A niche accounting firm with 45% cash flow and 1,500 owner hours sold for 5.6 million dollars on 2.6 million in revenue. That is the kind of result possible when a CPA firm owner gets intentional about the factors buyers care about most. In this episode, Brannon Poe sits down with Laurens Ball, a highly accomplished intermediary at Poe Group Advisors, to break down what really drives practice valuations in today’s market.
This is the latest episode in our Power of Focus series, where we explore how CPA firm owners use focus as a strategic advantage. Laurens brings real-world case studies from the M&A side, showing how niche firms consistently grow faster, charge 20 to 40% higher fees, and attract buyers willing to pay premium prices. From a dental-focused practice generating daily referrals to an agricultural firm that found its perfect buyer by leaning into its specialty, the evidence is clear: focus pays off at the point of sale.
The conversation also covers the current state of the market in spring 2026, where strong firms are seeing multiples well above traditional benchmarks. Laurens walks through a practical framework for owners who are 3 to 5 years from selling: reduce owner dependence, strengthen your team, and re-evaluate your client list. One seller raised per-return minimums from $360 to $600 and kept 98% of clients. Another did an across-the-board 20% price increase on over 2,000 returns and lost only five.
The Conversation Covers:
- How niche CPA firms consistently command higher fees and faster growth than generalist practices
- Why reducing owner hours to 1,000 or below creates intense buyer competition for your firm
- How one seller raised return minimums from $360 to $600 and kept 98% of clients
- Why the “90-day absence” thought exercise helps accounting firm owners identify their biggest vulnerabilities
- How strong team structure has become the top factor for private equity buyers doing roll-ups
- Why starting price increases with new clients is a low-risk way to test your market
Laurens and Brannon make a compelling case that the work you do on your firm today directly shapes the options available to you when it is time to sell. Whether you are 5 years out or just starting to think about what comes next, the fundamentals are the same: focus on your team, your clients, and your role as a leader rather than a technician.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCE:
Price Increase Letter Template
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Introduction to the Power of Focus series and Accounting Practice Academy
00:25 – Welcoming Laurens Ball, senior intermediary at Poe Group Advisors
01:32 – What is a focused CPA firm? Laurens’ definition
02:13 – Why intentionality is the foundation of practice growth
02:37 – Why hesitant-to-niche firm owners are leaving value on the table
03:19 – How niche accounting practices grow faster and charge 20 to 40% higher fees
03:52 – Dental niche example: weekly referrals and consistent growth
04:08 – Professional poker player niche: a memorable and lower-owner-hour firm
05:00 – Why niche firm margins, growth, and owner hours make them desirable at market
05:27 – Cost segregation firm: multiple offers, all-cash close
06:16 – Agricultural firm example: tractor on the website and the right buyer match
07:46 – Current state of the CPA firm M&A market in spring 2026
08:09 – When strong firms can see 7X EBITDA and what it takes to get there
09:03 – Niche firm sold at 5.6X: what the numbers looked like
09:41 – What buyers are really evaluating: cash flow, team strength, growth prospects
10:43 – How de-risking your accounting firm opens up more buyers and better terms
11:48 – Why the team is becoming the most important factor for roll-up buyers
11:48 – The “90-day question”: what falls apart first if the owner steps away
12:08 – How to analyze your CPA firm client list for quality, fit, and pricing
12:31 – Seller case study: raising fees from $360 toward $700, keeping 98% of clients
14:08 – Across-the-board 20% price increase: 2,000 returns, five clients left
14:49 – CPAs have more pricing power than ever, with some firms at $2,000 per 1040
16:32 – How owner dependence affects buyer interest and sale terms
18:35 – Success story: owner reduced hours by 500 while keeping EBITDA steady
19:26 – Top advice for accounting firm owners who are 3 to 5 years from a sale
20:31 – How six months to a year of changes can mean $1 million more in valuation
21:02 – Why team health is the longest-lead and highest-impact strategy before a sale
22:33 – Why owner-centric practitioners are hardest to get to stop and look at the firm
TRANSCRIPT
Brannon: I’m Brannon Poe, and this is The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast, where you can enjoy engaging conversations about mergers and acquisitions and accounting practice management. Listen in on strategies to build a more fun and valuable accounting firm.
All right, welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. Today we are continuing our mini-series, The Power of Focus, a dedicated look at core principles we teach inside our Accounting Practice Academy. These principles help you build a more profitable firm while reclaiming your time.
