Peter Vander WallFounder driving creative community growth

The Real Price of a Million Dollar Firm

Name: The Real Price of a Million Dollar Firm
Uploaded: 2025-10-30T17:01:11+00:00
Duration: 39 s
Channel: Peter Vander Wall
Description: The speaker (Peter Vander Wall) compares buying firms to growing via marketing, arguing that spending $1M on an acquisition roughly equals spending $1M…

30 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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The speaker (Peter Vander Wall) compares buying firms to growing via marketing, arguing that spending $1M on an acquisition roughly equals spending $1M on marketing in terms of new revenue. He emphasizes a key difference: acquisitions are single high-leverage decisions with large upside and downside, whereas marketing consists of many smaller decisions that collectively yield similar returns with lower per-decision risk.

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I talked to a guy who bought six firms in the last three years, and he's actually considering, like, quitting acquisitions altogether and just growing through marketing his firm. And as we were talking, I basically, like, walked him through the difference between the two. It's actually about the same amount of cost. An acquisition that costs you a million bucks is probably going to get you the same amount of new revenue as spending a million bucks on your marketing. But the difference is, if you're acquiring another business, this is one big decision that has massive stakes, and there's big upside, and there's big downside. With marketing your firm, it's like there's a thousand small decisions. And so no one decision is as leveraged as the decision on which accounting firm you're going to acquire, meaning the downside is mitigated. But collectively, all of those small decisions get you essentially the same reward.