureau, "has been reprimanded and put on notice that this sort of misunderstanding will never be tolerated."
The consultant who reported to Hassell Auto Body, Richard Arnold, set up his laptop in a glass-enclosed front office. For two weeks he churned out almost 300 pages of paper, which he compiled into a blue loose-leaf notebook and tabbed with multicolored dividers. The bulk of it consisted of a personnel-policy manual -- much of it copied from the shop's preexisting version, according to Hassell -- and a series of operating-procedure primers on such subjects as meeting agendas, job descriptions, employee-performance evaluations, and a drug policy. Although the words Hassell Auto Body did show up here and there in the pages ("Hassell Auto Body may require employees in safety-sensitive positions to undergo drug and alcohol testing on a random basis" is one drug-policy provision), most of the material appeared to be boilerplate language, presumably parroted from files in Arnold's laptop.
Arnold did spend time on other tasks, such as interviewing Hassell's employees. Hassell paid IPA more than $17,000 and, at Arnold's request, reluctantly initialed his approval on a series of forms, he explained. "I'd say, 'A lot of this is just waste," Hassell recalls telling Arnold, "and he'd say, 'It'll all tie in. We're going to make sense out of all this." Eventually fed up, Hassell halted the project after two weeks and stopped payment on his last check, which was for $10,264. As Hassell told the police, that triggered a three-day barrage of calls from IPA's bill collector.
