PE

Daiber: Use Succession as a Growth Strategy | The Disruptors

By

Firms that wait until a partner is ready to retire have already waited too long, plus 19 more key takeaways.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: The Advisor Edition by Dr. Jackie Meyer | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.
Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Erin Daiber, founder and CEO of Well Balanced Accountants, keeps seeing the same issue in firm after firm. A partner announces their intention to retire within a year or two, and the firm suddenly realizes no one is ready to take over.  “Firms are not starting that conversation soon enough,” Daiber says.

MORE STREAMING:MORE STREAMING: Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | 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 |

GoProCPA.com Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

“They’re not thinking about succession planning as a strategy,” she explains. Instead of treating succession as an ongoing process, firms see it as simply the point in time when a partner exits the firm. According to Daiber, succession planning should ideally begin with hiring decisions and culture building so that firms can be confident that they won’t lose clients or staff due to uncertainty about what might happen as partners get older.  

When succession planning fails, firms lose key employees before they even reach partnership consideration. “We’re losing them much sooner than that, which creates a big hole in the pipeline,” Daiber notes. She identifies an inability to have difficult conversations as the root cause, particularly when dealing with founders who view the firm as their legacy. 

READ MORE →

Outlook 2026: AI, Not Layoffs, Powers PE Valuations

By

How CPAs are using AI to boost EBITDA multiples.

Ilya and Victor Radzinski, TaxDome co-founders

By CPA Trendlines

Private equity investors are paying higher prices for CPA firms that deploy artificial intelligence to expand capacity, deepen professional benches, and systematize growth—rather than cut headcount.

MORE TaxDome | MORE Private Equity

“If AI were about to replace accountants and advisors, private equity wouldn’t be pouring billions into the sector,” TaxDome founders Ilya and Victor Radzinsky say in a public letter to stakeholders.

As dealmaking accelerates into 2026, the shift helps explain why valuation multiples for accounting firms continue to rise even as automation spreads through tax, audit, and advisory workflows. Private equity sponsors and strategic consolidators have completed hundreds of acquisitions of CPA firms since 2020, often at valuation multiples that would have been rare a decade ago.

READ MORE →

Ten Predictions: PE, Alternate Practice Structures and More

By

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?

Valuations have changed … and risen.

By Phil Whitman
 The Rosenberg Survey

While many trends will continue, here are my Top 10 predictions:

  1. Traditional M&A activity, CPA firm to CPA firm, will continue to be very robust.

Not all CPA firms will qualify for investment by private equity and other strategic investors. As such, firms will combine for a variety of reasons including: succession and transitions, increasing profitability and gross revenues, expansion of service offerings, expansion of geographic coverage as well as adding additional depth and breadth in existing service lines.

MORE: The 2025 Rosenberg MAP Survey is available from CPA Trendlines here.

  1. Valuations of CPA firms will increase as private equity creates bidding wars between each other. We have already seen demand of CPA firms of certain sizes exceeding supply. As such, we believe that even the larger private equity-backed firms will see acquisitions of smaller firms as not only lucrative additions but significantly more supply. Approximately 10,000 +\- firms with two or more partners that are members of the AICPA. Many of these smaller firms are very profitable and have been seeing multiples of two to three times gross revenues.

READ MORE →

Grassi: How the Hell Did This Happen? | Gear Up For Growth

By

Here’s what it takes to grow a CPA firm from zero to the Top 100—without losing your soul.

This is a preview. The complete episode is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: The Advisor Edition by Dr. Jackie Meyer | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.
Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!
.

Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines

When Lou Grassi started his firm at age 24, he couldn’t afford to pay himself. There was no client base, no safety net, and no guarantee it would work.

More than four decades later, Grassi is the 56th largest accounting firm in the U.S., with $146.5 million in revenue, seven offices, 58 partners, and more than 560 employees. And yet, as Grassi tells host Jean Caragher on Gear Up for Growth, the most important lessons from that journey have very little to do with size.

They have everything to do with intention.

More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More Gear Up for Growth

More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here

In this conversation, Grassi reflects on what it takes to build a firm that grows sustainably, treats people like owners, and stays independent in a profession reshaped by private equity, talent shortages, and rapid change.

READ MORE →

Whitman: New Firm Deals: Flexibility, Culture, and the Rise of “31 Flavors” | Holistic Guide to Wealth Management

By

Firms that prioritize, listen, and align position themselves for better long-term outcomes.  

Sponsored by CPA Trendlines Go PRO – Get More! Go PRO!  See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS

 

Get free gits, exclusive access, and more! Get more! Go PRO! 

By Rory Henry CFP®, BFA™
For CPA Trendlines

Phil Whitman, President and CEO of Whitman Advisory, works with hundreds of CPA firms and more than 230 strategic investors across private equity, family offices, wealth management aggregators, and publicly traded consolidators. He sees a profession undergoing unprecedented transformation, and Whitman has a front-row seat.

In this episode of Holistic Guide to Wealth Management, Whitman shares his observations with me from his unique vantage point.  

MORE Rory Henry and The Holistic Guide to Wealth Management

BUY the Holistic Guide to Wealth Management

Whitman points to 2021 as the inflection point for the profession’s transition. That’s when EisnerAmper became the first major CPA firm to accept private equity (PE) investment, followed shortly by Citrin and Cherry Bekaert. Those deals opened the gates for capital providers and ignited a wave of consolidation across firms of all sizes. The profession hasn’t looked back since. 

Transaction activity has since accelerated, creating unprecedented competition for deals and pushing accounting firm valuations into territory the profession has never seen before.

READ MORE →