Daily Archives: December 9, 2025

Four Strategic Fronts for Accounting Firms

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Every year, the 2025 Rosenberg MAP Survey asks the industry’s top consultants to share their observations from CPA firms across the country: How do you think the next 12 months will unfold? Trends? Predictions? Other thoughts? Also, how would you assess the last 12 months? Trends? Observations? Struggles?

For some, independence is a strategic choice.

By Gary Thomson
 The Rosenberg Survey

The next 12 months will see independent-minded firms pressing harder on four strategic fronts – clarifying their five-year vision, defining the priorities to get there, calculating the cost, and determining where the capital will come from. These questions will keep the mergers and acquisitions market hot, as some firms pursue scale or stability through deals while strong, well-capitalized players step into market gaps left by consolidation.

MORE: The 2025 Rosenberg MAP Survey is available from CPA Trendlines here.
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Artificial intelligence and automation will move from experiments to deliberate deployment, with clear expectations for efficiency, insight and safeguards. Outsourcing will remain a growth lever, but firms will also invest more heavily in their people – expanding career opportunities, developing leaders and using culture as a talent magnet.
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Smaller, Larger Accounting Firms Have Different M&A Concerns

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Four businesspeople greeting each other

Seven topics for the first negotiation meeting.

By Marc Rosenberg
CPA Firm Mergers: Your Complete Guide

Mergers succeed in direct proportion to the effort made by both firms to

  1. ask lots of questions,
  2. agree on as many merger implementation issues as possible before the merger takes place and
  3. openly share as much of their “dirty laundry” as possible to minimize surprises.

MORE by Marc Rosenberg
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Don’t assume anything. When you sit down for your first merger negotiation meeting:

  1. Start the meeting by confirming and agreeing on the agenda.

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Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | The Disruptors

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Only disciplined planning, accountability, and open communication will cut through the industry’s rapidly thickening fog.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Matt Rampe sees the accounting industry as one “under a lot of pressure to change, and it’s changing very quickly.” The combination of a staffing crisis, retiring baby boomers, AI, private equity, and tax law is creating “the fog,” a period in which the path forward isn’t just unclear; it’s fundamentally unknowable. 

To address “the fog,” his new book, CPA Firm Strategic Planning: Your Roadmap for Long-Term Success, lays out a framework grounded in decades of consulting experience with Rosenberg Associates, combined with research on organizational change, leadership psychology, and what drives team performance. “Strategic planning, in my mind, is the venue by which you analyze and think through those issues, put them up, not just out of reactivity,” Rampe explains. It means “really stepping back and looking at the big picture of the industry and your firm and your situation, and then making choices that you’re aligned with.” 

MORE STREAMING: Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

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According to Rampe’s research, strategic planning fails most often at the execution stage. Nearly two-thirds of respondents reported that “execution fails after the planning meeting.” Firms gather, generate good ideas, identify priorities, and then get pulled into their day-to-day work, and nothing happens. Or they put off strategic planning altogether until some imaginary day when they might have time.  

“One of the insights is you need to spend time working on the business, not just in the business, because the in the business is going to drown you,” Rampe explains. The way you solve that is “not working harder in the business. It’s working, prioritizing, working on the business.” 

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