Family Enterprise
What we can all learn from the accountant who became my second father
My accountant Sheldon Gordon died Monday night. It might not be the kind of news one would normally think about for too long, much less write about. Your accountant dies, you find another one. It’s just business. Right?
Not really.
See, Shelly cared about me and my family in a way that transcends what we would call a client relationship. He didn’t just do the sorts of things that one might learn in a sales or customer relations course about sending calendars or Christmas gifts, making small talk, or remembering the names of their kids. No, Shelly merged his business and personal life — what Marx might call his economic and his social lives — in a way that made them indistinguishable. Ethically, creatively and, sure, professionally.
There’s a lesson here for people trying to do business in a more holistic way, but maybe even more of a lesson for people like me, who are often at pains to distinguish between work and life — as if business and money somehow sully or compromise genuine friendship. We work for strangers, but do favors for our friends. “Don’t mix business and pleasure,” I heard countless times growing up. But that ethos is itself an artifact of a world where our work was intentionally disconnected from our…
