People in H&S: Warren L. Eisenberg;

              "I am really more an MAS man than an
auditor."
The self-analysis comes from Warren L.
Eisenberg, partner in the Philadelphia
office of Has kins & Sells and sparkplug of
its small business practice. In an interview
with Hcl^S Reports, Warren readily exhib­its
the characteristics essential to success
for the financial management adviser. He
has a ready smile and is an eager conver­sationalist,
while at the same time he
practices the art of sympathetic listening.
A person talking with him has the sense
that Warren is taking in everything that is
said, while his thinking is moving ahead to
a possible solution of the problem that the
other person is posing.
Had he decided to be a teacher by pro­fession,
it is a good bet that Warren would
have been a great one. He has a love for
learning that keeps his mind constantly
open to what is new. But he chose instead
to become a professional accountant and
to work with people in the business world.
He joined the Firm in 1970 when he and
Robert Grossman merged their account­ing
practice in the Quaker City with Has-kins
& Sells, and he gives every evidence
of relishing all the opportunities that
working in our Firm affords. He speaks
with warm appreciation of Phil Sand-maier,
whom he has known for many
years, and of Larry Walsh and Joe Healy
the successive partners in charge of the
Philadelphia office with whom he has
worked over the past four years.
Warren's particular professional inter­ests,
taken in no special order because they
intermingle with one another, are: work­ing
with the Firm's Small Business Advi­sory
Committee to develop this practice
on a national scale; assisting his clients in
the Philadelphia area to realize their full
business potential; bringing to small and
medium-size clients the benefits of elec­tronic
data processing systems suited to
their needs; and making friends for the
Firm through personal contact.
The way Warren came to these interests
is best explained by his own personal his­tory.
He was born in Philadelphia and
attended school there. His father, an engi­neer
by training, left that field and
became, Warren believes, the first man to
start an automobile finance company in
the United States. Warren entered Penn­sylvania
State College (now University) in
1938 and was, as they say in show busi­ness,
a "quick study" at the books.
"I didn't have the patience to take just
the required number of credits," he recalls
now, "so I took eighteen credits the second
semester. Then I took twenty-one credits
the third semester, and I pushed it up to
twenty-four credits in my fourth semester.
I was working at the time, too, because my
father had died and money was a bit tight
for us. Then, in my second year, I looked
over my schedule and saw that if I grabbed
some extra credits in a summer session I
could graduate in three years. So I did, and
finished in 1941, with a major in econom­ics
and a minor in accounting.
"I didn't know for certain just what I
wanted to do. But I was sure that I did not
want to be in the finance business. So I
took a job for a few months in a local
accounting firm in Philadelphia, just as the
war clouds were growing pretty dark. I had
taken two years of military science at Penn
State, and in the fall I decided I wanted to
enlist. One week before Pearl Harbor I
went to the Philadelphia Navy Yard and
tried to sign up. Then, the day after the
attack, I sent the Navy a telegram, trying to
enlist again. They took me as an ensign
early in 1942, and I was assigned to the
Communications Office of the Third
Naval District, in New York City."
Warren soon tired of office work and
hotel living, so he applied for sea duty and
spent most of 1943 and 1944 on a de­stroyer
in the North Atlantic, making
countless crossings on convoy duty, par­ticipating
in the invasions of Normandy
and southern France, and advancing to
the rank of lieutenant. He ended up his
Navy stint in charge of the Radar Training
School in Norfolk. Upon his discharge
from the service in 1946 he went back to
work for his old employer.
Married by now to the former Bert
Radoff and the father of a baby boy, War­ren
studied for the CPA examination and
was certified in Pennsylvania in 1947. That
year he moved to another Philadelphia
firm and worked there for the better part
of two years before starting his own CPA
firm in 1950. His practice was traditional
for a number of years. Then in 1962 there
occurred a sequence of events that heavily
influenced Warren's future course and
enabled him, with Bob Grossman, to
build his practice and organization to
twenty-five people by 1970. As he tells it
now in retrospect:
"I became the auditor for Isaac L. Auer-bach,
a Philadelphia engineer starting his
own computer consulting business. He
had been one of the original members of
the team that built UNIVAC, the first
computer. About 1960 he told me that a
computer could do most of what an
accountant could do, and I told him it was
impossible. But he discussed with me
what a computer could accomplish and
said he wanted to computerize his
accounting system. Well, he knew EDP
systems, such as they were back then, and I
knew accounting. Together we worked out
a system for putting his accounting records
into a computer."
One thing led to another. Alex Hersko-vitz,
a partner of Alexander Woodwork
Company, one of Warren's manufacturing
clients, had enough confidence in his
accountant to be a pioneer in his industry
in computerizing his accounting system
under the direction of Eisenberg ck Com­pany.
This led, in turn, to Warren's making
a presentation before the Architectural
Woodwork Institute, the national trade
association, and obtaining both the Insti­tute
and a number of its member compa­nies
as clients. The AWI remains an H&S
client, and Warren Eisenberg has moved
on to providing new services, such as the
Cost-of-Doing-Business Survey, for the
Institute and its members.
Meanwhile, from his experience as
treasurer of his synagogue, one of the
oldest and largest in the Delaware Valley,
Warren recognized that the time had come
to use EDP systems to save time and
money in the nonprofit sector, as well as in
manufacturing. In 1968 he designed a
computer system for processing pledges
and other receivables and for preparing
financial statements. Shortly afterward he
prepared a written report on the use of
EDP to prepare financial information for
synagogue management, and this report
was distributed on a national basis.
Last year Warren and Dorsey Wittig,
manager in the Washington office, took
22
PEOPLE IN H&S:
WARREN L. Elf ENBERG