I finished my degree in the summer of ’56 and took a job with Price, Waterhouse. I felt I needed to get some experience, so I was sent to Chicago for two months for classes. On the weekends we had the option of coming home or staying there. A couple of weekends, Jo Anne would come up and stay with me and the other weekends I’d come home to St. Louis.
I had hoped when I went with them that I’d get into their management office; but I ended up in the audit department, which I disliked. I did find some satisfaction in some work that I did: bringing a brokerage firm to their knees because one of the major partners was stealing from the firm. I was the one who found it.
I didn’t know I’d found it because I didn’t know that much about brokerage houses. I thought okay, we had a company here where guys were borrowing at the end of the month and paying it back the first of the month; he was borrowing from a company he owns. As soon as I mentioned it my boss, he picked up the phone and called the SEC. I feel proud to have found that.
Jo Anne says, “Alan was known as an accountant’s accountant, which meant he was very good, very thorough.”
I also did an audit on the Chase Hotel, and one of the owners was caught. It was the Kopler family, and one of the owners was Sam Kopler’s daughter, since Sam had died. His daughter was married to Shenker, a brilliant attorney, who was considered the mob’s attorney because he represented them. (As a matter of fact, Time Magazine once had a cover with the mayor, Morris Shenker, and Jimmy Hoffa.) I can remember the IRS coming into the office to question me about his involvement with the Chase Hotel, and other than spending money there, which was always on the cuff [on credit], he had no activity there. I think they were just frustrated; they couldn’t get at him any other way.
Tiger Fireside and I.E. Millstone
After I was with Price Waterhouse for a year, they let me go. In the meantime, I had taken the CPA exam twice, and I had passed on the second. I needed two more years of public experience to get my certificate, so I got a job with Tiger Fireside, a local Jewish accounting firm: Louis Tiger was one partner and Carl Fireside was the other. I was with them for two years; a lot of funny things happened there, but I wanted to leave because I really didn’t care for public accounting; I didn’t like the auditing. So I went to I.E. Millstone and asked if I could use him for a referral, because I knew that Tiger Fireside wouldn’t give me one, and he said, “Would you like to come to work for me?”
Well, I knew the work I had done before, and I said, “On the condition that you replace the cost accounting job I did with an accounting machine, and a woman to run it,” because I did not want to be pushing a pencil like I had been doing, and I knew there was a better way to do it. He agreed, and then shortly before I went to work for him, he came to me all excited and said, “What did you tell Carl Fireside? He called me and accused me of stealing you!” I said, “I told him I was leaving, and he asked where I was going, and I told him.” I also told him that I had asked him for a referral, so that sort of blew over.
Millstone knew that there would be no future for me in the accounting department. He tried to get me to get involved in real estate, and for some reason it never suited me as something I would like to do. His firm was basically a construction company.
Accounting partnership
In 1963, I left Millstone to join Marty Rosen, who I knew from Tiger Fireside, and Irv Scheiner, who was my next-door-neighbor’s brother, in a small accounting partnership. When I left Millstone, he didn’t replace me; I came in half time, and he paid our firm what I’d been earning as a salary – he paid me the full amount for half-time work. You don’t find people like that! He was very, very generous.
I.E. Millstone is, in many ways, the type of person I would like to be. It isn’t easy for someone to go out on their own, but he would encourage them to do it, and he would help them in any way that he could. There were many engineers or architects who had worked for him who went out on their own. If they were working on a project, they took that project with them, and he paid them to complete it.
So we were three partners, and we saw things differently. One liked doing audits, not taxes, and our business was essentially doing tax returns. We did a lot of bookkeeping, and I thought we should try to mechanize that. At this time there weren’t any computers and software, but there was something called ad-puncturing that would punch in an account and an amount. We didn’t go that route, and our partnership broke up after three years.
Working at Monsanto
For the next couple of years, I worked at Monsanto, planning accounting designs in the organic division. One of the major things I did there was mechanize the budget, trying to prepare the budget the same way the accounting was done, so that when we did our budgets it would be more comparable. A lot of it was done manually and what we did was try to run it through the computer. We had an IBM 602 computer, or a 300 – I think it ended up in the Smithsonian. I was a sort of an assistant designer. I learned the hard way that you had to spell it out exactly as you want it for a programmer.
Running my own firm
In 1968, I left Monsanto to work for Sidney Cohn, who had a small accounting firm. And then, in May 1975, I went out on my own.
When I went on my own, I was still doing some work for Millstone, and I stole a couple of clients from Sidney Cohn. Then word of mouth got me my other clients. A good accountant shouldn’t have to advertise. You either find someone who is retiring and selling their practice or someone who has got clients who are dissatisfied with them.
My clients were a combination of individuals and businesses. One of my first clients was Big Boy Steel. John Gerst, who was the president of Big Boy Steel, used to work at Millstone, and then he went out on his own.
Thoughts about accounting
The only way you make money in public accounting is by either specializing in an area where you can charge extra-large fees, or by having staff who make money – I never had staff other than a part-time assistant. I’ve made a comfortable living – I haven’t gotten rich but I’m not unhappy at all. I’ve had some very fortunate things occur during my lifetime – my father-in-law made sure that my children had money for education, so I didn’t have to save for that; all I had to do was save for retirement, and that was very helpful to me.
The Felson Family 