I am delighted to welcome Laurens Ball to the show, for at least the second time, maybe the third. Laurens is a highly accomplished intermediary here at Poe Group Advisors. In her role, she navigates the complexities of mergers and acquisitions in the accounting space, connecting motivated sellers with their right-fit buyers. She works mostly with some of our larger firms and sells to a lot of private equity buyers, so she has a great deal of experience in that space. Because she is working in the M&A space every day, we wanted to get her perspective on what drives practice valuations. A lot of the people who take our academy are interested in creating a more valuable firm, so this is where the rubber meets the road. Laurens is going to share some real-world case studies and market insights to show us what you can start doing in your firm to set it up for success when a sale comes down the road. Laurens, thanks for joining us.
Laurens: Yeah, excited to be here.
Brannon: Well, let’s get into it. Let’s start really broad. What is your definition of a focused firm?
Laurens: I think the definition of a focused firm would be one that really knows where they are going in the next five years, and how and who will continually enhance their team and systems in order to get there. They spend more time working on the firm rather than with clients and dealing with the day-to-day. I know it is hard when you get pulled in a million different directions, but really taking that time to focus on how the firm can keep improving, even just over the next year, makes a real difference.
Brannon: Yeah, and it is really about intentionality. What you are describing is being intentional. I think it is really easy to get lost in the weeds in an accounting practice. There are so many things pulling at you, and most practitioners start in a technical role. It is hard to give up the technical work as time goes on. You just have to let go. I always say growing a firm is a series of letting go, and that is what we see the best practitioners do.
So let’s start by talking about what a really focused firm looks like. I think of it as a niche firm. And a lot of owners are hesitant to pursue that because they think, if I niche down, I am excluding so much of the opportunity that is out there. We have talked about niche firms on this podcast before, but when you take a niche firm to market, does that hurt or does it help?
Laurens: I think in a lot of ways it helps. I went back and looked at a number of our more niche firms, and one thing they do is consistently tend to grow faster. The word of mouth spreads. They know who they are marketing with and where they are getting their referrals. They also know exactly what type of clients they want, so they can very quickly and efficiently analyze whether a new client is the right fit or whether the fees are appropriate. And they can usually charge between 20 to 40% higher fees because they are specialized. That client really wants to be with that firm, knowing the firm will have inside knowledge of their industry.
Brannon: Yeah, we had one that was mostly a dental practice. They did a lot of dentists, were connected with a medical-related website, and that was all they did. They were getting weekly, if not daily, referrals.
I remember we also had one, I think you worked on this, it has probably been five years or so, where the seller had a lot of professional poker players as clients. You remember that one?
Laurens: Yes, and he wrote a book about it.
Brannon: That was an interesting one, and a great one. I do find that with niche practices, there are things that tend to go hand in hand. A lot of them have lower owner hours. That seller spent about half their year on an island.
Laurens: I had forgotten about that.
Brannon: Yeah. What I have generally seen with niche practices is that margins tend to be higher, growth tends to be faster, and like you said, owner hours tend to be lower. And all of those things make a practice pretty desirable for the market. When you look at those results of niching down, buyers are not necessarily looking for a niche firm specifically, but when they see the bottom line and see those hours, they start asking what is going on here.
Laurens: I think it can also depend on the buyer. There are some that are specifically looking for a niche, and when they find it, they want to pay a premium because there are not many of them out there. We have had cost segregation firms, firms that specialize in a specific industry, and firms that mostly did franchise work. There are some where I have buyers who either did not get it or came along later and say, any time you get one of those, please let me know first. They are willing to pay the premium price.
Brannon: Yeah, specialized firms. With the cost segregation firm, we got multiple offers and it ended up being an all-cash close. I still have buyers asking about that one. You are going to have buyers who are willing to pay whatever it takes to get that firm.
And again, if you are selling, one of the advantages of having a large buyer pool is that the matchmaking can really work in your favor. I remember one time we had a firm for sale that had a lot of agricultural clients. When we went to market, we put a picture of a tractor on the website to flag that this practice was agricultural. The seller was a little hesitant to market it that way because of the concern about excluding buyers.
Laurens: Right. But it finds the right buyer, and they are going to pay that premium because this is exactly what they want. The buyer in that case was geographically close, had grown up on a farm, had farm clients, had another practice, and they put those practices together. It was a perfect fit.
