CLUSTER TIPS by Chris Burand Cluster contracts among individual agencies or groups of agencies (not necessarily the major cluster-type agency organizations) are almost alw...

GEORGE, THE ETERNAL OPTIMIST by Chris Burand This object lesson shows how NOT to grow your agency. A few years ago, an agency principal let...

An agency valuation I completed recently came in considerably lower than the agency owners expected. The reason? Their balance sheet was very poor and they were materially out of trust: Meaning that their ratio of Accounts Receivable + Cash to Accounts Payable was less than 1. The agency principals were quite upset that I would decrease their value for this reason. They retorted, “We always pay our companies on time, our companies have never been hurt by this, our customers have never been hurt by this, and our CPA has never found fault with this practice. You're the only one who thinks it matters!”