Yesterday I received a call from a buyer client who runs
a fairly large and well-established practice in the New York metropolitan area.
As managing partner, he was looking specifically for back-up for one of his owners
and, ideally, it would be a young practitioner with a decent book of business
who wants to merge into a larger firm.
I listened attentively to this all-too-familiar wish list
and promised that should I encounter that type of seller whose growth strategy
dovetails that perfectly into his, he would be the first call I made.
But I wisely resisted an overwhelming urge to counter
with “Yeah, and all I need to do is to pick the correct numbers for the Powerball
Jackpot and my problems would be equally solved as well.” Fortunately, I opted
for discretion and thereby avoided the potential of an angry hang-up and a subsequent
e-mail telling me our services would no longer be needed.
But what I could have said is that opportunities such as
those arise as frequently as Don Rickles being asked to deliver a eulogy at The
Vatican. We’re about as close as you can get to a Match.com in the public
accounting space and if I had a vast supply of Mad Men’s Don Draper or Joan
Harris look-alikes who operate successful CPA firms and are eyeing an upstream
merger, you could reach me six months of the year at my villa in Tuscany.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t often imitate the AMC channel
but that does little to resolve the very real succession issues that are
rampant in the public accounting space. I won’t rehash the sobering statistics
found in the 2012 succession survey conducted by the PCPS section of the AICPA,
but considering that more than 60 percent of firm partners are over the age of
50 and one person turns 65 every eight seconds in the U.S., that does not bode
well for transitioning a firm from the present to the future – unless you have
done some very careful planning around several possible scenarios.
I’m not going to sugar coat it by telling you you’re
always going to get the round peg in the round hole, when it comes to
fulfilling your succession needs. If it
were that easy, we’d likely be on the cover of Fortune magazine. There’s also
this pesky law of supply and demand that factors into it.
So we’ll certainly help if we can, but my advice is to
have a solid Plan B for succession.
Because nobody ever wants to go to Plan C.
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