Niching is interesting when you go to market, but it is a really good strategy. It helps you find that right fit. Buyers even include information in their buyer profile about how they can relate to that niche, and you click right away because you know they have that specific experience. For highly niche firms, we have even started asking buyers qualifying questions upfront, because it helps us streamline who is going to be the best match.
Brannon: Let me step back a little and talk about the market right now. We are recording this in spring of 2026. We recently released a revised valuation report that you can download from our website. It covers a lot of the multiples happening in the marketplace right now. How would you describe the market right now?
Laurens: It is wild. We are seeing some firms, and I do not want to overstate it because not everyone can get these numbers, but we are seeing effects on revenue in a real way. Even when an owner wants to leave within six months, I think you can get seven times EBITDA. If you are willing to stay longer, that opens things up further. But you do need to have at least some of the key factors in place, like strong cash flow and low owner hours. If your owner hours are at 1,000 or below, you are going to have a lot of buyers competing for your firm. We probably spend more time filtering buyers for certain sellers than almost anything else.
Having a strong team is essential, especially when there are employees who may want to move into management roles or take equity. In general, most firms are probably seeing multiples between 1 to 1.5 times revenue. But we had one niche firm where cash flow was about 45%, owner hours were around 1,500, and revenue was around 2.6 million. We sold it for 5.6 million. Part of what makes that possible is having a large buyer pool and being able to focus on fit.
Brannon: If you boil it down, what are buyers really evaluating?
Laurens: Good cash flow, a strong team so the firm is not totally owner-dependent, and growth prospects. Those are the three main things. Sellers do not always see how a buyer views it. The owner-centric piece is really about de-risking the firm. If a firm depends heavily on the owner, that is higher risk for a buyer, and the terms may not be as strong. But if owner hours are at 1,500 or 1,000, a buyer can potentially acquire multiple firms, can replace the owner’s role more easily, or redistribute those hours among existing employees.
I think it also helps to step back and ask: if I were going to buy my own firm, what are the best parts about it, and if I were gone for a couple of months, what might need to be worked on?
Brannon: I like that. Can you expand on that? The idea of being gone for 90 days?
Laurens: Yes. If you stop and identify what would fall apart first, and then fix that, you start moving away from the firm being so owner-dependent. Whether it is client work that cannot get done, or a process that only the owner knows, the question becomes: how do I move that to my team, and do I have the right people in place? Buyers are buying the team as much as almost anything else, and that has become even more important with larger platforms doing roll-ups. They are focusing on the team very heavily.
Brannon: Let’s talk about client quality a little more. One of the things we talk about in our Accounting Practice Academy is going through the client list, analyzing it, and identifying where some clients may not be the right fit, where fees may be too low, or where there are clients you would like to have more of. It is a really powerful exercise. You had a seller a couple of years ago who did a good job of working through this after initially having some difficulty selling. Can you tell that story?
Laurens: Yes. I had a seller who had fees on the lower end for the time, closer to around $360 per return. I suggested going up to $700, and I gave him a little exercise. I said, go to TurboTax and see what it costs just to talk to a human. They advertise $99, but by the time you actually speak with someone, it is over $500 or $600. A business return is around $1,500. You are offering something three times more valuable than TurboTax. That seller started increasing his minimums to around $600, and clients started turning in their information faster. He kept about 98% of his clients. The handful who left were clients he was ready to let go of anyway.
I think it is also worth really assessing where each of your clients stands and what type of client you actually want. A lot of people have not done that audit yet, simply because they do not have the time. But it will save time throughout the year for you and your employees, and it creates capacity to bring in new clients. And if you are hesitant to do it with current clients, try setting new minimum fees with incoming clients. You will be surprised how many say yes without hesitation.
Brannon: It is a shame that he had to do that exercise when he was already facing an exit and eager to move on. That gave him the motivation to make the changes. But when people have 3 to 5 years to make changes before they exit, you can really drive a lot of change in that time. That is what he did in less than a year. It can be done.
And we have that price increase letter on our website. We also have charts from a seller who did over 2,000 returns in a year and did an across-the-board 20% price increase. He had five clients leave. Obviously you want to maintain great service throughout, but that shows you what the market is like right now.
Laurens: Yeah. CPAs have more pricing power than they have had in years, given the staffing shortage and overall demand. I know of firms where even for a 1040, they have gone to a $2,000 baseline. There is simply not enough talent for the amount of work available. And you simplify your life a great deal when you focus on higher-end clients who value your service and are willing to pay for it.
