Peter Vander Wall argues that mastering marketing beats acquisitions for controlling client quality. One owner bought three firms: one brought great clients and staff, another required firing clients and cutting staff. Acquisitions work better at larger scale.
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.
How This Bookkeeper Scaled From $30k/mo → $92k/mo in 2025 [LIVE WORKSHOP RECORDING]
