A short video commentary arguing that accountants typically struggle with marketing and therefore often favor growing by acquiring other firms. The speaker contrasts growing via marketing (more control over client types) versus acquisitions (faster scale but unpredictable quality), and gives anecdotal examples of both good and bad acquisition outcomes.
Chapters
There's two ways to grow your business, right? There's growing through marketing and getting more customers, and there's growing through acquisitions and buying out other people's companies. This is very common in the accounting world, right? And I think it's because accountants have no fricking idea how to do marketing, and so they just default to buying out other firms. That used to be the playbook, right? You grow a successful accounting firm in your local town, and then when it's time to expand, you go buy out the guy in the next town and the guy in the other next town, and you just keep doing that until you've got a local empire of 20 different accounting firms in your state. Problem with this is it's a complete mixed bag. You never know what you're getting. I know a local guy who has three accounting firms. He bought two of them in the last five years. One of them was an amazing buy that got him a bunch of awesome clients and some great team members. The other one, he fired basically all the clients and had to let most of the team members go. So if you can crack the marketing machine necessary to get clients in your industry, then that is clearly the superior way to go because you have control over what kind of leads you're going to get. Problem is, this gets more difficult at scale. And so that's where once you're a large company already growing through acquisitions and buying out other large companies can grow you in a much faster, more leveraged way.
