SMALL BUSINESS: Mail-Me-Monday

As he does every week, small businessman Jim Mulder of Lemon Grove, Calif. tucked his paid bills, sales slips and the salary record of his one employe into an envelope and dropped it into a mailbox. The envelope, and all Jim Mulder’s bookkeeping worries, went to “Mail-Me-Monday.” By last week, some 3,000 small businessmen in 58 U.S. and Canadian cities were doing the same thing Jim did.

This mail-order bookkeeping service was the brain child of Jack Hession, 36, who learned his bookkeeping as a federal bank examiner, got his financial backing through his war job as a drill-press operator in Consolidated-Vultee’s San Diego plant. On the next machine was Charles Silverman, who had always made money fast (he sold his Boston-New York bus line in 1929 for a fat price), but had not hung on to it.

About a year before Convair laid him off, Silverman and eight other Convair workers pooled $10,000 (half was Silverman’s), ran it up to $100,000 by dealing in real estate through their Postwar Investment Co. When Jack Hession was laid off, he went to work to figure out a bookkeeping system for small businessmen. They needed it badly because 1) most of them didn’t know how to keep books and 2) they couldn’t afford a part-time bookkeeper to do the job. Why not, thought Hession, a mail order service which would charge a small fee to keep the books? ($15 a month for businesses with a $25,000 annual gross and $5 a month more for each additional $25,000.) Silverman liked “Mail-Me-Monday” so well that he bought the idea for $5,000 in Postwar Investment stock, set up a subsidiary, Accounting Corp. of America.

In a few months, Hession and Silverman had 1,000 California businessmen mailing their records every Monday to the company’s San Diego and Los Angeles offices (Mail-Me-Monday pays the bill if their figures on tax returns are wrong). They soon had so many accounts that they started to sell franchises for the use of the idea on a basis of $1,500 down, $1 a month royalty on each account handled.

In the first sixteen months, Accounting Corp. has grossed about $300,000, will net a sizeable chunk of this, since their expenses are small (they have only 60 employes). Last week, Silverman and Hession were in New York to explore the eastern market. Business was so brisk that Hession quipped: “We even had to hire bookkeepers to keep our own books.”