Around the 150th conversation I had with firm owners about staffing – I counted for a while before I stopped – and a pattern became obvious. The firms struggling most with retention were almost always struggling with the same two things: no visible career path for anyone below the partner track, and no honest answer to the question of where the firm was going.
PE-backed firms have ready answers to both.
Career path: You will grow into a larger organization with more titles, more specialization and more upward movement.
Firm direction: toward scale, through acquisitions, toward an eventual liquidity event.
These are not always the right answers for every person. But they are clear answers. Clarity has real pull when someone is sitting across the table weighing their options.
Attending and learning from conferences can be amazing opportunities for your career or your business. They can also be huge money drains. It’s easy to take a look at the conference registration and make a quick decision about whether we can afford it – or even worse – whether it will clear our credit card limit or not.
A smart business owner will take a bit different approach. Here’s how to calculate how much revenue or increase in price you need to justify the expense of attending a conference. READ MORE →
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “What do your team need from you in order to be at their very best?”
By Martin Bissett
Your team will need four things in order to do their very best for your clients. They need to be secure mentally, socially, physically and financially. When was the last time you checked that this is the case? It is small gestures such as this that build loyalty in practice.
Today’s To-Do:
Find the time to speak to at least one of your team members today. Ask how they are and find out if there is anything they need from you.
In a profession often defined by structure, standards, and well-worn career paths, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, opens a different kind of conversation in a recent Accounting ARC episode—one that challenges assumptions about what it means to build a career in accounting.
His guest, Danielle Supkis Cheek, embodies that challenge.
As senior vice president of AI, analytics and assurance at CaseWare, Supkis Cheek operates at the intersection of technology, methodology, and human judgment. But her path there was anything but linear—and that, Shimamoto suggests, is exactly the point.
Supkis Cheek describes her role less as a technologist and more as a translator. “I like to think of myself as someone who translates across domains,” she says, explaining how she helps software companies understand how accountants actually work—and how technology can reshape those workflows.
Venture capital crashes the private equity party in accounting.
Consolidation constellation: Sponsors in blue, platforms in red, targets in gold.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The CPA Trendlines CPA PE Deal Tracker™ shows the steep rise in deal flow, hitting more than 450.
Private equity’s push into accounting is entering a new and more complicated phase: platform building, sponsor recycling, technology investments, blended tax and wealth services — and now, a new pipeline of cash from venture capital.
This month’s CPA Trendlines CPA-PE Deal Tracker™ shows nine new deals in April, down from the first-quarter deal-closing frenzy but bringing the year-to-date deal count through April 30 to 78, well ahead of the 44 logged in the same window of 2025.
The broader verified dataset now includes 452 in-scope events, giving CPA Trendlines a clearer view of what private capital is doing after its first wave of accounting-firm investments.
The latest data does not show a retreat. It shows a transformation. The new gambits go well beyond roll-ups, and include service line extensions, corporate carve-outs, cross-industry tie-ups, recapitalizations, continuations and a buzzy new venture-backed startup.
World domination
The deal models are sprawling in all directions as big money battles for a dwindling number of prime firms and squeezes for synergies in the firms they’ve acquired.
In the mix, accounting is morphing from a profession into a platform. A launchpad from which to sell a growing, and traditionally conflict-laden, range of products and services. From tax planning to wealth management, from outsourced accounting systems to internal audit, and from risk management to insurance sales.
A once incongruous, even contradictory, collection of services are being acquired, aligned and advanced. The ambition is market encirclement. The impulse is world domination.
