For me, the hardest part is how to say goodbye.

Do you go into your dry cleaner and say that you are only going to pay what you think it is worth? No but they do with accountants.

Why? Because we allow ourselves not to be treated as professionals. And out fellow accountants buy into it. We are our own worse enemy. As I tell my students, CPAs are the only professionals who love to eat their own.

I was hoping for some insight on dealing with these types of situations.

How do you get them to decide to move on without offending and, thereby, creating an “anti-referral” source?

What do you tell the next guy when he or she contacts the predecessor accountant?

How do you convince the partners that these clients are so poisonous that they need to go; after all the rest of the firm enjoys the benefits of the fees, but not necessarily the aggravation of the relationship?

That’s the article I want to read.

One great idea I’ve implemented is to keeping increasing the bill of the clients I don’t like until I like them again. Those incorrigible ones, those hateful and defective specimens of humanity who hate even themselves, I consign to my worthy competitors.

Ultimately, the only strategy for upgrading the level of clientele is to ensure you, yourself, are worthy of better clients by a brutally honest assessment and upgrading of your own attributes, and to ensure your marketing is working at peak effectiveness to keep the new clients rolling in the door to replace the malcontents. Remember, the old adage is still applicable: birds of a feather flock together. Many times, we accountants get the clients we deserve.

My question is with regards to a partnership where there is an uneven distribution of “D” clients. Let’s say on a whole firm evaluation, we need to trim 20% of Partner A’s clients, but only 5% of Partner B’s clients. Furthermore, Partner B has potential “A” clients in the pipeline that he has not been proposing to because of a lack of firm resources that will now be available by retiring some of Partner A’s poor clients.

The firm as a whole becomes much more profitable, happy and effective by digging out the “D” client cancer, but the compensation structure has now shifted much more money from Partner A to Partner B.

Furthermore, in most instances this shift in compensation can be anticipated by Partner A and the course of action eliminating Partner A’s “D” clients does not happen, due to Partner A’s subversive actions (after all, he is not concerned as much with total firm profitability as he is his own compensation).

Does a situation like this happen often in practice? What is a good way to address this issue and other agency issues between the firm and its partners?

Jim