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Chapter 7
Succession Is Everyone’s Crisis
The job of relationship manager in an accounting firm is a strange one
indeed. Until recently, it was still reasonably efficient to conduct all sorts of
services after year-end in far-less-than-valuable ways and then to employ
someone to come in afterward and ask, “Did everything go okay?”
The notion that we should design the performance of our services to
hit the biggest value target possible the first time was preposterous. It was
cheap and easy to push lots of tax returns and audits through our busy sea-
sons and then have political partners massage the value equation by engag-
ing with a relatively un ...