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

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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.

Both Hassell and Hudlow were surprised that no one at IPA headquarters had called to inquire why they were dissatisfied. Bharadwa did call Hudlow on December 20, more than two months after the survey analyst had visited Centennial, for an update on the IPA project, she says. Hudlow was stunned. She asked about his being put on notice and reprimanded. He told her that he knew nothing about it, that "he didn't have a clue," she recalls. When I called Bharadwa the same day, he declined to discuss his dealings with Centennial, saying they were confidential and adding, "I try to do a good job, and I don't want to jeopardize anything or anybody."

Eventually fed up, Doug Hassell halted the project after two weeks and stopped payment on his check. "A lot of this is just waste," he said.

If IPA is today a subject of controversy, it's nothing new. It has been embattled virtually from the moment, in the late summer of 1991, when Burgess and two other executives at George S. May International Co., based in Park Ridge, Ill., bolted from the company and created a competing business. A suit May brought in October of that year charged that Burgess and his cofounders, Bruce A. Tulio and Charles W. "Bill" Morton, and eight other former employees had appropriated trade secrets, including the alleged use of its forms and programs. May eventually lost that round of litigation, but there have been many others. At least a dozen suits filed by May or IPA (or individuals with those companies) since 1991 have set off legal fireworks in the Illinois courts of Cook and Lake counties, among other jurisdictions.

One early obstacle that had confronted Burgess and his fellow defectors was a noncompete clause in the employment contracts they had signed while working at May. It barred them for six months from enlisting with a May competitor after they parted ways with the company. When Burgess called a meeting with his colleagues from May at his apartment to discuss the possibility of starting a rival business, he didn't know how many of them would defy the covenant. He expected three May employees to show up. Twenty-two did.

A few weeks later IPA opened a small office in Wheeling, Ill. The whole of IPA's empire then encompassed "two desks and three employees. So you had to make sure you got there early enough to have a desk," Burgess recalls. Ian McLeod, one of the early May defectors, jumped ship to work as an analyst at IPA because, as he put it recently, he admired Burgess as a "very astute businessman" who brought "a lot of very talented people together." McLeod no longer works for IPA.

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