Post navigation Are you an accountant that adds value to your clients? Jim Kondonis is the CFO of Lowes Manhattan -- an Australian retailer with over 150 stores with a revenue of over $200m. I asked Jim, Tell me about a time when you received terrible service from an accounting firm. How did it make you feel? What could they have done differently? I won't call it a terrible service; I'd rather call this a service that didn't add value. It was in a past life of mine. I was working with a Big Four accounting firm and we were using them as an adviser on a particular acquisition we were working on. The company that I was involved with was looking at a major acquisition. We decided we'd outsource the due diligence process and obviously involve our accounting partner in the deal. To cut a long story short, it cost us a lot of money for very little value. What happened was that the deal fell over at the 11th hour and we had a big bill to pay. In fact, the owner of the business I was working with had to negotiate the big bill down to $300,000. At the end of the day, the due diligence process failed because certain parts of the sales contract were not relayed back to the business owner. If they were communicated early on in the piece, we probably would have saved a lot of money, since the deal would have not