The Great Accounting Gamble: Why I’m Choosing to Lean In

The accounting profession is going through its biggest structural change in fifty years. You can feel it at every roundtable and in every inbox: the independent firm model is at a fork in the road, and every owner is being pushed to place a bet on what comes next.

There is no “business as usual” left. Two rational bets are on the table. I want to lay out both honestly — because I respect the people taking the other one — and then tell you why I’m taking mine.

Gamble #1: The liquidity play

For a lot of practitioners, this is the best exit the market will ever hand them. Private equity and wealth-management consolidators are buying firms at a pace the profession has never seen. The International Federation of Accountants found that consolidation has roughly quadrupled since 2021 — fewer than 200 direct PE investments have triggered nearly 900 follow-on roll-ups. We have even entered the “flip” era, where a firm changes hands from one PE owner to the next; Citrin Cooperman’s 2025 sale from New Mountain Capital to Blackstone was the first of its kind.

If you are an owner who wants out of technology procurement, billing design, and HR so you can focus on clients and a clean transition, selling to a consolidator is a rational, well-earned move. The payouts are real and the structure is real. For many of my peers it is exactly the right call, and I would never call it giving up. It is reading the same board and deciding the smart play is to take chips off the table.

There’s a catch worth naming — not about the people, about the model. A consolidator answers to different masters. Private equity exists to expand margin; wealth-management buyers are often acquiring the trusted relationship as a front door for investment products and assets under management. IFAC’s own research flags the tension: consolidation can leave firms better resourced, but it can also push fees up and reshape what the firm optimizes for. The open question isn’t whether these buyers are capable — they are. It’s whether the thing a CPA actually sells survives the model. They sell products. We sell integrity. Those two don’t always make the trip.

Gamble #2: The tech-leveraged independent

The other bet — mine — looks at the same volatile market and doubles down on staying independent. It rests on two forces compounding at once.

The talent gap is a moat — though not the obvious one. The entry pipeline thinned for a decade: new CPA Exam candidates fell from a 2016 peak of roughly 48,000 first-timers to record lows by 2024. But that trend is turning — undergraduate accounting enrollment rose 12% in fall 2024 to its highest level since 2020, and states are opening faster, cheaper paths to licensure. So the shortage that actually protects a local practice isn’t the count of new graduates. It’s experience. The U.S. accountant and auditor workforce contracted about 17% from its 2019 peak — roughly 300,000 people as retirements and mid-career exits outran new entrants, per Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and seasoned partners are still leaving faster than new licensees can absorb their judgment. Consolidation, meanwhile, is buying up the independents fastest of all. A small, specialized shop that stays independent becomes a scarce, premium option — a relationship, not a ticket number inside a roll-up.

AI is the multiplier. Where one generation sees AI as a threat to compliance margins, the next sees a force multiplier — and the adoption curve backs that up. In finance organizations, AI that is “broadly or fully embedded” jumped from 22% to 42% in a single year. But here is the part the headlines miss: the firms furthest along are not gutting their teams. They are reshaping them — fewer rows of preparers, more senior people doing review, judgment, and advisory work. That is the whole game. A small, sharp team can now carry a book of work that used to demand an army.

What AI doesn’t change

None of this works if the work is not trustworthy. Even as it documented the consolidation wave, IFAC’s leadership drew a hard line: integrity, quality, and independence stay non-negotiable, no matter who owns the firm or what software runs the back office. I agree completely. AI changes where human judgment sits; it does not remove the need for it. The signature still has to mean something.

Predicting the future is often easier than it looks. It belongs to whatever you ruthlessly focus on today.

The pivot point

Let me be honest about my own bet, because it’s the riskier one. Selling now locks in a known number. Staying independent wagers something larger — for many of us, our retirement — on one proposition: that when the dust settles, the public will still want a real, independent advisor whose only product is judgment. If consolidation quietly redraws what “a CPA firm” even means, and clients stop noticing the difference, the independent loses that bet. I’m making it anyway — not because it’s safe, it plainly isn’t, but because I think the hollowing-out is exactly what makes the genuine article scarce and worth more, not less. The fence is the only place that loses for certain.

To those transitioning out: you have earned it. Take the win.

To those of us staying in, the work is to keep questioning the defaults — the billable hour, the staffing pyramid, the assumption that a firm has to be big to be powerful. The rules changed. I think the most interesting chapter of independent practice is the one being written right now, and I would rather hold the pen than wait to see how it ends.