We recently accepted a presentation for CPE in our office. Shortly after the initial agreement some staff started to regret it.
They keep trying to confirm how many were attending, even after all the employees confirmed. When we got to the day we had 5 people show up to give us 2 hours of CPE… So we crammed the 11 of us, lunch, three computers and a projector into our conference room.
They then quickly mentioned that the firm was owned by a rival CPA firm and then went into detail on how and why they wanted us to give them our clients to pitch software upgrades to them…
The pitch was for Sage 50, 100 and 300, they tagged on QuickBooks Enterprise stating that they were not interested in clients who merely used QB Pro or Premiere. I guess these client are too small for the CPA firm to want to poach.
Now CPA’s are bound by certain ethics requirements, so out and out poaching is frowned upon. But a wholly owned software implementation and training subsidiary is not bound by those ethics.
That might not have been the intention. But when all six of us sat and round tabled the value of the presentation we all had the same beliefs. Any clients referred to them would be evaluated for their poaching potential.