Remembering an Accounting Pioneer

Accountants as a rule are not natural entrepreneurs. In fact, they’re trained from their first class on the subject to be cautious and, well, question everything. As someone who has both covered and consulted on the profession for nearly 20 years, I have seen otherwise intelligent CPAs make incredibly idiotic business decisions.

Like the firm owner in the Detroit area who needed to merge upstream for lack of a succession plan bragging to me that he just signed a 5-year lease extension at a terrific rate.

It didn’t dawn on him that by signing, he just eliminated 80 percent of the potential successor firms that might have been interested in merging. But now any firm would either must assume the lease or try and sublet the space.

“Oh” was the muted reaction I received when I broke this bit of unwelcome news.

But the ones that are born entrepreneurs stand out from the rest of the pack and can be justifiably labeled as pioneers.

One such member of the profession was Jim Sikich who lorded over his eponymously named firm in the Chicago suburbs for 35 years and grew it from its modest roots into a $150 million behemoth with 19 offices, 50-plus partners and 750 employees. When he retired in 2017 Sikich was the third largest firm in the Great Lakes region.

Sadly, I saw this week where he had passed away at the age of 70. His death stemmed from injuries he suffered while helping the victims of the recent flooding in his home state of Wisconsin.

No small part of his firm’s success was his aggressive M&A push which began more than a decade ago. But more than a plain vanilla strategy of merging in CPA firms, Sikich was one of the forerunners of building the firm through non-traditional affiliations – he acquired such diverse entities as marketing and engineering companies, retirement and benefits providers and of course technology concerns.

Long before anyone had heard of blockchain, machine learning or AI and the pending changes those technologies promise to reshape the operational paradigm of the traditional accounting firm, he envisioned the value of a practice offering a vast array of client services. He was, unlike most accountants, proactive, not reactive.

I met him only once in my career and he was not at all what I expected from someone with his notable business acumen. He was in fact soft spoken, almost shy. Not a Trumpian-like figure well acquainted with the back-room dealings and steely nerves required to be successful in the M&A arena.

Today’s CPA firms can take a lesson from Jim Sikich and others like him. Those firms who are slow or resistant to change or cannot see the proverbial foot in front of them will surely create client and real estate opportunities for competitors who aren’t.