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

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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.

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."

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