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Market to the Business Life Cycle

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illustration of business life cycleMeet your clients where they are.

By August Aquila
MAX: Maximize Productivity, Profitability and Client Retention

The business life cycle refers to the stages that a business goes through from its inception to its eventual closure or exit. Each stage presents unique challenges and opportunities, and it is essential for accounting firms to adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.

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Here are some marketing strategies that can be effective during different stages of the business life cycle. Take a fresh look at your existing clients, and sort them according to their business life cycle: startup stage, growth stage, mature stage and transitional/decline. You want to make sure that as your clients go through these different cycles, your marketing messages and services change and address the right business concern.
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CPAs Regain Upper Hand in Pricing Battles

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Advisory and specialty services lead the way.

Tax pricing pulls away from audit, year-over-year percent change. (CPA Trendlines)

By CPA Trendlines

After two years of mostly weak pricing power, accounting firms appear to be regaining the initiative on billing rates, led by tax services with eye-popping 8% increases.

MORE in Pricing: Tax Prep Billing Rates Lift Busy Season | The Hidden Data Behind CPA Firm Burnout and Profit Pressure | Six Steps to High-Value Tax Advisory |

CPAs are raising rates by 4.2 percent year over year, reversing a 2.1 percent decline recorded a year ago, according to new CPA Trendlines findings.

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Four Ways to Identify Candidates for Cross-Selling

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https://cpatrendlines.com/2016/06/11/adopt-a-marketing-mindset/

Adopt a marketing mindset.

By Ed Mendlowitz

The average tax return client thinks of accountants as being mainly involved in taxes. Also, an accounting firm’s largest volume of clients is usually for tax return services. Therefore, a good part of the public image of your firm must come from the tax department.

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The tax department must be involved in:

  • strengthening the firm’s brand and name recognition,
  • getting publicity and
  • introducing tax return clients to additional services.

Unfortunately, many accounting firms provide very little guidance or training in this area.

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Your Advisory Offering Needs a Focus Statement

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Young businessman standing on edge of rock mountain and looking across

The CAAS-Chasm is the distance between what you are doing and how it impacts your clients.

By Hitendra Patil

One in two accountants stated that advisory services is the top new growth opportunity for their firm. According to the CPA Trendlines Accountants Outlook 2024 research, many accountants also expressed that advisory is the most attractive (profitable) opportunity.

But there is a catch.

It requires accountants to cross the CAAS-Chasm.
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CPA-PE Deal Tracker™: How Big Buyouts Are Turning the Profession into a Platform

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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.

MORE PE Wars: The CPA Platform Economy Is Concentrating Fast | Alan Whitman: Why the Next Big CPA Firms Won’t Look Like CPA Firms | Gear Up for Growth | The PE Takeover: Audit Problem? What Audit Problem? | 1,000 Deals Show Where PE Money in Accounting Really Goes. | The 7.6x Machine: How Grassroots Firms Are Taking Private Equity for a Ride | Deal Tracker: PE Platforms Accelerate the Grab for CPA Firms | With Apax Sale, CohnReznick Starts Building a National Platform | PE Deal Tracker for Feb. 2026: 57 deals in 60 days | PE Deal Tracker Update: Alan Whitman Plants a Flag in the Private Equity Landscape | Alan Whitman: Breaking the Mold with PE Backing | Holistic Guide
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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.

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