Carlino's Corner

Welcome to the inaugural blog in my new capacity as Managing Director of Consulting Services at Transition Advisors. Many of you I know from my previous post, where I wrote a column or two on trends and events in the accounting profession. Some of you even emailed me during my nearly 12 years there to suggest  that many were even controversial in nature.

Me?

I’m just glad you didn’t take it personally.  No offense Mr. President.  Well, as part of my new responsibilities, I’m going to blog on – events and trends in the accounting profession.  Now before I hear a collective “here we go again,” I will tell you that this time the perspective will not be from my former journalistic perch, but rather on the business side.

So here goes….

Unless you’ve been a recent cast member of “Survivor” or even “The Amazing Race” and your access to the Internet has been virtually non-existent, it should come as little surprise that the accounting profession has, and for the foreseeable future, will be, in full  merger-mania mode.  For example, Accounting Today recorded roughly 20 mergers during the month of February alone, and that buying and selling spree simply piggybacked on the frenetic pace of combinations throughout 2011.  We saw a number of blockbuster unions that changed the landscape of the profession, literally, and played havoc with the Top 100 rankings, including the marriages of Clifton Gunderson and LarsonAllen, Dixon Hughes and Goodman and even a rare three-way merger where Warren Averett made itself a major player among firms situated in the Gulf Coast by combining with O’Sullivan Creel, and Wilson and Price Barranco, Blankenship & Billingsley.

And it promises not to stop anytime soon for a number of reasons:  the surprising number of firms without succession plans, firms looking to acquire a specialty niche or merge either with equals or upstream as  competition and pricing pressures, have prompted a number of CPA practices to adopt survival strategies.

 And chief among them over the past several years has been M&A. Since succession strategies hit on the sweet spot of what we do, I can tell you that if firms are sluggish to adopt the strategies that will allow them to compete amidst a still-uncertain economy, and a profession that is changing on almost daily basis, it will surely open up real estate opportunities for those with far more progressive and forward-thinking practices.