The Great CPA Firm Liberation
2:00 – 3:00 pm ET
1 hr CPE/CPD in Business Management & Organization
Program Level: Overview
The Great Resignation is forcing firms to rethink their future. Today, the industry is adding advisory services and using technology to dissect client profitability and identify other client needs. Firms are shifting from a heavy compliance revenue model to a more balanced advisory-focused firm. Learn how to build your advisory center and how artificial intelligence can help you grow without being dependent on CPAs to fuel your growth.
Learning Objectives
- How to adapt to changes in the CPA landscape
- Using M&A to find advisory businesses
- Trends in client analysis and creating advisory solutions
- Discuss obstacles to avoid and reveal strategies for approaching the market
- Walk away with actionable value-enhancing strategies for your firm
Speaker Bio
Bob Lewis
President
The Visionary Group
| Bob is one of Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting. His focus is to build the Enterprise Value of CPA Firms using a process of mergers and acquisitions, succession planning, and refinement of a firm’s organic growth decisions. He has been exclusively supporting the CPA profession for 25 plus years and collaborates with firms of any size including a few of the largest firms in the country. For firms looking to explore M&A, his team has a search process to identify tuck-ins or platform locations to build upon. Candidates can be CPA firms and non-accounting businesses such as tech companies, specialty management consultants, VARs, or other businesses. Bob and his team identify practices not up for sale or merger yet and manage the deal cycle from start through negotiations and closure. Organic growth and firm succession are two areas Bob helps firm navigate. Organically, Bob acts as the Chief Growth or Advisory Officer for CPA firms. In these roles he collaborates with leadership to shape the firm’s vision to refine their future organic growth, expand advisory capabilities, and use M&A as a focused growth catalyst. He helps firms analyze underperforming clients and instills a focused growth process. From a succession perspective, many firms want to preserve their legacy. Bob designs partnership buy-ins, compensation structures, multi-layered incentive goals, and trains newer partners. Bob is a frequent speaker nationally, at local events, and in individual firms. He was an accountant and has a Bachelor of Science in Finance and an MBA, both from DePaul University in Chicago, IL. | |
Speaker Bio
Doug Lewis
Director
The Visionary Group
| Doug is responsible for the overall success of Visionary’s Mergers & Acquisitions sector. He specializes in conducting M&A searches from inception, through onboarding and final closing of transactions. Doug leads our candidate firm profiling, development of targets, assessing the potential candidate fits, and deal structure & negotiations. A major component of his role is to facilitate structured and fair opportunities for all parties involved in M&A transactions. He spends the majority of his time speaking with Managing Partners, CEOs, and other key leadership positions inside CPA firms and non-accounting organizations. His focus is to increase deal flow and overcome obstacles as they arise during the M&A process. Doug has a proven track record of successfully establishing relationships with industry leaders to think outside the box when conducting M&A related activities. The balance of his time is spent on building a strategic partnership network of trusted consultants and advisors. Prior to joining The Visionary Group, Doug spent time in key client facing roles in the professional sports and the startup technology industries. In these roles, he was responsible for leading several different sales, marketing, and account management campaigns catered towards Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Illinois State University. | |
Speaker Bio
Heidi LaMarca
President and CEO
Windham Brannon
| As the President and CEO, Heidi LaMarca is responsible for steering the firm’s strategic growth and new service offerings. Heidi also has extensive experience in employee benefit plan services, which includes Employee Benefit Plan audits, Form 5500 filings and advisory services. Heidi was named a 2022 Mid-sized Business Leader by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2020 Most Admired CEO by the Atlanta Business Chronicle and was also named a 2019 Managing Partner Elite by Accounting Today. She’s one of ten Managing Partners nationwide to receive the MP Elite award. Under her leadership, Windham Brannon has been named Accounting Today‘s Best Firm to Work For, and an AJC Top Place to Work for five consecutive years. | |
Speaker Bio
Patrick Morrell
Chief Revenue Officer
Anduin
| Patrick Morrell is the cofounder and chief revenue officer at Anduin, an AI-based billing platform. A veteran sales and marketing leader and technology company founder, he began his career in sales at CEB (now Gartner). He then joined Three Ships, where he led content development and later business development, and then joined Skookum (now Method) where he led inside sales and strategic partnerships as the company scaled (later acquired by GlobalLogic). Sealed Air Corporation then recruited him to build and manage the enterprise’s first inside sales team and manage a nine-figure portfolio of commodity products. Morrell then founded and eventually sold a direct-to-consumer ecommerce business, and then cofounded Digitize.AI, a fintech company focused on the health care industry, where he ran sales and marketing. After exiting Digitize.AI (acquired by Waystar), he cofounded Anduin. An avid runner, reader, and basketball fan, he lives in North Carolina with his wife Clay and two children. | |
Speaker Bio
Daniel Hood
Editor-in-Chief
Accounting Today
| Daniel Hood has been editor-in-chief of Accounting Today since 2011; he joined Accounting Today as managing editor in 1998. A graduate of Georgetown University, he has also served as a business editor for the New York Daily News, and as a production editor for The Wall Street Journal Europe. He is the author of five novels and a guidebook to New York City. | |