That incident didn't cost him his lawyer's license, only a suspension, but the Grievance Committee of the Eighth Judicial District of New York was soon investigating at least 20 complaints his clients had lodged against him. The most serious charge: $40,000 inexplicably missing from an escrow account of a deceased 38-year-old nurse's estate that Burgess had represented. Burgess was disbarred and convicted of attempted grand larceny. He paid a $1,000 fine.
The roller-coaster ride of his life reached a nadir on May 2, 1989, when he and Norma filed for personal bankruptcy under Chapter 7. The following year he and Norma were divorced. (He met his second wife, Dana, who is 30, in the early 1990s after she came to work at IPA.)
But Burgess was a scrambler, and as usual he relied on a fierce work ethic to recover from adversity. He landed a job with George S. May as an executive survey analyst. His rise there was remarkable. By 1991, when he abruptly resigned, he was chief of the survey department, one of the company's top executives. It hadn't taken him long to put his troubles behind him. Within half a year of starting as a survey analyst, according to his bankruptcy papers, he was earning $12,900 a month.
Back in Burgess's office after the Christmas party, as the day wore on, Burgess, as promised, did indeed yell louder at his employees, and his language turned coarser. Being "incredibly aggressive" is an important element of his success, he volunteered, a point he qualified by adding that he was "compassionate" with his long-term employees. "If someone has a problem and I can help them, I get long-term loyalty out of them because they realize I was there when they needed me," he said. Drugan, the IPA sales director, cited examples of Burgess's generosity: "He's liberal with advances for employees in a bind. He has an internal legal staff to help with speeding tickets and even divorces."
Some of Burgess's former survey analysts, on whose behalf the Illinois attorney general sued two years ago, would likely paint a different picture of Burgess's management style. Accused in the suit of failing to pay commissions and reimburse expenses, IPA didn't admit any wrongdoing but agreed in a settlement to submit the employees' claims to arbitration and promised to abide by the law in the future. There have been no further complaints of that kind since the settlement, Burgess said.
That week's quotas for the telemarketers: call 40,000 business owners and set up 8,500 appointments.
At the office my conversation with Burgess turned to the question of how he would document the high level of satisfaction with IPA's work that he said prevailed among its clients. He pulled out a loose-leaf notebook full of positive letters. One letter in particular captivated him -- so much so that he'd read it aloud to IPA employees at a Christmas brunch the day before. The letter, written by Edward Page, CEO of Megawood Industries, in Maplewood, N.J., lauded IPA as "the real thing" and a source of "topflight" consultants. Page, whose company manufactures and sells customized windows, later confirmed the tone of his letter in an interview with Inc. and said that he would recommend IPA to other companies.
IPA regularly receives evaluations of its services from its customers; the consulting firm's contracts with its clients require the clients to write letters assessing IPA's work at the conclusion of a project. Burgess told me that he read all those letters, about 120 a week. "Therefore, we ask for complaints," he said. "We get very, very few."
What about the records of the Better Business Bureau of Chicago & Illinois, which show that 47 complaints were filed by IPA's clients over the three years ending December 14, 1999? Burgess at first challenged the figure as too high, although it represented less than 0.4% of the firm's 13,378 clients during that period. After reviewing a list of the cases, he said that "the heavy majority of them are people who didn't pay us." All the cases were resolved, according to Steve Bernas, operations director of the bureau's Chicago chapter, which serves as a nationwide clearinghouse for complaints against companies based in the area. Of course, not all dissatisfied clients file complaints with the bureau; Hudlow did, for example, but the Goldstones and Hassell did not.
A bureau member from 1996 till 1998, IPA resigned in a dispute stemming not from the clients' complaints but from two other issues the organization was investigating, according to Bernas. One related to the agreement between IPA and the Illinois attorney general's office, the other to a complaint alleging that IPA's promotional materials wrongly claimed that Burgess was serving on President Clinton's "Advisory Committee on Small and Medium Sized Businesses." (No such group exists, according to the White House.) Burgess said IPA quit the bureau because it wouldn't postpone a hearing, but he conceded that he had never belonged to a White House committee, only to what he calls "the Pricewaterhouse Advisory Committee for Small and Medium Sized Businesses," which, he says, met with President Clinton two years ago in a Chicago hotel. While a PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesperson says that Burgess is one of more than 400 CEOs who make up its Trendsetter Barometer survey panel, the president has never spoken to the group.