Brannon: You will not know what people will pay until you try. If you are not comfortable going that high right away, start with new clients and see what happens.
Now let’s shift and talk about owner independence. A lot of firms are owner-dependent. Buyers are looking at hours more and more. What happens to buyer interest and the multiple when you bring a firm to market where the seller is still doing 80% of the billable work?
Laurens: From a buyer’s perspective, that is riskier. The firm is dependent on the owner for bringing in clients and getting the work done. When a buyer can acquire a firm where the owner is focused on managing the company and employees are running the day-to-day, those are the people who will ideally stay long-term. That makes the acquisition less risky and opens up the buyer pool considerably. We have a lot of buyers now who are acquiring accounting firms without being hands-on operators. It is harder to find one individual who will completely take over the owner’s role, so having a team-run structure gives you different options. It makes the firm more desirable to more buyers, which allows for a higher price and better terms.
When a firm is owner-centric, buyers will try to de-risk their position and push for earn-outs. There are cases where earn-outs are necessary and even beneficial, but in general, you want more cash at closing, not less.
Brannon: On the flip side, I would love to hear a success story of a seller who successfully delegated a lot of the heavy lifting to their team. What did that owner’s day-to-day look like before the sale, and how smooth was the transition for the buyer?
Laurens: I actually have one right now that is doing exactly this. They really looked at how much time they were spending in the firm and started figuring out who they could bring on to take more of the workload off the owner. With that hire in place, and after doing some price increases, the EBITDA is staying the same while owner hours are dropping by at least 500. That is going to make the firm significantly more sellable. And the owner has not worked any weekends during tax season this year. So even if you are not ready to sell right away, figuring out how to step back from the firm improves your quality of life immediately.
Brannon: If you were giving advice to someone who is 3 to 5 years from selling and really trying to get optimized for the market, what would you say are the one or two things they should be most focused on?
Laurens: First, figure out how you can work more on the business and not in the business. Step back and ask yourself: if you were gone for a month or two, can your team handle everything? Do you have the right people in place? Second, re-analyze your client list. Do you have the type of clients you want, and are they paying the right fees? I actually had a firm where a client turned out to be their lowest ROI client even though they had been around the longest. They just had not looked at the fees in a while. Those two things, team structure and client quality, will really move the needle.
Brannon: And if you have got 3 to 5 years, that is a lot of time to change the course of the practice. Even in six months to a year, you can make pretty significant improvements. When you talk about multiples, depending on the type of firm, adding hundreds of thousands to the bottom line can translate to a million-dollar difference in valuation.
On the team side, the more time you have to address it, the better. If you are five years away from selling and you have employees who are not the right fit, now is the time to make those changes.
Laurens: I have seen a lot of difficult situations unfold when practice owners go to sell and a problem employee either leaves at the wrong time or drags the practice down in ways that affect team morale. Price increases can be handled a year or two out pretty smoothly. But the team is a longer-term strategy. Of all the firms I have sold, the ones that get the absolute highest multiples are the ones with such a solid team that the employees themselves get excited about who is going to help run the firm next. Whether it is a private equity buyer who is not present day-to-day, or an incoming owner, having strong leadership in place makes everyone more confident. That structure makes the transition smoother and the valuation stronger.
Brannon: It is always puzzling to me why more people are not proactive about focusing on things like this.
Laurens: I think it comes back to what we talked about early on. It is really easy to get pulled into the day-to-day and not come up for air. You do not stop to think about the bigger strategies that really drive the results of the practice. And on the flip side, when an owner is the main person doing everything, sometimes even getting 1X can be a challenge. It is almost a catch-22, because that person is also the hardest to get to stop and look at their firm, because they are so busy with client interaction.
So again, it really comes down to asking: if I left, what do I need to fix first? If you are the main client-facing person, how can you move that off your plate and onto your team? Once you do that, you create the space to focus on what actually needs to change in your firm.
Brannon: Well, Laurens, thank you so much. Appreciate you coming on for the third time and sharing your market perspective and practice management insights with us.
Laurens: Thank you. It has been great.
Brannon: Thanks for listening to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. You can keep the momentum going by subscribing and sharing your thoughts with us. Visit our website at poegroupadvisors.com for more resources, and tune in next time for more conversations like this one.
