My wife had a very interesting problem in doing her 2007 taxes this year: Her accountant — whom she had mailed all her 2007 receipts and financial information half-way across the country to — fell off the wagon. He stopped returning calls, and didn't even bother filing an extension for April 15th deadline. I introduced her to my accountant here in Albuquerque, who quickly filed an extension for her. However, she needs her 2007 materials from the old accountant, so the new accountant can do the 2007 taxes. Worse, my 2007 taxes are being held up, because they depend on hers.

Being an attorney, I live-and-breathe what I must now unfortunately call the "old way" of thinking. My old-fart process is very structured, requiring a lot of effort, time and expense. It goes like this: Make a telephone call (no answer, of course), leave serious and threatening message (no response), send certified letter demanding 2007 tax materials (certified letter not picked up at post office), contact relevant oversight authority (in this case, state CPA board) who then follows the old-fart process themselves with similar results, once self-help options are exhausted file a lawsuit (which has its own lengthy process).

My "old way" takes months, several thousand dollars and an the results are uncertain (i.e. even with a court order, will they put the accountant in jail if he doesn't deliver all the materials, and how do we prove what materials the accountant actually has in his possession?). Worse, without very significant effort, time and expense, there's almost no way to obtain the 2007 tax materials in time for the upcoming October filing deadline.

My wife introduced me to the "new way" of problem resolution, and not only is it effective, it's fast, easy and very inexpensive. It turns out that my wife was a member of BNI, a business networking group, where she met her accountant. She found out that her accountant was still attending BNI meetings. Despite all the trouble we were having with him, he felt he needed to maintain his networks for business. So, my wife sent an email to a number of her BNI contacts, simply stating the facts and asking if they see her accountant or have any influence with him. Those contacts, in turn, ended up forwarding the email to other people, and so on, and so on. Turns out that a number of contacts had ongoing business relationships with her accountant.

This became very embarrassing for her accountant, who within 2 days, sent all the materials back to my wife. Problem fully resolved within 2 days, with very little effort (an email note) and no cost. This is unprecedented with "my old" way of handling things.

Social and business networking has always been important, but the Internet is exponentially increasing the value and power of networking. In the case above, email was the tool. New social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and friendfeed, are enabling near real-time access to your network of friends and business associates, which will have profound impacts on businesses and how problems are resolved.

Are you on any of these social networks? If not, you might want to look at them and start paying attention to what others might be saying about you or your business. At the very least, they could provide feedback to you on how your business is doing.

2 Responses...

1. Andrea Feucht says:

   June 13, 2008 at 11:04 am

   Your wife's way was definitely a different way of solving the problem, but the truly "new" way might be to only use the online social networks to track the guy down.

   In fact, I'm going to blog about that whole social networking subject next, rather than comment on it.
2. Quyen says:

   June 20, 2008 at 5:55 am

   Wow, Larry… I appreciate you sharing your story with us. Glad that you and wife got justice so quickly.

   Thanks to your tip, we are now on Facebook and MySpace and I've already posted them to our homepage. Maybe we can all help one another out and add each other as friends/fans?

   I'm grateful that you keep us up with the times!