Louis Barajas and his partner Bill Torres had a partnership that was growing fast, when they decided they needed Sterling.
“We’d been growing at 40% a year,” says Mr. Barajas, “and at that rate we were growing so fast we didn’t have any systems in place, no organization. So we decided we needed to find a consulting group that deals with accountants that would set us up for expansion.
“Because we were not organized, the work was not getting out. There were a lot of bottlenecks and my partner and myself were just frustrated.
“Its funny how lucky we were to find Sterling,” recalls Barajas. “We were looking at firms that specialize in working with accountants and we had some friends who tried out another one which did not give them the results they wanted. But somebody had contacted them from Sterling before that, so they had an introductory cassette from Sterling. They gave us the cassette, saying they had already spent their money on this other firm. And when I watched the video I found everything on the video was just what we needed, and I found I just kept agreeing with everything on the video. My partner watched the cassette and saw the same thing, and my partner and I contacted Sterling.
“We are in the City of Commerce, which is about 20 minutes from Sterling, and we went to see one of the people down there, asked a lot of question, and got a list of referrals of CPAs that had gone through the same problems. So we called the referrals and asked them ‘here are our problems, do you think Sterling can help us?’ After we had talked to them, we decided if we were really committed to growth and success we should go with Sterling.
“One of the things that I liked about Sterling from the beginning,” says Mr. Barajas, “and I also saw when I did my training, was that they were not only giving us information, but teaching us how to learn, and giving us the concept of how to use the systems.
“Basically what happened was this: They break down business into seven divisions, which is their organizing board. And that bit of organization alone did a tremendous lot. By looking at the business form seven divisions, we could make one partner responsible for different divisions. Before, we were trying to do a lot of things together. Afterwards we divided it up; we each had things to do. With Sterling, we found there were a lot of things that we were doing right, but also a lot of things we just weren’t doing.
“When we got back from our training, my partner and I had a basic strategic plan and program and a list of tasks to do. The consultant would call us up, and ensure we were progressing on our program. We started out talking to our employees about what we had just learned and we started getting everyone keeping statistics that measured actual products.
“Also, as soon as we got back we started policing ‘Developed Traffic,’ the wasted time and motion that can take up your whole day and get you no product. And knowing what we were looking for, the Dev-T stopped instantly.
“The org board was great, too. We know which people were responsible for what. With management by statistics we could find out who was producing and who was just pretending to produce. That enabled us to get rid of the people who were not producing, because they were causing the bottlenecks we were experiencing.
“We also did full, useable job descriptions that described everything people needed to do their jobs.
“Naturally,” says Mr. Barajas, “our production statistics went up. And when we got rid of the low-production people, the whole morale of the office went up. And now we have great people. I can honestly say I’ve never had better people working for me.”
