At what revenue share must a client be disclosed/siloed according to the speaker?

Name: Why I Interviewed Every Employee Before Buying
Uploaded: 2025-09-19T17:01:56+00:00
Duration: 54 s
Channel: Peter Vander Wall
Description: Peter Vander Wall explains how to evaluate an accounting firm before buying it. He reviews tax returns and profit & loss statements, but the key is…

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Why I Interviewed Every Employee Before Buying

19 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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0:54

Peter Vander Wall explains how to evaluate an accounting firm before buying it. He reviews tax returns and profit & loss statements, but the key is interviewing every employee to assess work quality. Watch out for customer concentration: if one client is over 5% of revenue, it becomes a major risk.

Questions this video answers

More than 5% of the firm's revenue.

Chapters

What does that due diligence process look like with an accounting firm? What are you looking for there? Yeah, I'm looking at previous year's tax returns. I'm looking at profit and loss statements. I'm looking at their work papers and how they develop a lot of work if. Is it quality work? Are they just stitching stuff together now? You're not going to get all this. You know, I was fortunate enough they let me interview all their employees one on one before I bought it, which is cool again. Are you going to get everything out of it? No, but it's good to do that. I really wish I could have got, like, cash receipts to see when the seasonality of the cash flows were and better understand that they're not going to give you the client list until you sell it. Now, if you go with a broker, a lot of times the brokers make them disclose customer concentration risk. If you had a client that made up more than 5% of the firm's revenue, that person has to be siloed out. Most accounting firm deals where there's a lot of customer concentration, you know, the buyer should know about that. It's just the same thing in real estate. You know, buyers should know about radon or gas in the house, right?